ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: December 2019

Call: Cognitive, Affective, and Conversational HCI – AMCIS 2020 mini-track

Call for Papers

Cognitive, Affective, and Conversational HCI
Mini-track at the Americas Conference on Information System (AMCIS) 2020
Track: Human-Computer Interaction (SIGHCI)
Salt Lake City, Utah
August 13-15, 2020
https://amcis2020.aisconferences.org/track-descriptions/#toggle-id-13

Deadline for paper submissions: February 28, 2020

Understanding and adapting to the cognitive and affective states of users can enable systems to interact more effectively, and creates new possibilities for information systems. Emerging systems are able to incorporate information from these sensors to create more humanlike responses, to improve decision processes, and to gain a deeper understanding of how the user is thinking or feeling.

The cross-disciplinary nature of the IS discipline and its unique ability to view technology in novel ways gives it strong potential to make big waves in this domain. We encourage full paper and research-in-progress submissions ranging from exploratory to confirmatory work. All methods of research are welcome, including design science, qualitative, empirical, and theoretical research.… read more. “Call: Cognitive, Affective, and Conversational HCI – AMCIS 2020 mini-track”

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(How) could VR and presence influence politics?

[In the context of today’s polarization, it’s worth considering the potential of presence-evoking technologies for engaging, informing and building empathy in the context of not just elections but politics generally. This link-heavy summary of some recent efforts is from Forbes; see the original version for five more pictures. –Matthew]

Could Virtual Reality Influence Election Campaigns?

Sol Rogers, CEO and Founder of REWIND, an Emmy nominated immersive content studio that fuses bleeding-edge technology with award-winning creative storytelling.
December 10, 2019

Politicians always try to adapt to new forms of media to allow them to connect to their voter-base. Consider Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats” in the thirties, John F. Kennedy’s early mastery of television in the sixties, or Donald Trump’s use of Twitter. The adoption of modern communication forms has arguably never been as important for politicians as it is today.… read more. “(How) could VR and presence influence politics?”

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Job: Associate Professor in Extended Reality and Visual Computing at NTNU

Tenure-track Associate Professor in Extended Reality (XR=VR/AR/MR) and Visual Computing
Department of Computer Science
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Gjøvik, Norway
https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/179127/tenure-track-associate-professor-in-extended-reality-xrvr-ar-mr-and-visual-computing

Application deadline: January 15, 2020

We have a vacancy for a position as tenure-track Associate Professor in Extended Reality (XR=VR/AR/MR) and Visual Computing at the Department of Computer Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), workplace is at campus Gjøvik, Norway.

We are recruiting in the core area of Extended Reality XR (Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality), as part of the Visual Computing area of Computer Science and the core technology’s application related to simulation, training, and serious games within various fields.

Main duties and responsibilities

  • The associate professor is expected to play a leading role in research and research-based education related to the research field in close collaboration with existing staff at the department of computer science.
read more. “Job: Associate Professor in Extended Reality and Visual Computing at NTNU”
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A VR test drive and other presence stories from The New Yorker

[The New Yorker has a long and lively first person report on a variety of presence experiences via virtual reality; just the beginning and end of the story are below (note the specific reference to presence at the end of the third paragraph and the example of inverse presence at the very end). The original story also includes a 38 minute audio version. The publication has two other recent presence-related stories, one about its new Animate Objects iOS app, “an augmented-reality feature that allows you to discover the secret thoughts of everyday items, as drawn by the New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck,” and the other a short interview with artist Christoph Niemann “about his work and his feelings about technology” along with several examples of his clever animated drawings featured in and on the cover of the magazine. –Matthew]

[Image: With my Oculus, I had adventures right out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.read more. “A VR test drive and other presence stories from The New Yorker”

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Call: UMAP 2020 – 28th ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization

Call for Papers

ACM UMAP 2020
28th ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
Theme: “Responsible Personalization”
Genoa (Italy)
July 14-17, 2020
https://www.um.org/umap2020/

Abstracts due: January 31, 2020 (mandatory)
Papers due: February 7, 2020

BACKGROUND AND SCOPE:

ACM UMAP – User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization – is the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users or to groups of users, and that collect, represent, and model user information. ACM UMAP is sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and SIGWEB, and organized with User Modeling Inc. as the core Steering Committee, extended with past years’ chairs. The proceedings are published by ACM and will be part of the ACM Digital Library.

ACM UMAP covers a wide variety of research areas where personalization and adaptation may be applied. This includes a number of domains in which researchers are engendering significant innovations based on advances in user modeling and adaptation, recommender systems, adaptive educational systems, intelligent user interfaces, e-commerce, advertising, digital humanities, social networks, personalized health, entertainment, and many more.… read more. “Call: UMAP 2020 – 28th ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization”

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VR game uses presence to show users the deadly consequences of not getting flu shot

[This story from Fast Company describes more evidence that presence-evoking technologies can build empathy and other positive effects, in this case to encourage users to get a flu vaccination. This quote from the research PI is noteworthy: “It turned out that neither the tablet nor the video were able to create this sense of presence, this sense of you feel like you’re involved in the story … The only modality that did that was virtual reality.” By the way, our colleague Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn is one of the project researchers. For more information see coverage by UGA Today and the article in Vaccine via ScienceDirect.–Matthew]

[Image: CREDITS/SOURCES: Lucrezia Carnelos/Unsplash, scyther5/iStock]

What happens if you skip your flu vaccine? This VR game shows you the deadly consequences

Flu vaccine rates are disturbingly low. What can move the needle?read more. “VR game uses presence to show users the deadly consequences of not getting flu shot”

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Call: SALENTO AVR 2020: 7th International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics

Call for Papers

SALENTO AVR 2020: 7th International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics
“Where the digital world is blended with the real world“
June 8 – 11, 2020
Lecce, Italy
http://www.salentoavr.it/

Paper submission deadline: February 15, 2020

The 7th International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics (SALENTO AVR 2020) intends to bring together the community of researchers and scientists in order to discuss key issues, approaches, ideas, open problems, innovative applications and trends on virtual and augmented reality, 3D visualization and computer graphics in the areas of medicine, cultural heritage, arts, education, entertainment, military and industrial applications.

SALENTO AVR 2020 solicits original contributions and the submission of full or short papers for oral or poster presentation. The conference solicits original contributions and is structured around the following tracks:

External reviewers and program committee taking into account originality, significance, technical soundness and clarity of exposition will carefully evaluate the contributions.… read more. “Call: SALENTO AVR 2020: 7th International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics”

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Audio website Quinn streams erotica to your ears – and your imagination

[They don’t use the term, but most stories about the new audio erotica website Quinn, including the one below from Wired, discuss presence. Mashable’s begins with this example:

“The 10-minute recording features the soft voice of a French man (or at least, a man putting on a French accent) as he fingers his lover — the listener — one last time before he boards a plane to Paris the next morning.”

The New York Times’ story quotes a voice-over actress who says contributing to the site allows her to “connect with audiences in a much more intimate way” and notes that audio erotica “could also be a more disruptive format than, say, virtual reality porn, which has all of regular porn’s problems and then some.”

And The Guardian describes a user’s (presence) experience this way:

“With audio erotica, [27 year old] Fatima [not her real name] says, her body feels more engaged.… read more. “Audio website Quinn streams erotica to your ears – and your imagination”

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Call: First Pacific Asia Workshop on Game Intelligence & Informatics (GII)

Call for Papers

First Pacific Asia Workshop on Game Intelligence & Informatics (GII)
To be held in conjunction with
The 24th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (https://www.pakdd2020.org/)
11-14 May 2020
Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre
https://web.northeastern.edu/guii/gii/

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: January 22, 2020
Camera-ready copies: March 6, 2020
Notification of acceptance: February 21, 2020

SCOPE AND TOPICS

Understanding the game state and player action is a fundamental objective for any game researcher, because it sheds light on various aspects about the players and the game, such as skills, strategies, engagement, intention, retention, difficulty level and decision-making. Such intelligence helps us advance closer to the holy grail of providing a perfectly personalized and wholesome user experience, in a data-driven manner.

In recent times, there have been numerous innovative advances in the space of AI and machine learning for the gaming domain, including bots and reinforcement learning agents for perfect and imperfect information games, dynamic content generation for digital games, and so on. … read more. “Call: First Pacific Asia Workshop on Game Intelligence & Informatics (GII)”

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Why kids don’t trust Alexa

[While in some ways children are more vulnerable to experiencing presence illusions, interesting research reviewed in this story from MIT Technology Review suggests that, sadly given current media and political trends, they’re more skeptical of information from new sources like voice assistants and the internet generally than adults, that “we, as humans, have an ingrained sense of skepticism about unknown sources that somehow gets fuzzier as we grow older.” For more information see the links in the story and a column by Professor Danovitch in The New York Times. –Matthew]

Why kids don’t trust Alexa

We tend to think of children as blindly trusting of whatever information comes their way. They’re not.

by Tanya Basu
December 6, 2019

One day, Judith Danovitch overheard her son interrogating Siri on the family’s iPad.

“What color shirt am I wearing?” the then four-year-old asked.… read more. “Why kids don’t trust Alexa”

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