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Monthly Archives: March 2014

Call: Human-Machine Affective Coordination – Workshop at ALIFE14

Call for abstracts

Workshop
Human-Machine Affective Coordination
Generating Emotional and Empathic Dynamics Between Artificial and Human Agents
@ ALIFE14 New York, USA July 30 – August 02, 2014

Website: http://blogs.cornell.edu/alife14nyc/

Contact:
artificial.empathy@developmentalrobotics.com
luisa.damiano@gmail.it

Deadline: May, 07, 2014 Notification of acceptance: May, 30, 2014

We are interested in submissions of original HRI and Social Robotics research, or research in related fields relevant to the topic of “Human-Machine Affective Coordination”. The submissions, in the form of an abstract (min 800, max 1000 words), should be related to the investigation of one or more specific aspects of emotional and empathic HRI (e.g. theoretical, epistemological, applicative, social, ethical aspects) within the context of HRI, Social Robotics or related fields. In particular, they should present original research works dealing with questions such as:

  • What are emotions and empathy for a robot? Which conditions are required in order for them to be able to participate competently in emotional and empathic dynamics with human beings?
read more. “Call: Human-Machine Affective Coordination – Workshop at ALIFE14”
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Polycom unveils giant video conference system to rival Cisco

[From V3; a 3:27 minute video with more details about the system is available on YouTube and analysis can be found at Telepresence Options]

Polycom's RealPresence Immersive Studio

Polycom unveils giant video conference system to rival Cisco

by Dan Worth
11 Feb 2014

Polycom has announced a giant new video-conferencing tool that sees the firm take on Cisco’s TelePresence suite at the top end of the market. The system will start from a not inconsiderable $425,000.

The RealPresence Immersive Studio boasts top-of-the-range specs, with the firm touting it as a true “floor-to-ceiling” product that uses three 84in displays to create a giant video wall. It also has a 55in display on top that can be used to display documents during a meeting (as pictured).

The screens will offer video display quality of 1080p by using Ultra HD 4k displays. Audio is provided using Polycom’s existing 3D Voice technology.… read more. “Polycom unveils giant video conference system to rival Cisco”

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Call: Making the City Playable Conference – Research Stream

Call for Proposals – Making the City Playable Conference – Research Stream
Watershed, Bristol, UK.
September 10th & 11th 2014

On September 10th and 11th 2014 the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol will host the first Making the City Playable Conference, convened by University of the West of England Visiting Professors Clare Reddington and Andrew Kelly. This two day international conference will bring together future city experts, urban planners, artists and technologists to explore the theme of the Playable City, and what it might mean in imagining and making the cities of the future.

The Playable City

The “Playable City” is a term that has been coined by Watershed in Bristol as a people-centred counterpoint to the idea of the data-driven “Smart City”. The Playable City is imagined as a city in which hospitality and openness are key, enabling residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite city services, places and stories.… read more. “Call: Making the City Playable Conference – Research Stream”

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The past and possible futures of VR

[From MIT’s Technology Review]

Oculus Rift VR headset

Virtual Reality Startups Look Back to the Future

Thirty years after the first wave of virtual reality, new startups are determined to take it mainstream.

By Simon Parkin on March 7, 2014

It’s been almost 30 years since the computer scientist Jaron Lanier formed VPL Research, the first company to sell the high-tech goggles and gloves that once defined humanity’s concept of where technology might soon take our species. In the late-1980s, a person could pull on a $100,000 head-mounted display and electronic gauntlet and fool their brain into thinking they had stepped inside the simulated space rendered on the screen.

At the time, Lanier’s intoxicating inventions were featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, coverage that popularized the term “virtual reality” as well as a fresh vision of the future in which humans would flit between the real and virtual worlds.… read more. “The past and possible futures of VR”

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Call: UCDAS 2014: The 1st IEEE International Workshop on User Centered Design and Adaptive Systems

Call for Papers

UCDAS 2014: The 1st IEEE International Workshop on User Centered Design and Adaptive Systems

Västerås, Sweden – July 21-25, 2014

The 1st IEEE International Workshop on User Centered Design and Adaptive Systems, UCDAS 2014, is co-located with COMPSAC 2014 (The 38th Annual International Computers, Software & Applications Conference, http://compsac.cs.iastate.edu/). The aim of this Workshop is to introduce the combination of different disciplines to build adaptive systems. Also, to discuss this approach and the state-of-the-art advances in research and development of the construction of user-centered adaptive systems. This Workshop is addressed to researchers from different disciplines in academia and industry, as well as practitioners, who share interests in adaptive systems design and development. The focus will be on the processes and methodologies combining techniques from these disciplines and the experiences drawn from adaptive system design practice, as well as on emergent topics.… read more. “Call: UCDAS 2014: The 1st IEEE International Workshop on User Centered Design and Adaptive Systems”

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VocalIQ: Smarter, more personalized agents are coming

[From Fast Company Labs]

Siri can't say why she can't do more

[Image: From GottaBeMobile.com]

This Cambridge Researcher Just Embarrassed Siri

A new spoken dialogue system called VocalIQ could revolutionize computers’ understanding of human speech

By Michael Grothaus
2014-02-27

Siri held lots of promise when Apple introduced it in iOS 6. However, in the two years since Siri’s release, the virtual assistant has improved little–offering clever ways to do simple tasks via voice command, but no more. That’s because Siri, and other virtual assistants like it, have built-in problems that doom it to be a simple system forever. But one Cambridge researcher thinks there’s a better way to make virtual assistants become the companions we all want–and, soon, will need.… read more. “VocalIQ: Smarter, more personalized agents are coming”

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Call: ‘Social NUI: Social Perspectives in Natural User Interfaces’ Workshop at DIS 2014

Call for Papers:
DIS 2014 Workshop on Social NUI: Social Perspectives in Natural User Interfaces

This one-day workshop will be held as part of the DIS 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (http://dis2014.iat.sfu.ca), held in Vancouver, Canada 21-25 June

http://www.socialnui.unimelb.edu.au/dis2014workshop/

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submission by:  21 March 2014
  • Notification of acceptance:  31 March 2014
  • Camera Ready Copy:  20 April 2014
  • Workshop day:  21 or 22 June 2014

SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP

The term Natural User Interfaces (NUI) has come to refer to a broad collection of interactive technologies argued to draw upon existing human capabilities for communication and human capacity to manipulate the physical world. Examples include input modalities such as voice, gesture, eye gaze, and body-based interaction. While the notion of naturalness is widely deployed in motivating narratives around such technologies, it has also come under increasing scrutiny and debate in recent years examining what is meant by natural and challenging the basic claims of intuitiveness, usability, learnability attributed to them.… read more. “Call: ‘Social NUI: Social Perspectives in Natural User Interfaces’ Workshop at DIS 2014”

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Love and sex in the digital age: Are two actual people still required for a relationship?

[From Psychology Today’s Love and Sex in the Digital Age blog]

"Her" movie poster

Are Two Actual People Still Required For a Relationship?

Does a “relationship” still need actual people to provide sex and love?

Published on February 19, 2014 by Robert Weiss, LCSW, CSAT-S in Love and Sex in the Digital Age

Recapping Her

If you don’t know, the much lauded Spike Jonze film Her is the tale of Theodore, a very lonely man in the final stages of a sad, ugly divorce. Feeling down, he decides to treat himself to the new OS1, advertised as the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system. “It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.” Almost immediately, Theodore finds himself enjoying the company and personality of Samantha, the voice behind his OS1. He begins interacting with her on a personal level, and before he knows it, he and the OS1’s digital consciousness have fallen in love, which, needless to say, presents him with more than a few existential issues.… read more. “Love and sex in the digital age: Are two actual people still required for a relationship?”

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Call: Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialog (SIGDIAL 2014) Conference

SIGDIAL 2014 CONFERENCE
Wednesday, June 18 to Friday, June 20, 2014

The 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialog will be co-located with the 8th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2014) in Philadelphia, PA, USA and immediately preceding ACL 2014.

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference15

PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Sunday, 9 March 2014 (23:59, GMT-11)

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2014 SIGDIAL conference continues a series of fourteen conferences, providing a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research across the areas of discourse and dialog and attracting a diverse set of participants from academia and industry. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group on discourse and dialog for both ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) and ISCA (International Speech Communication Association).

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Prof. Lillian Lee from Cornell University, and
Prof.… read more. “Call: Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialog (SIGDIAL 2014) Conference”

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Explore the Seinfeld apartment in Oculus Rift

[From Eurogamer, where the story includes a different image and the 1:20 minute video]

Jerry's Place VR

Explore the Seinfeld apartment in Oculus Rift

Worlds are colliding

By Jeffrey Matulef
Published Monday, 3 March 2014

If you’ve ever wanted to explore one of the most iconic sets in television history, now you can with Jerry’s Place VR, a fan-made mod that details the home base from Seinfeld.… read more. “Explore the Seinfeld apartment in Oculus Rift”

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