Call for Papers – Ecoplay: Digital Games and Environmental Rhetoric The University of Florida’s TRACE journal publishes online peer-reviewed collections in ecology, posthumanism, and media studies. Providing an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, we focus on the ethical and material impact of technology. TRACE Innovation Initiative’s second call for papers, “Ecoplay: Digital Games and Environmental Rhetoric,” focuses on digital games and asks how play contributes to ecological thought. Building on M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer’s Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America as well as Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey’s Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature, this issue proposes “Ecoplay”…

Call for Papers: Robot Ethics 2.0 (MIT Press) Abstract deadline: 10 Sept 2015 (and ongoing) Paper deadline: 1 Feb 2016 We are putting together an edited book on robot ethics, to be published by MIT Press. This is a follow-up to our previous volume, Robot Ethics, and will cover more recent developments in the field, including: Autonomous cars Space, underwater, other environments Entertainment and sports Cyborgization and enhancement Personal/gender identity Security, crime, and abuse Environment Risk and uncertainty Programming and design strategies Privacy and other law Sex and psychology Deception and artificial emotions Human-robot interactions Medical, health, and personal care…

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION GUR Tool Design Jam: Designing Tools for Games User Research In conjunction with CHI PLAY 2015 in London (http://chiplay.org/) Website: http://gurtools.wordpress.com/ IMPORTANT DATES: August 30, 2015: Submissions deadline September 4, 2015: Acceptance notification October 4, 2015: Workshop This one-day workshop explores the vast spectrum of tools used and created by current game user researchers and provides a platform of discussion for advancing the development of such tools. This workshop will facilitate intersections from user researchers with diverse epistemologies, as well as from both academia and the industry, in an interactive Design Jam activity to collaboratively design future-proof…

[A (free) ‘deep dive’ into philosophical issues of reality/fiction. -Matthew] British Society of Aesthetics Conference on Fictional Characters University of Southampton, 15th and 16th December 2015 http://bsafictionalcharacters.weebly.com/ Fictional characters have received unprecedented philosophical attention in last few years including the publication of the following monographs: Thomasson’s (1999) Fiction and Metaphysics, Priest’s (2005) Towards Non-Being, Azzuoni’s (2010) Talking About Nothing, Crane’s (2013) The Objects of Thought, Everett’s (2013) The Nonexistent, and the long awaited release of Kripke’s (2013) Reference and Existence. Despite the progress made by the above authors, there is still no consensus as to the best approach to the…

Call-for-Papers for AUIC 2016 17th Australasian User Interface Conference 2nd – 5th of February 2016 Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Australia http://auic2016.massey.ac.nz/ Overview The Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC) is the forum for user interface researchers and practitioners at the Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW 2016). AUIC provides an opportunity for workers in the areas of HCI, CSCW, and pervasive computing to meet with colleagues and with others in the broader computer science community. We will be publishing via the ACM conference publication series for the first time, which will ensure good visibility of published papers. Important Dates Paper submission:…

Call For Papers – Game Studies Special Issue: “WAR/GAME” by Guest Editors – Pötzsch & Hammond Video games are an important sector of the global entertainment industry and AAA titles often have budgets and audiences similar to those of major Hollywood productions. Many of the commercially most successful games are war-themed titles that play out in what are framed as authentic real-world settings inspired by historical events. Parallel to this development, significant changes have occurred in the way Western industrialized nations wage actual wars. It has been argued that postmodern war increasingly resembles a videogame and that this form of…

Call for Papers IHCI 2015: 7th International Conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction Indian Institute of Information Technology-Allahabad 14-16 December, 2015 http://ihci.iiita.ac.in Paper Submission Deadline: August 16, 2015 The international conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction (IHCI) is a forum for the presentation of technological advances and research results at the crossroads of human computer interaction, artificial intelligence, signal processing and computer vision. It brings together engineers and scientists from around the world. It will also provide as a platform triggering further technological and research improvements through exchanges between industry and academic professionals. The 7th edition in the series, IHCI…

International Association for Computing and Philosophy – Annual Meeting June 14-17, 2016 University of Ferrara, Italy The International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) [http://www.iacap.org/] is delighted to announce that submissions are now being accepted for its 2016 annual meeting [http://www.iacap.org/iacap-2016], to be held on June 14-17 at the University of Ferrara, Italy [http://www.unife.it/international] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrara]. The meeting will be hosted by Professor Marcello D’Agostino [http://docente.unife.it/dgm] and Professor Marcello D’Alfonso [http://docente.unife.it/dlfmtv/]. IACAP has a long-lasting tradition of promoting philosophical dialogue and interdisciplinary research on all aspects of the computational and informational turn.…

AISB 2016 Call for Symposium Proposals Deadline for symposium proposals: 1st September 2015 Notification of acceptance: 26th September 2015 The AISB Convention is an annual conference covering the range of AI and Cognitive Science, organised by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. The 2016 Convention will be held at the University of Sheffield, UK, from 4-6th April 2016. Daniela Romano (Department of Computer Science) and Tony Prescott (Department of Psychology) are the 2016 conference chairs, which will be hosted by Sheffield Robotics. The convention is structured as a number of co-located symposia, together with…

Call for Papers NEUROTECHNIX 2015 – 3rd International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics 16-17 November, 2015 Lisbon, Portugal http://www.neurotechnix.org NEUROTECHNIX is sponsored by INSTICC – Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication SCOPE The first research works on neurotechnology can be dated back nearly half a century, but it is in the XXI century that most significant advances are being witnessed. Neurotechnology shows a very high potential of enhancing human activities, involving technologies such as neural rehabilitation, neural prosthesis, neuromodulation, neurosensing and diagnosis, and other combinations of neurological and biomedical knowledge with engineering technologies. This congress…

Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors Series editors Calvin Mercer (Professor of Religion, East Carolina University) Steve Fuller (Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK) Humanity is at a crossroads in its history, precariously poised between mastery and extinction. The fast-developing array of human enhancement therapies and technologies (e.g., genetic engineering, information technology, regenerative medicine, robotics, and nanotechnology) are increasingly impacting our lives and our future. The most ardent advocates believe that some of these developments could permit humans to take control of their own evolution and alter human nature and the human condition in fundamental…