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June 2009 TEDxDublin

TEDx Dublin: Welcome from Organiser - Aaron Quigley

On June 12th at 7.30pm 2009 I organised TEDxDublin which was hosted by the Science Gallery. While I founded TEDxDublin, it was truly was a team effort. The TEDxDublin series of event, which started small, has now happened nine times upto 2016.

Links: [ Facebook Fan Page ] [ TEDxDublin Website ] [ #tedxdub on twitter ] [ #tedx on twitter ] [ TEDxDublin on Flickr ]

TEDxDublin is a local, self-organized event that brought people together to share “ideas worth spreading”. At TEDxDublin we had a program of 2 TEDTalks videos and 3 live speakers. See the TEDxDublin website (which the Science Gallery kindly host) for full details and videos on this event. This event really did spark off some deep discussions and connection. I was particularly glad that our ODCSSS 2009 research interns were able to attend along with some of their mentors and supervisors. It really is a great testament to Dublin that such an event can come together on such short notice yet have speakers from around the world and be delivered through such a high quality event.

Thanks go to our three speakers for giving up their time and presenting inspiring talks and also our local volunteers. The Science Gallery and all the staff who helped are to be very much complimented for their professionalism with helping to plan and execute on TEDxDublin. Beforehand a number of people said they weren’t sure if we could have something in Dublin that emulated the buzz, energy and inspiration of the original TED talks but afterwards many people said the event had met and exceeded just those expectations. Rowan Manahan from Fortify Services has written a very nice blog piece on TEDxDublin.

Two interesting aspects of how this whole event came together was firstly the speed (18 days) and also the use of social media (lots of twitter and Facebook). Due to the whole connection to TED I was interviewed by a local reporter Marie Boran on the use of social media to drive the organisation of this event. You can see her piece on this in the Silicon Republic.

The event itself….
Our first presentation came from Scott Rickard on “source signal separation” or the cocktail-party effect. Scott gave a great and engaging talk and certainly inspired many people, if the discussions afterwards are anything to judge by! Scott is keenly interested in science, mathematics, and engineering education, at all levels. He is co-founder of Science With Me! and co-created RoboRugby. He is the director of the Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory UCD. Along with explaining what is some complex research in accessible terms Scott was able to give a live demo with multi-lingual source seperation on the spot! Pretty impressive.

Educated at MIT and Princeton, Scott was a research assistant at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts (from 1991 to 1993) and worked on a prototype analog neural network computer, designed neural networks for mine detection from sonar images, and designed large sets of frequency hopped waveforms with nearly ideal ambiguity properties for sonar applications. From 1993 to 2003 he was a member of technical staff at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey. He spent 1995 and 1996 in Munich Germany with Siemens working in the Neural Networks Group. While with Siemens, he developed and applied machine learning technology to industrial problems such as vehicle navigation, automated image analysis, biomedical signal classification, and industrial plant state prediction. Scott moved to UCD in September 2003 and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering and the Director of the UCD Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL).


Our first TED talk on video at TEDxDublin came from Pattie Maes on the Sixth Sense. [ TED Link ]


Mark Billinghurst was our second live presenter on “Accessible AR: Bringing Augmented Reality to the Masses”. Mark is the director of the Human Interface Technology Lab New Zealand. He is the inventor of the “Magic Book” – an animated children’s book that comes to life when viewed through the lightweight head-mounted display (HMD).He was awarded a Discover Magazine Award in 2001, for Entertainment for creating the Magic Book technology. In 2004 he was nominated for a prestigious World Technology Network (WTN) World Technology Award in the education category and in 2005 he was appointed to the New Zealand Government’s Growth and Innovation Advisory Board.

Our second TED talk on video at TEDxDublin came from Robert Full on Learning from the gecko’s tail. [ TED Link ]

Our final live talk at TEDxDublin came from Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft Live Labs. Blaise is well know for his original TED talk in 2007 on [ Photosynth ]. Blaise Aguera y Arcas has authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques, and in 2001, he made an influential computational discovery that cast doubt on Gutenberg’s role as the father of movable type.

He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

Thanks to Catalin David of Jacobs University Bremen, Germany for his images of the event. Catalin is an ODCSSS research intern.

June 2009 Paper Accepted to EMBC 2009

Congratulations to my co-authors from UCD and TRIL on our recent paper entitled “Objective real-time assessment of walking and turning in elderly adults” which was accepted at the 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC’09). EMBC’09 will be held during September 2~6, 2009 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“The EMBC’09 technical program will consist of plenary and keynote lectures, workshops, symposia, and invited sessions, in which the leading experts from all around the world will present state-of-the-art reviews of rapidly-developing and exciting areas, report the latest significant findings and developments in all the major fields of biomedical engineering, and discuss government and industry related issues. Accepted high-quality original technical papers will be presented in poster and oral sessions, with up to 4-page papers to be included in IEEE Xplore and indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE. A number of student travel awards will also be made available to assist graduate students attending EMBC’09.”

June 2009 Master Class on Visualisation

I’m giving a Master Classes called “Visualisation as an analytical tool, from networks to data streams” at the DHO Summer School 2009 in July. Thanks to Shawn and Paolo for inviting me. I’m looking forward to outlining the 7 key research challenges our field faces in light of the ever increasing torrent of both local and remote data sources.

Lecture: Visualisation as an analytical tool, from networks to data streams.

7 Key Challenges we face. Aaron Quigley (University College, Dublin)

Societies continued reliance on information and communications technologies has resulted in organizations generating, gathering, and storing “raw data” at a rate growing each year. The ability for even a mid-sized organization to store tens to hundreds of terabytes of data is already within reach. Massive storage technologies are rapidly outstripping our ability to effectively analyse, explore, and understand such voluminous data. While research in other fields such as data mining, machine learning and knowledge management are also attempting to aid in the analysis of such voluminous data, there is a realisation that the “human-in-the-loop” affords a visual analysis not possible through automation alone.

As such, the area of visual analytics extends the fields of scientific and information visualization by incorporating techniques from knowledge management, statistical analysis, cognitive science and decision science.

This talk will outline how voluminous data is modeled, managed, mined and hence visually presented for exploration. Several large scale data and information visualisation methods will be described and discussed along with the 7 key challenges we face as researchers and developers in using visualisation in an attempt to present information.

Details:

DHO Summer School 2009

Date: 13 – 17 July 2009

Venue: Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College Dublin

The Digital Humanities Observatory in conjunction with NINES and 18th Connect are delighted to offer a week-long workshop to allow scholars undertaking digital projects to develop their skills, share interests, and work towards common goals. Workshop strands, master classes and lectures will focus on the theoretical, technical, administrative, and institutional issues relevant to the needs of digital humanities projects.

The summer school will offer participants four week-long workshop strands to choose from:

* Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative: Theory and Practice;

* Data Modelling and Databases for Humanities Research;

* Data Visualisation for the Humanities;

* Text Transformations with XSLT.

In addition the Summer School will feature lectures and master classes by leading experts and theorists in digital humanities.

June 2009 Paper Accepted to SNMABA 2009

Congratulations to Mike Farrugia on having our new paper entitled “Enhancing airline customer relationship management data by inferring ties between passengers” accepted as a regular paper at the International Workshop on Social Networks Mining and Analysis for Business Applications (SNMABA2009). This workshop will be held in conjunction with the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing in Vancouver, Canada. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop section of the main conference proceedings of SocialComp-09.

“Abstract—In the airline industry, as in many other industries, customer relationship management data is predominantly based on quantitative data. In this paper we explore the possibility of augmenting this quantitative data with relational data by inferring ties between passengers. Different methods of inferring relationships are proposed and discussed, along with the business
benefits such relational data adds to current customer information. We also explain some visualisation approaches to facilitate the exploration of this data by business analysts in marketing, sales and customer loyalty sections.”

June 2009 4th ODCSSS Program

This is the 4th year for the ODCSSS program. ODCSSS is a 12 week undergraduate summer research internship program between the University College Dublin (UCD) and Dublin City University (DCU) Ireland which starts on June 2nd 2009. This program offers a distributed and interdisciplinary research environment at the forefront of ICT research. The theme for 2009 is “Technologies for bridging the digital-physical divide: sensing the environment“. Each ODCSSS student is engaged in a research project with a faculty member and mentor which provides them an opportunity to experience research.

This year we have, yet again, an impressive set of research interns coming here for the summer. Our 2009 research launch event will be held in the Guinness Store House Dublin on June 2nd with a strong line of research presentations for academia, industry and applied research labs.

As UCD director for this program I wish all the research interns based here and in DCU all the very best in their summer research. To see some past images view this flickr set called ODCSSS SET


May 2009 Paper Accepted to HCII 2009

“Interaction Techniques for Binding Smartphones”


Congratulations to Umer on having his paper on Interaction Techniques for Binding Smartphones published in the proceedings of the First International Conference on Human Centered Design 2009. This conference is held as part of HCI International 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, July 19-24, 2009. The proceedings are published in the prestigious Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Our paper reports on the use of guided interviews to evaluate the desirability
of different interaction techniques for binding smartphones. We demonstrate
five interaction techniques using storyboard sketches and cardboard
prototypes of iPhones. We discuss the implications of these results for the
design of interaction techniques for smartphones.

May 2009 Workshops Pervasive 2010

———————————————————————-
Pervasive 2010
The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing

Call One: Workshop Proposals Pervasive 2010
Submission Deadline: June 26, 2009

Helsinki, Finland
May 17 – 20, 2010
http://pervasive2010.org/
———————————————————————-

——————————————————–
Call One for Workshop Proposals
——————————————————–

Pervasive 2010, the Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing will be held in Helsinki, Finland on the 17 – 20 May.

The workshop program for Pervasive 2010 will be different than in past years as invited projects, invited topics and regular workshops form part of the program. This call represents the first opportunity for anyone to submit a regular workshop proposal. Two topical and two project workshops have already been invited. The invited workshops include:

1 Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive Applications
2 Multimodal Location Based Techniques for Extreme Navigation
3 Workshop on Pervasive Personalization
4 Workshop on Ubiquitous Virtual Reality

Contrary to previous years, there will be two calls for workshop proposals. Workshops will be selected from both calls. The deadline for this first call is *June 26, 2009*. Interested parties should submit 1-2 page workshop proposals that include the following details:
– Title and abstract/description for the workshop
– Format of the workshop
– Motivation for the relevance of the workshop to Pervasive computing
– Names and affiliations of the organisers

The workshop calls will be evaluated considering the (i) quality of the proposal, (ii) relevance of the workshop topic and (iii) overall span of workshop topics. This first call is targeted at groups who which to establish a longer lead time to promote and develop their workshop program than is typically the case with Pervasive workshops. Clearly, topics for workshops should differ substantially from the topics of the invited workshops.

The notifications will be sent by the end of July. Accepted workshops are expected to finalize their workshop program (call for papers, PC, website etc.) at the latest by October 2nd, 2009.

Critical dates:

* June 26, 2009: Submission deadline
* July 31, 2009: Notification
* October 2, 2009: Deadline for final workshop descriptions and workshop webpages

The deadline for the second call is October 16, 2009. This will be the standard call our research community has for each Pervasive conference.
Participants submitting to the second call are expected to submit full proposals (4-6 pages). More details about this call will be sent at a later stage.

Please visit the workshops page at
http://www.pervasive2010.org/workshops.htmlfor up to date information.

Best regards,
Petteri Nurmi & Aaron Quigley
Pervasive 2010 Workshop Chairs
pervasive2010-workshops-list@cs.helsinki.fi

May 2009 Pervasive 2009

Workshop –
Papers –
Session Chair –

Two weeks ago I was at LoCA 2009 where we had a
presentation from the CEO of http://www.koozyt.com/
(pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/loca2009/)

They have spun out a LBS technology (placeengine) from
Sony. They spoke of their many applications and systems developed
to date.
They are a company based in Tokyo, Japan,
a spin off from Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.,
that provides PlaceEngine, a locationware platform
that estimates a user’s location by sensing nearby wireless
LAN signals.

At the time they didn’t have any apps in the US iPhone store
but now they do. “Oedo Yokai” is a book on the Japanese
“Yokai” (Sprites and Spirits). It is a collection of “Yokai” stories
associated with the areas near the subway stations of the Oedo
Line in Tokyo, Japan. You can also summon Netsuke sculptures
of each “Yokai” in the book and collect them at your leisure.

*Press*
Tokyo, JPN – May 19, 2009 – Koozyt announced today the release of
their new iPhone/iPod touch application called “Oedo Yokai” on the
App Store as of May 15, 2009. Oedo Yokai is an application that
introduces stories of the Japanese Yokai. The contents were created
under the supervision of Dr. Hiro Kubota and art direction was
provided by graphic arts designer Atsushi Morioka. The application
supports both Japanese and English.

Oedo Yokai will be showcased at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 2009 Conference
that will be held in San Jose, CA.

http://www.koozyt.com/press/2009/pr090519en.html

May 2009 Paper Accepted to ICSOFT 2009


Congrats to Emil and Mike my co-authors for our newly accepted paper entitled “A self-adaptive architecture for autonomic systems developed with ASSL” at ICSOFT 2009, the 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies.

“The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested on information technology and software development. The conference tracks are “Software Engineering”, “Information Systems and Data Management”, “Programming Languages”, “Distributed and Parallel Systems” and “Knowledge Engineering”.

Software and data technologies are essential for developing any computer information system, encompassing a large number of research topics and applications: from programming issues to the more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from databases and data-warehouses to the most complex management information systems; knowledge-base systems; Distributed systems, ubiquity, data quality and many other topics are included in the scope of ICSOFT.”

May 2009 “Haptic Jingle” and Pervasive Advertising 2009

Earlier this week I attended a Pervasive 2009 workshop on Pervasive Advertising I organized with Jörg Müller, University of Münster, Albrecht Schmidt, University of Duisburg-Essen and Bo Begole, PARC. My postgraduate student Ross Shannon presented two papers on our ideas and developments in this space. There were some very interesting and thought provoking presentations and all the participants fully engaged with the full program of events from presentations to actual working sessions.

During Pervasive Advertising 2009 we discussed not only means of showing dynamically updated content, but also means to react implicitly and explicitly to the audience in its vicinity. In order to interact with the target audience, technologies need to be explored that are capable of identifying the user or their interests/needs. It’s clear (for good or bad) advertising is becoming one of the major deployers of pervasive computing technology for many end-users (e.g. mobile ads, digital signs, context awareness, RFID etc.).

On a side note, given a quick survey online I am going to lay claim to coining a new term, namely “Haptic Jingle”. This is a pretty simple but I think powerful idea.

Consider all the products we know and use on a regular basis. There are now many products which have well known catch phrases or audio jingles. Typically when we hear such phrases or jingles we automatically recall and associate this with the product or service. Now, I’m not making a value judgment on if this is a good or a bad thing but it did give me the idea for what I call a “Haptic Jingle”.

A Haptic Jingle is a particular shake or pulse pattern which we physically experience when we touch a particular object and hence associate with a product/company/service. A company could build such haptic feedback into their products or sales spaces e.g. “I’m loving it” translates to a low key vibration with two or three pulses which match with the inflection points in the associated audio or written phrase. This haptic pattern can then be embedded into physical objects we interact with in public space such as door handles. In the future imagine the scenario of moving into a store, you pull the handle, feel the haptic jingle and then think, yes, yes, I do want a Starbucks Latte. If this strikes you as a worrying idea then stay informed and advocate against it happening!

However, as a scientist I am curious about the range of modalities and multi-modalities which can be employed for information delivery. Be this for advertising or other important elements of information.


During the workshop we were all acutely aware that our physical environment is becoming ever more overloaded with man made objects. At one point our sub-group moved to sit and work in the Nara park where we were based for Pervasive 2009. This inspired us to recall what the late Mark Weiser said. “Ubiquitous computers will help overcome the problem of information overload. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.”


This motivated us to consider this question. Could we weave pervasive advertising into the current park environment as a source of information you might want? Could Pervasive Advertising provide information so the overall experience was “refreshing”? As described in our call for papers in this session we took a positive view to envision advertisements that precisely match a person’s interests and fit the current situation so well that people enjoy receiving them and see advertising as relevant information or a pleasant distraction. During the course of the workshop we also came across many concerns shown in the negative view. One can easily imagine a world where people cannot escape from advertisements, where we are continuously tracked and where advertisements reduce the quality of life.

The overall outcomes from the workshop include, areas of concern from the scientific to the social issues, a number of positive and negative scenarios, a set of small scale research projects and a set of large group projects. The workshop organisers have decided to put together a book on Pervasive Advertising with sections on the various technologies, social and legal issues which will be documented and discussed.

The workshop was an excellent venue for a full and frank discussion on both positive and negative issues and key scientific research challenges.