The Virtual 2007: call for papers
Deadline for abstracts; May 15th.

The research programme Man Medium Machine [M3] and the School of Communication, Technology & Design at Soedertoern university college, invites to a three-day conference on the theme “The Virtual: interaction”.

The conference will be held at Almasa conference centre, in the archipelago of Haninge, south of Stockholm.

The theme of this year’s “The Virtual” conference is interaction. ‘Interaction’ is naturally at the core of many researchers strive to understand people’s use and engagement with information technology. ‘Interaction’ also attempts to capture the interdisciplinary focus that the conference has developed in previous years. The conference seeks to create a meeting space for research that spans from interaction design and HCI to social and humanistic perspectives on technology. ‘Interaction’ is also about the relation between people and how they are affected by digital media, their living situation, and so on.

We hope to attract researchers that like to involve in a discussion of how these two fields of research may enrich each other. The particular themes of this years conference include, but are not limited to:

– technology for the experience of nature
– the body and/in information technology
– art, body and design
– new forms for media production
– amateurs, end-users, and hobbyists as digital media producers
– games that transcend physical and virtual boundaries
– novel methodologies and approaches in interaction design practice
– consumer and user participation in media and storytelling
– sketching of interactive behaviour
– expressions of ideology in design and digital technologies
– gender and intersectionalist studies of interaction practices
– the construction of identity, gender, normality, etc., in virtual communities
– the interaction between online and offline subjectivites, actions, identities, etc.

Keynotes
Jon Hindmarsh http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/mgmt/staff/jonhindmarsh.html
Senior Lecturer in Work Practice and Technology King’s College, London

Dates to remember
May 15th – deadline for abstracts.
June 15th – notification on acceptance for paper presentation.
August 15th – last day for paper submission and payment of conference fee.

http://m3.sh.se/virtual2006.

From Guardian Unlimited (UK; 05/10/07; Fitzpatrick, Michael)

An experiment in ubiquitous computing is being undertaken in Tokyo to address the problems inherent in a bustling metropolis that has no street names. “Just as we built up roads, the next step in civilization is to build a total information network that will form part of the fabric of things around us,” says Tokyo University professor Ken Sakamura, who is leading the Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project to provide an interactive landscape that aids people in their everyday dealings. The Japanese government is investing in the project, whose potential advantages include better guidance for the visually impaired, interactive guidance for tourists, and navigation around hostile areas for foreign journalists and salarymen. The system enables total user control through a combination of electronically tagged objects–never people–and handheld communication devices that are read/write only and thus do not expose private information. Given the system’s massive infrastructure construction and maintenance costs, the participation of commerce in the enterprise is vital, according to Sakamura. A pilot project revealed technical and security challenges, including cross-interference from outlawed radio transmitters and problems with the prototype reader; Sakamura says the mobile phone will eventually assume the role of reader, via the employment of a remote server. He envisions a world in which microcomputers that provide people with location-specific information are embedded in all physical objects. “They will operate in a concerted manner, processing, exchanging information with each other within the ubiquitous computing architecture,” he explains.

After the first year of this project, the need for computer vision-based user interfaces was identified which should include technology for computer-based interaction with physical maps and map/model-based tracking. The project is looking for an additional partner with outstanding computer vision and augmented reality expertise who is able to develop core technology in these directions. The required technologies are summarized as follows:

1. Augmenting paper maps: for urban planning situations, paper maps are appropriate because they provide a high-resolution, yet large-scale view of the environment. However, these maps lack dynamical information such as locations of moving vehicles or simulation results. An augmented map should be developed which combines both static information on physical maps and dynamical information using projector-based augmentation information.

2. Handheld map tracking: similar to the augmented paper maps, a portable map tracking algorithm should be developed which allows augmentation on handheld devices rather than direct augmentation on physical maps.

3. Model-based outdoor tracking: we are looking for robust model-based outdoor tracking algorithms which are complementary to GPS and INS tracking. Based on rapid acquisition techniques of 3D models of the environment, robust tracking should be developed which runs on handheld devices (i.e. ultra-mobile PCs, smartphones).

For more information, see this (pdf).
There is also a Guide for proposers here (pdf).

Peach First Summer School. Santorini, GREECE – July 4/5/6th 2007

Are you a PRESENCE junior RESEARCHER (industry or Academic), Or presence PhD student? Would you like to attend the first Peach Summer School!

Registration opened until APRIL 20th 2007! Peach has money to support your travel and logistic expenses!

Summer School title: “Towards Human Machine Confluence – Presence Technologies and Foundations”.

The Peach Summer School will have morning lectures, in which Presence experts will share with the students Presence technologies, measurement and Foundations, and working group afternoons, where Presence measurements and applications demos will be provided. Finally each day will have a poster session where students will present their work to the attendees and experts.

http://school.peachbit.org

BEING THERE, BUT NOT, WITH NEVEJAN (Doors of Perception Report April 2)
Doors’ lifelong friend and collaborator Caroline Nevejan has completed the dissertation for her PhD on “presence and the design of trust”. Her timing could hardly be better. As George Monbiot so inconveniently demonstrates in “Heat”, each passenger on a return flight from London to New York produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. “There is no technofix to the disastrous impact of air travel on the environment…the only answer is to ground most of the aeroplanes flying today” concludes cheerful George. So Nevejan’s topic, the design of presence in technologically mediated environments, moves centre stage.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~nevejan/presence/
http://www.being-here.net/

MAPPING THE NECKLACE (Doors of Perception Report April 2)
Can you roam a park which doesn’t, as such, exist? How do you map something ephemeral like a memory, or a noise? In the City of Durham, the Necklace Park has opened for business – virtually. On May 5-7, you are invited to join spies, geeks, performers and other lone rangers to track, create, and compose your own park along a12 mile stretch of the River Wear with its 1,000 years of river-linked experience.
http://www.mapping-the-necklace.org.uk/

SNOUT – PARTICIPATORY SENSING (Doors of Perception Report April 2)
In next week’s Snout ‘participatory sensing carnival’ in London, artists, producers, performers and computer programmers demonstrate how to create wearable technologies, from scavenged media, in order to map the invisible gases that affect our everyday environment. The project also explores how communities can use this visual evidence to participate in or initiate local action. The performance will show in action two prototype Snout sensor ‘wearables’ based on traditional carnival costumes. Venue: Cargo, 83 Rivington St, Kingsland Viaduct, London, EC2A 3AY, Tuesday 10 April.
http://www.iniva.org

FLASHMOB – a mailing list to discuss and convene flashmob and related place-specific performative activities to inform performance research (relates to events in the city). To join the list, see here: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/FLASHMOB.

“In modern usage, flash mob describes a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, and then quickly disperse. They are usually organized with the help of the Internet or other communications networks.” Wikipedia

For more information on flashmob, see eg. these links:
–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob
–http://flashmob.com/

19 September 2007: Workshop – Spatial Cognition in Architectural Design

Anticipating User Behavior, Layout Legibility, and Route Instructions in the Planning Process in conjunction with international Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT’07) Melbourne, Australia.

Architects make inferences about the spaces that they are not in. They can infer how multi storey buildings look like by inspecting separate 2D layouts of the floors. They can mentally synthesize separate spaces that make up a building design, and they can create alternative designs by revising the spaces and how these spaces may come together.

Apart from these inferences, architects may also anticipate how residents and visitors of a building will behave in the spaces. They may design a building in such a way that people’s ability to understand the spatial layout of this building is influenced (in a positive or negative way). For instance, the legibility of the spatial environment may in- fluence the way in which routes between locations in the building are conceptualized, mentally processed, and communicated. These issues as well can inform and change the architect’s spatial inferences and decisions in the architectural design process.

Questions to be considered in this workshop include, but are not restricted to:
– How do architects switch between the designer’s and the users’ perspectives during the design process?
– What types of (internal and external) knowledge representations and pro- cesses do they make use of?
– What are suitable computational tools for dealing with the spatial complexity of the diverse spatial perspectives and requirements?
– What means are there to anticipate the way future users of the building will conceive of the building layout?
– Regarding complex built environments, how can the aspect of conceptualizing and communicating route knowledge be integrated in the design process?
– How do spatial / architectural and mental complexity related to each other with respect to building layouts? What are the limits both in the design process and the real experience of the resulting building complex?

Call for contributions
Authors are invited to submit a contribution of 4 to 6 pages as basis for discussions during the workshop (pdf file in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science format, see www.springer.com/lncs). Please send your contribution to barkowsky@sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de. Accepted contributions will be made available on the workshop web site, unless their authors instruct us otherwise.

Important dates
-30 April 2007 submission of workshop contributions
-15 June 2007 notification of acceptance
-07 July 2007 final versions of workshop contributions
-19 Sept 2007 workshop

More information at http://www.sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de/SCAD

25-26 April 2007: Call for papers – Research and Activism 4th Urban Studies Days at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, Estonia.

The tools of urban planning and policy can poorly address a range of important contemporary urban issues. Finding cultural and creative uses for old industrial areas, fighting social polarisation, achieving a liveable multicultural milieu and redefining urban character as a political project are questions where forms of urban activism have recently played decisive roles. Multicultural festivals, temporary cultural uses and community based new media are examples of fresh approaches, the “Research and Activism” conference aims at bringing together.

More http://www.cumulusassociation.org/index.php?option=com_content& task=view&id=100&Itemid=37.

Call for Doctoral Colloquium (DC)

PhD students and candidates are invited to present, discuss and defend their work-in-progress or preliminary results in an international and renowned audience of researchers and developers in the ubiquitous computing field at UbiComp 2007. PhD students and candidates at all stages in the process are invited to submit a thesis position paper. Participants will be expected to give short, informal presentations of their work during the Colloquium, to be followed by a discussion.

The submission (max. 8 pages) should clearly state:

-the original key idea of the thesis
-the problem domain and the specific problem addressed
-an overview of related work in the area of the PhD work
-methodological approach
-research carried out
-the contribution made in the field of ubiquitous computing (for early work, state the expected contribution)

Submissions should be formatted according to the guidelines of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science and should be submitted as PDF files through EDAS. The submissions will be reviewed and based on these reviews approximately 8 participants for the doctoral colloquium will be selected. The accepted thesis position papers will be published in the adjunct proceedings of UbiComp 2007.

Important Dates

-extended to March 12, 2007 (closed) — Submission of thesis position paper
-May 15, 2007 — Accept/reject notifications
-June 29, 2007 — Camera ready papers
-September 16, 2007 — Doctoral Colloquium in Innsbruck, Austria

More at http://www.ubicomp2007.org/calls/dc/