Schlagwort: events

CeBIT: Context-Awareness for Novel Transport and Logistics Services

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At the Fraunhofer Forum at CeBIT I had the chance to talk about future transport solutions. One of my students in Munich (Michael Müller) is working on a pro-active transport container. In the project aware-goods (http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~albrecht/awaregoods/) we looked into this domain already in 2000 at TecO together with SAP Research. Reiterating over the idea is really interesting as now the technology is really here – sensor network nodes are available, mobile phones offer massive processing power, there is ubiquitous data connectivity, and web service interfaces are available for many applications.

The big question is now on algorithms and software for context recognition and data mining in the collected sensor data, the integration with processes and company software systems, and the exploitation for optimising transport and logistics processes.

Educational Fair in St. Petersburg

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Together with Alexandra Reitelmann I am in St. Petersburg (Russia) to advertise our study programs at the B-IT and University of Bonn (http://www.bit.uni-bonn.de/). In particular we talk to potential students about the master programs in Media Informatics and Life Science Informatics. The educational fair is held in the centre of St. Petersburg at the Russian Museum of Ethnography, which is a truly magnificent building. Overall I was surprised by the city, the buildings, the shops and the quality of the hotel.

The discussions with potential students and in some cases with their parents were interesting. It showed that there is a demand for high quality education and that Germany is an attractive place to study. Given the background of many people we talked to it could be interesting to look into the potential of a conversion master in media informatics, where people with different degrees (e.g. psychology, business studies, math, or engineering) can enter. In comparison to other countries education seems to be a bargain in Germany.

Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2008 in Bonn

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The second international conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI’08) will be in Bonn, Germany. Together with Hans Gellersen from Lancaster University I will chair the conference in 2008. I am absolutely delighted that Elise van den Hoven from Eindhoven University of Technology and Ali Mazalek from Georgia Institute of Technology will co-chair the program. The conference will be held in the B-IT-Center in February or March 2008 – we will soon put more information on www.tei-conf.org

Some thoughts to keep in mind for 2008… In the discussion it was suggested that we capture the conference next year on video and put the online or stream them. Furthermore several people argue for workshops as part of the conference. To have papers of different length, which may be presented in different forms (talks, exhibitions, demos, posters) but which are all equal in the proceedings was generally welcome. It was suggested that videos should feature in the submission to the program in one way or another. To make it easier for participants to have demos but also see other demos it was suggested to have student volunteers to help. The publication in the ACM digital library was seen by most people I spoke to as an important plus of the conference.

Affectionate Computing

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Thecla Schiphorst introduced us in her talk “PillowTalk: Can We Afford Intimacy? to the concept of Affectionate-Computing.
The central question is really how can we create intimacy in communication an interaction with and through technology? The prototype showed networked soft objects, that include sensors that recognize tactile qualities and gesture interaction. There are more details in her paper published at TEI’07.

Keynote at TEI’07 by Tom Rodden

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Tom presented (in socks) a very inspiring keynote at TEI’07. He questioned if the notion of seamless integration of technology based on several examples from the Equator Project (www.equator.ac.uk).

A central lesson from his talk for me is to look more closely how to design interactive systems so that people can exploit the technical weakness of system creatively. We will always have to deal with sensors systems, context-recognition, and learning algorithms that are not 100% perfect. I find it interesting to see this rather as a resource for design than a problem. The experience Tom reported from CYSMN (http://www.equator.ac.uk/index.php/articles/618) show nicely how people make use of GPS inaccuracies in a game.

A further point to keep in mind is that when triggering events based on context you may get boundary effects that can break the user experience. Tom gave an example of children finding virtual animals based on location. The effect was that they stopped when the saw an animal on their device – and this was at the boundary of the trigger area. This led to cases where the animal appeared and disappeared on the device and the children were puzzled about this effect. Hence one should really be careful how to put triggers – and I would expect that this is generally applicable to context-awareness not just to location-aware application.

UbiLog’07

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We got the message that our workshop proposal at the German Informatik2007 Conference is accepted. Together with colleagues from the University of Bonn and from the AutoID-Labs in Zurich I will organize a workshop on context-aware and ubiquitous computing applications in logistics. With the workshop we hope to get together interesting people who look into smart transport and logistics solutions.

The Workshop webpage is online at: ubilog.iai.uni-bonn.de and papers are due at 29.04.07. I am really looking forward to seeing the submissions.