CALL FOR PAPERS ROLE-PLAYING IN GAMES SEMINAR April 10-11, 2012, University of Tampere, FINLAND Role-playing activities are characterized by involving participants in as-if, simulated and pretend play actions and circumstances. This element can be found in numerous contexts from child’s play to training and research. The most common recreational role-playing games include tabletop role-playing games, live action role-playing games (larps) and massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs). Different forms of role-playing, pretend-play, and make-believe can be traced throughout human history. Role-Play in Games seminar brings together researchers of role-playing and role-playing games. Submissions from a wide variety of research fields are…

IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG) Special Issue: Computational Aesthetics in Games Special issue editors: Cameron Browne, Georgios N. Yannakakis and Simon Colton Deadline for submissions: October 28, 2011 AI research seeks to optimise the performance of artificial agents in their given domains, and in the area of games this does not mean simply making stronger opponents. We do not increase the player’s enjoyment of a game by beating them as quickly as possible, but by matching them at their level of expertise to engage them and provide an entertaining experience. While such aesthetic considerations are…

Designing Interactive Systems 2012 Newcastle upon Tyne, UK June 11-15, 2012 (Note change of date) http://www.dis2012.org/ The ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems is the premier, international arena where designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers and many more come together to debate and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. At DIS 2012 we will turn our focus to what happens when our interactive systems are used “in the wild”. Join us to discuss the opportunities, issues and challenges of interactive systems when they are placed in the lived, everyday experiences of people, institutions and practices.…

Dear all The 5th SLanguages Annual Symposium is a FREE annual conference which focuses on language learning in a virtual world(s) founded by Gavin Dudeney of The Consultants-E. Today it is organised by a team of passionate language educators testing virtual worlds for language learning and teaching. The featured theme of this year’s 3-day online conference is ‘Serious games’ and ‘Situated Learning’.…

CALL FOR PAPERS 20th IEEE Haptics Symposium: “Engaging and Connecting with the User” http://hapticssymposium.org/ IMPORTANT DATES Paper & Ext. Abstracts Due:  September 16, 2011 (firm) Tutorial / Workshop Proposals Submission:  October 13, 2011 Author Notification:  November 21, 2011 Camera-Ready Paper Submission:  December 19, 2011 Demo Submission:  December 19, 2011 Conference Dates:  March 4-7, 2012 Proposals for Tutorials and Workshops should be sent to the conference chairs by October 13, 2011 (earlier communication is strongly encouraged). LOCATION AND FORMAT The 2012 Haptics Symposium will be in Vancouver, Canada, in the heart of downtown at the Sheraton Wall Centre. The 2012 IEEE…

1st European Immersive Education Summit 28th and 29th November 2011 Leganes (Madrid, Spain) Important Dates Paper submission: 30th September 2011 Notification of acceptance: 14th October 2011 Final paper submission: 28th October 2011 Summit: 28th-29th November 2011 There is a growing interest in the use of virtual and mixed-reality environments for online teaching and learning. Immersive Education gives participants a sense of “being there” even when attending a class or training session in person isn’t possible, practical, or desirable, which in turn provides educators and students with the ability to connect and communicate in a way that greatly enhances the learning…

Call for Papers: Workshop on Role of Ambient Intelligence in Future Lighting Systems November 16th, Amsterdam, the Netherlands http://www.lightingami.id.tue.nl/ in conjunction with the Conference on Ambient Intelligence (http://www.ami-11.org/) Important Dates Submission Deadline: September 2nd, 2011 Notification of acceptance: September 15th, 2011 Workshop: November 16th, 2011 LED-based lighting systems have introduced radically new possibilities in the area of artificial lighting. Being physically small the LED can be positioned or embedded into luminaires, materials and even the very fabric of a building or environment. Together with new functionality and flexibility comes complexity; the simple light switch is not anymore sufficient to control…

Call for Papers Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing Special Issue on Mobile Interaction with the Real World Mobile devices have become a part of our everyday lives as we increasingly rely on smartphones and tablets as personal information devices. The use of those devices for interactions with nearby physical objects has been a popular research area in the last years. We currently see a dramatic increase in the interest in this field as technologies like Near Field Communication (NFC) and TransferJet will soon be widely available to smartphone users, as camera-based interactions (e.g. based on 2D Barcodes or image…

Call for Conference Papers, Panelists and Installations SENSORY WORLDS: Environment, Value and the Multi-Sensory University of Edinburgh 7-9 December 2011 Full details at: http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/Sawyer/Conference.html Conference Theme It is through our senses that we investigate, navigate and know the world around us and the other beings, forces and phenomena that constitute it in its rich and lively variety. To consider the nature of sensory being is to be confronted by questions that examine the ways in which we engage with our environments and those that interrogate the very nature of embodiment. Constantly at work and yet often undervalued, the sensorium is…

CALL FOR PAPERS 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012) Valencia, Spain June 4–8, 2012 http://aamas2012.webs.upv.es ABOUT AAMAS AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multiagent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 by merging three highly respected meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS); the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL); and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of…

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Ethics and Information Technology on “Armed Military Robots” Ethics and Information Technology is calling for papers to be considered for inclusion in a Special Issue on the ethics of armed military robots, to be edited by Noel Sharkey, Juergen Altmann, Peter Asaro and Robert Sparrow. The need for this Special Issue became apparent at the Berlin meeting of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control in September, 2010. This meeting expressed deep concerns about the proliferation and development of armed military robots and identified a pressing need for more international discussion of…

Research on the blurring of reality and fiction in ARGs: Short online survey Hello fellow ARG players and researchers, My name is Mela Kocher and I am a Swiss games researcher. For my post-doc research project I am focusing on the blurring of the line between reality and fiction in alternate reality games (ARGs). The research project is sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation (http://www.snf.ch/). I am curious how the TINAG aesthetics are implemented in the game design and how players interpret the games in relation to the topic of reality and fiction. I’ve been playing ARGs myself and…