ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: June 2017

Call: Robophilosophy 2018 – Envisioning Robots in Society: Politics, Power, and Public Space

Call for Papers

International Research Conference
Envisioning Robots in Society – Politics, Power, and Public Space
Robophilosophy 2018 / TRANSOR 2018
February 14-17, 2018
University of Vienna, Austria
www.robophilosophy-conference.org

Deadline for submission of abstracts for papers and posters: Oct. 31, 2017
Deadline for submission of workshop and panel proposals: Sept. 15, 2017

Focus

Automation is the new key strategy for productivity gain—many countries are well on their way towards the production model of “industry 4.0” where software bot and robots will appear in all industrial sectors including service industries. The core driver of this disruption complex is robotics, producing ever more intelligent, ever more connectable artificial agents that function in ever more complex physical and social surroundings. This raises a host of complex questions for policy-makers, engineers, and researchers. Which socio-political, socio-cultural, economic, and ethical challenges will we humans be confronted with as robots will be included into more and more contexts of our everyday life?… read more. “Call: Robophilosophy 2018 – Envisioning Robots in Society: Politics, Power, and Public Space”

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Digital humanities VR site takes you into poet John Ashbery’s home to understand his work

[This story from Yale News describes a project designed to evoke presence to help users better understand the poet John Ashbery and the inspiration for his work; for more information and the link to the website (when it launches July 1), see the project’s web page. –Matthew]

[Image: Award-winning poet John Ashbery stands outside his Victorian home in this screenshot taken from a new Digital Humanities Lab project. John Ashbery’s “Nest” takes visitors on a virtual tour inside of his house, and invites them to “walk” through the spaces that the poet inhabits to learn about the objects that have provided the inspiration for many of his works.]

New virtual reality site creates a ‘sonic collage’ of esteemed poet John Ashbery’s works

By Elizabeth Connolly Martell
June 29, 2017

In many of his poems, John Ashbery endeavors to create for his readers the feeling of home.… read more. “Digital humanities VR site takes you into poet John Ashbery’s home to understand his work”

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Call: Researching Digital Cultural Heritage – International Conference

Call for papers

Researching Digital Cultural Heritage – International Conference
Manchester, UK
30 November – 1 December 2017
#digheritage17
http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/icp/connect/events/digital-heritage-conference/

Organised by The University of Manchester and Newcastle University

Submission of proposals: 21 July 2017

Digital tools, approaches, platforms and experiences have become ubiquitous within cultural heritage research and practice. The diverse facets of heritage that lend themselves to both multi/interdisciplinary and focused disciplinary investigation have made heritage a fertile ground for an abundance of methodological explorations: analogue, digital and hybrid. More recently, a range of digitally mediated frameworks, methods and tools, such as data mining, crowdsourcing, social network analysis, visual analysis, sentiment analysis and research-through-design have been adopted in heritage research challenging, expanding, re-defining and re-imaging the questions, methodologies and analytical approaches we are able to tackle. Although the resurgence of digital approaches within heritage and museum studies triggered the creation of the term Digital (Cultural) Heritage in the late 1990s, the reciprocal relationship between digital research methodologies and heritage and how they interface and shape each other has attracted limited critical attention and interest so far.… read more. “Call: Researching Digital Cultural Heritage – International Conference”

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A marketer considers the ethics of presence

[This thoughtful column by a marketer comes as Google has announced its first prototype of an ad format for virtual reality. The column is from Mumbrella and you can read about and see a demo of the VR ad on the Google Developers Blog. –Matthew]

It’s not long now until we’re playing God!

As marketers explore the potential of virtual and augmented reality worlds Shae Duncan asks whether enough thought has been given to the ethical aspects of the products, in a post which is part of the LinkedIn Agency Influencer program.

By Shae Duncan, a business executive at Society Social
June 29, 2017

“How many of the things that we have in our lives actually don’t need to be physical?” – Mark Zuckerberg, 2017

When we talk about the future of the marketing landscape, AR and VR are at the forefront of conversation.… read more. “A marketer considers the ethics of presence”

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Job: Post-doc position in Dialog Systems and Social Robotics

Postdoctoral position in Dialog systems and Social robotics
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science and Communication
Stockholm, Sweden
https://www.kth.se/en/om/work-at-kth/lediga-jobb/what:job/jobID:158099/where:4/

Last application date: 31 August 2017

JOB DESCRIPTION

The work will be done in a newly funded project called “Exploring situated interaction with social robots using augmented reality”, lead by Assoc. Prof. Gabriel Skantze. The goal of the project is to explore how augmented reality can be used to create virtual robots that can interact with humans. A central question will be how social robots should engage in spoken interaction with humans in their surroundings, and how they can adapt their conversational behavior to the users’ level of attention and engagement.

The initial task will be to develop a framework using (for example) Microsoft HoloLens and our open source tools for conversational systems (IrisTK). This framework will then be used to record interaction data, and build machine learning models that can be used to understand the user’s behavior, as detected by the HoloLens sensors.… read more. “Job: Post-doc position in Dialog Systems and Social Robotics”

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How augmented reality will be used in the operating room

[It’s early days, but there’s great potential for the use of presence by surgeons. This story is from New Scientist and for more information see the press release from Cambridge Consultants and coverage in MIT Technology Review and Forbes. –Matthew]

Augmented reality goggles give surgeons X-ray vision

By Matt Reynolds
11 May 2017

Augmented reality could soon let surgeons peer inside a patient’s body without needing to make a large incision, helping them to carry out keyhole surgery.

By donning an augmented reality headset, a surgeon will see a virtual 3D map of a patient’s internal organs overlaid directly onto their body as they lie on an operating table. The system has been tested using data from people projected onto a surgical mannequin during simulated operations (see photo, above).

Surgeons could tag virtual organs with notes before an operation to help guide their procedure, says Simon Karger, who led the development of the tech at Cambridge Consultants in Boston, Massachusetts.… read more. “How augmented reality will be used in the operating room”

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Call: “What can Synthetic Biology offer to Artificial Intelligence? New frontiers” (SB-AI 2017) at ECAL 2017

Call for Abstracts

SB-AI 2017: What can Synthetic Biology offer to Artificial Intelligence? New frontiers
September, 4, 2017 – Lyon, France

Satellite Workshop at ECAL 2017 – The European Conference on Artificial Life
September, 4-8, 2017
http://alife.org/conference/ecal-2017

Co-organized by
Luisa Damiano (University of Messina, Messina, Italy)
Yutetsu Kuruma (ELSI, Tokyo, Japan)
Pasquale Stano (University of Salento, Lecce, Italy)

Deadline for abstracts: July, 30 2017

Traditionally Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, broadly conceived as the study of intelligence through the construction of artificial models of natural cognitive systems, has been developed in the context of computer science and robotics. Today the emergence of Synthetic Biology (SB), conceived as the chemical synthesis of biological parts/systems/processes, allows the scientific community to extend AI research within the field of experimental biology.

The workshop aims at offering an interdisciplinary forum in which nascent programs involving cooperation between SB and AI in the exploration of biological and cognitive processes can be discussed in their groundings, their procedures, their possibilities and their limits, as well as enriched through scientific exchange of ideas.… read more. “Call: “What can Synthetic Biology offer to Artificial Intelligence? New frontiers” (SB-AI 2017) at ECAL 2017”

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New 3D display takes the eye fatigue out of virtual reality

[Eye fatigue is a barrier to effective presence experiences and the research described in this news release from the Optical Society of America suggests a possible solution that shifts the operation of displays to match how humans see. –Matthew]

[Image: The new display creates a 3D image using optical mapping. An OLED screen is divided into four subpanels that each create a 2D picture. The spatial multiplexing unit (SMU) shifts each of these images to different depths while aligning the centers of all of them with the viewing axis. Through the eyepiece, each image appears to be at different depth. Image Credit: Liang Gao, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign]

New 3D Display Takes the Eye Fatigue Out of Virtual Reality

Innovative technology mimics the depth cues our eyes are accustomed to in the real-world

21 June 2017

WASHINGTON — There is a great deal of excitement around virtual reality (VR) headsets that display a computer-simulated world and augmented reality (AR) glasses that overlay computer-generated elements with the real world.… read more. “New 3D display takes the eye fatigue out of virtual reality”

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Call: Ethics for New and Emerging Technologies: From Moral Intuitions to Ethical Theories

Call for Papers

Ethics for New and Emerging Technologies. From moral intuitions to ethical theories
Annals of the University of Bucharest – Philosophy Series

http://annals.ub-filosofie.ro/index.php/annals/cfp

Submission deadline extended to 9th of July 2017

We invite paper submission for a special issue of the Annals of the University of Bucharest – Philosophy Series, to be published in the second part of 2017. The editors of this special issue are Julian Savulescu (University of Oxford) and Constantin Vică (University of Bucharest). The issue is entitled Ethics for New and Emerging Technologies. From moral intuitions to ethical theories.

It is often contended that our moral intuitions and dispositions dictate responses to new and emerging technologies. At the same time, there is a growing body of empirical findings that point out to the systematic errors of our moral intuitions. As a consequence, the methodology of moral reasoning and the reliability of our moral intuitions as solutions to ethical problems must come under scrutiny.… read more. “Call: Ethics for New and Emerging Technologies: From Moral Intuitions to Ethical Theories”

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VR and 3D-audio used to create ‘ghost orchestra’ at Cathedral of Notre Dame

[This press release from the Acoustical Society of America via EurekAlert! describes an intriguing project that integrates sophisticated visual and aural technologies to create a compelling place-based presence experience. For much more information including audio and video materials and a 15-slide presentation, see the project’s website. –Matthew]

Seeing with your ears

Novel acoustics project aims to improve virtual reality and explore ear shape effects on 3-D sound

Acoustical Society of America

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 25, 2017 — Paris’ Cathedral of Notre Dame has a ghost orchestra that is always performing, thanks to a sophisticated, multidisciplinary acoustics research project that will be presented during Acoustics ’17 Boston, the third joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the European Acoustics Association being held June 25-29, in Boston, Massachusetts.

In the project, computer models use recordings from a live concert held at the cathedral and detailed room acoustic simulations to produce a novel type of audience experience: a virtual recreation of the live performance using spatial audio and virtual reality.… read more. “VR and 3D-audio used to create ‘ghost orchestra’ at Cathedral of Notre Dame”

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