ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: December 2017

Call: 5th International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr 2018)

5th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON USER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (i-USEr 2018)
28-30 August 2018
Selangor, Malaysia
http://fskm.uitm.edu.my/iuser2018

Submission Dateline: 1st February 2018

We are pleased to inform you that the 5th International Conference on User Science and Engineering 2018 (i-USEr 2018) will be held in Selangor, Malaysia from 28th-30th August 2018. i- USEr 2018 is organized by the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Research Group, Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia.

i-USEr 2018 aims to address the main issues of concern within Human Computer Interaction with a particular emphasis on the aspects of design, development and implementation of interfaces and the generational implications for design of human and technology interaction.

The growth of HCI field has traversed across disciplines and technological aspects encompassing elements that are both tangible and intangible. It’s hard to exclude HCI from domains of Informatics, Internet of Everywhere, Quality of Life and others, more so with diverse range of users and possibilities.… read more. “Call: 5th International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr 2018)”

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(Presence) technology trends that will transform our world in 2018

[The last two of the four predictions for the coming year in this story from Fortune directly involve presence. More predictions are available from Gartner via Forbes and from designboom.

Best wishes to all of us for a safe, healthy, productive and happy 2018! Hope to see you in Prague in May!

–Matthew]

[Image: Source: Forbes]

4 Technology Trends That Will Transform Our World in 2018

By Jay Samit, independent vice chairman of Deloitte’s Digital Reality practice and author of the bestselling book “Disrupt You!”
December 26, 2017

Predicting the future requires hubris, and it should therefore be met with more than a terabyte of skepticism. In past years, I’ve made some calls that have proved prescient like predicting way back in 2011 that social media would determine the U.S. presidential election. Meanwhile, some took decades longer than I had foreseen such as my 1992 prediction that this new thing called the Internet would lead Hollywood studios to merge with telecommunications companies.… read more. “(Presence) technology trends that will transform our world in 2018”

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Call: Natural Language Generation for Spoken Dialogue Systems – Special issue of Dialogue & Discourse

Call for papers for a special issue on Natural Language Generation (NLG) for Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) to be published as part of the Dialogue & Discourse journal.

Deadline for submissions: January 20, 2018

Language generation for dialogue requires sophistication in modeling the context of the dialogue, as well as methods that are sensitive to the rhetorical structure of a turn, and to the requirement that turns in dialogue are typically incremental and structured as oral, rather than written language. We therefore especially invite submissions which address these gaps, whether by introducing novel statistical or neural approaches or by leveraging data to improve natural language generation for dialogue using a more traditional architecture.

Dialogue and Discourse (D&D) is the first peer-reviewed free open access journal dedicated exclusively to work that deals with language “beyond the sentence”. The journal adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, accepting work from Linguistics, Computer Science, Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, and other associated fields with an interest in formally, technically, empirically or experimentally rigorous approaches.… read more. “Call: Natural Language Generation for Spoken Dialogue Systems – Special issue of Dialogue & Discourse”

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Google’s voice-generating AI is now indistinguishable from humans

[It’s sometimes hard to remember how quickly the technologies behind machines that we speak to and that speak to us have developed, and how many of us are interacting with machines this way (e.g., see a recent Pew Research report). The short story below from Quartz and the audio samples it includes and links to demonstrate how good the technologies are becoming at evoking presence. –Matthew]

[Image: A spectrogram for “whoa.” Credit: Lorenzo Tlacaelel]

Google’s voice-generating AI is now indistinguishable from humans

By Dave Gershgorn
December 26, 2017

Humans have officially given their voice to machines.

A research paper published by Google this month—which has not been peer reviewed—details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text.

The system is Google’s second official generation of the technology, which consists of two deep neural networks.… read more. “Google’s voice-generating AI is now indistinguishable from humans”

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Call: Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2018

Call for Contributions

FDG 2018: The International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG)
7-10 August 2018
Malmö, Sweden
http://fdg2018.org

Workshop Proposals due: February 12, 2018
Full and Short Papers due: March 12, 2018

The International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) is a major international event. It seeks to promote the exchange of information concerning the foundations of digital games, technology used to develop digital games, and the study of digital games and their design, broadly construed. The goal of the conference is the advancement of the study of digital games, including but not limited to new game technologies, critical analysis, innovative designs, theories on play, empirical studies, and data analysis.

FDG 2018 will include presentations of peer-reviewed papers (with rebuttal process), invited talks by high-profile industry and academic leaders, panels, workshops, and posters. The conference will also host a game competition, tech demo session, and a doctoral consortium.… read more. “Call: Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2018”

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How augmented and virtual reality will reshape the food industry

[This story from TechCrunch by a professional chef highlights three categories of ways presence experiences will shape the food industry, with lots of links to interesting examples. –Matthew]

[Image: London’s City Social “Sea Marshall“ augmented reality cocktail. Credit: Addie Chinn. Source: The Telegraph]

How augmented and virtual reality will reshape the food industry

December 26, 2017
Jenny Dorsey

Augmented reality content can be found on everything from wine bottles to IKEA’s catalog and virtual reality experiences are much more detailed, with rich layers of interactivity from hand controllers to gaze triggers, and a VR film has even won an Oscar. With Apple and Google both debuting augmented reality platforms (ARKit and ARCore, respectively), Facebook heavily invested in its Oculus headset and Amazon unveiling augmented shopping features, AR and VR is primed to change many parts of our everyday lives.… read more. “How augmented and virtual reality will reshape the food industry”

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Call: PETRA’18, 11th Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments conference

Call for Papers: The 11th ACM PETRA Conference
June 26-29, 2018
Corfu, Greece
www.petrae.org

Submission deadline: January 23, 2018

The 11th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. Please visit www.petrae.org for more information.

IMPORTANT SUBMISSION DEADLINES:

January 23, 2018:  Full/Short/Poster Papers [EXTENDED]
January 23, 2018:  Doctoral Consortium Applications [EXTENDED]
March 02, 2018:  Workshop Papers

WORKSHOPS:

  1. Accessibility and the Smart City: Technological Challenges and Open Accessibility Issues
  2. DAEM2: The 2nd International Workshop on Designing Assistive Environments for Manufacturing
  3. NOTION: Human Behaviour Monitoring, Interpretation and Understanding
  4. PEARL: Patient data acquisition, analysis, profiling and personalized care plan
  5. RobAssist: Robotic Assistive Systems for People with Disabilities
  6. Social Robots: A Workshop on the Past, the Present and the Future of Digital Companions
  7. Smart Cities: Enhancing Citizens’ life and activities

Industrial Workshops:

  1. Supporting the Development of Assistive Systems for Older People
  2. Industrial Perspectives on Assistive Systems for Manual Assembly Tasks

PETRA TOPICS OF INTEREST include, but are not limited to:… read more. “Call: PETRA’18, 11th Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments conference”

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NFL Films working to perfect presence experiences with docuseries ‘NFL Immersed’

[This story from Sport Techie is an update on what NFL Films is learning as its team works to create presence experiences of (American) football games (the fact that the new season of NFL Immersed features the Philadelphia Eagles, my hometown team, is purely coincidence!). –Matthew]

Virtual Reality Production Enhanced For Docuseries ‘NFL Immersed’

December 20, 2017
Mitch Reames

Since its inception in 1964, NFL Films has won more than 100 Emmys for its work documenting the NFL’s stories and gameplay. NFL Films has also extended its work into virtual reality with the show “NFL Immersed.”

The first three episodes of the second season are now available, and they follow Philadelphia Eagles defensive end Chris Long and his work both on and off the field.

“I love telling stories in VR,” NFL Films producer Jason Weber said. “We have been making football stories for a long time, but this is a new area and we have been learning a lot.”… read more. “NFL Films working to perfect presence experiences with docuseries ‘NFL Immersed’”

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Call: “Digital Entertainment for Special Needs, Special Needs for Digital Entertainment” for G/A/M/E

Call for Papers

G/A/M/E: The Italian Journal of Game Studies
Special Issue: “Digital Entertainment for Special Needs, Special Needs for Digital Entertainment”

CFP online: https://www.gamejournal.it/n-72018-digital-entertainment-for-special-needs-special-needs-for-digital-entertainment/

Guest Editors:
Dr. Enrico Gandolfi (Kent State University) (egandol1@kent.edu)
Dr. Richard E. Ferdig (Kent State University) (rferdig@gmail.com)
Dr. Kaybeth Calabria (Franciscan University of Steubenville) (dockbc@icloud.com)

Abstracts due by: January 20, 2018

It is well known that videogames represent the driving sector of the current entertainment with an excepted business of 90 billion dollars in 2016 (NewZoo 2015). Furthermore, the supporting technology is often at the cutting edge (e.g., Oculus Rift, Microsoft Hololens, PlayStation VR) and constantly in progress (e.g., social games, cloud gaming, holograms). Along with such a rising popularization, sectorial trends and orientations are getting more and more articulated going beyond the mere escapism: serious games, newsgames, and persuasive games (e.g.,… read more. “Call: “Digital Entertainment for Special Needs, Special Needs for Digital Entertainment” for G/A/M/E”

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Take a home tour with a telepresence robot

[Here’s another clever application of technology that provides social presence; note the comment from a potential renter that getting a tour of the property “was like having somebody there, just in a different shape.” The story is from CNBC, where it includes a 0:39 minute video report. For more information and a 1:39 minute promotional video see coverage in Curbed SF. A story in Inman has even more information, reporting that “[i]n 2015, the industry reacted somewhat negatively to a company developing similar technology called Zip Tours. Zenplace replaces the handheld video call used by Zip Tours with a taller, slimmer Roomba.” –Matthew]

Take a home tour with a robot

Diana Olick
Friday, 15 Dec 2017

There was no one home when Avisheh Madani arrived to tour a San Francisco rental property. No one human, that is.… read more. “Take a home tour with a telepresence robot”

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