Along with Professor Giulio Jacucci of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT I’m a general chair for ITS 2013. This post is version of our introductory message on that site. 

“We wanted like to thank our web chair Jim Young for his hard work in getting this site underway and for managing it over the next two years. Thanks to Aaron Genest our social media chair for coordinating the online social presence with Google+, Facebook, Twitter and more. We would also like to thank our publicity chair Paul Marshall for arranging the postcard you see below. Printed copies of these are now being used to advertise the conference around the world at upcoming conferences. If you would like some of these postcards please do let us know. Thanks also to our PC chair Miguel Nacenta for his logo work and to our local chair Per Ola Kristensson for his hard work organising a multitude of things. A conference such as this is the culmination of work and often unseen efforts of many people. As general chairs we aim to highlight these efforts here through this blog over the next two years.

We would also like to thank all of our program chairs who over the coming months will be developing their plans in the form of committees, timelines, calls for papers all of which we aim to publish before the ITS conference in 2012. Following this will be the work of reviewing and determining the final program.

Giulio has already been to visit St Andrews for two days in late April 2012 to help assess the various conference facilities and plans for 2013. Aaron would like to thank Giulio for working on this conference with him, his valuable experience is already helping make our plans that much better!

We look forward to welcoming everyone to St Andrews in Scotland in October of 2013 for what promises to be a stellar international conference. Please follow us on Google+, Facebook or Twitter or check back to this site (or use RSS) to follow our developments over the coming weeks and months.”

You can see some of the Arduino and Kinect equipment we have for the summer school here starting on June 26th with an Arduino workshop. The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are proving a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a MERL Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.

http://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/2011/06/one-week-until-summer-school-in-st-andrews/