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DFG Emmy Noether Meeting in Potsdam, Art, Ceilings

Juli 19, 2009Juli 19, 2009 admin Schreibe einen Kommentar

Meeting with other researchers that run or have run Emmy Noether research groups is very different from normal conferences and meetings. The participants are across all disciplines – from art history to zoology 😉 The meeting focuses mainly on strategic, political, personal, administrative and organizational issues when starting a research career. This year we had child care organized during the meeting and Vivien came with me to Potsdam.

On Saturday night I learned that we (our galaxy) will eventually collide with the Andromeda Galaxy (but after our sun is out fuel – so I do not worry too much). Vivien found this fascinating, too. Learning more about astrophysics (looks defiantly more complicated than the things I usually do) teaches me to worry less about the immediate usefulness and direct utility of research results – also in our domain.

I am fascinated how different research can be and at the same time how similar the enthusiasm is people have for their research. By now – being one of the old guys – I co-organized two workshops. One together with Dr. Hellfeier from DHV on how to negotiate for a professorship and one with Stefanie Scheu and Rainer Hirsch-Luipold on teaching and PhD-supervision.

I talked to Riko Jacob (CS at TU Munich) about teaching computer science in school and he showed me a picture of a tangible shortest path calculator (I took a photo of the photo ;-). Perhaps I have at some point time to play with the installation in Munich.

On Sunday morning we took the water taxi – direct from the hotel peer – to the central train station in Potsdam. Christian Scholl from Göttingen (he does Art History) took some time to show us around the castle Sans Souci. After our discussion I wondered if we should consider a joint seminar from computer science/media informatics and art history – in particular ideas related to ambient media, interactive facades, and robotic buildings would benefit from a more historic awareness. There is an interesting PhD thesis on ceiling displays [1] – for a shorter version see [2]. I met Martin Tomitsch at a Ubicomp DC and I was impressed with the idea and its grounding in history.

[1] Tomitsch M. (2008). Interactive Ceiling – Ambient Information Display for Architectural Environments. PhD Thesis, Vienna University of Technology, Austria.

[2] Tomitsch, M., Grechenig, T., Vande Moere, A. & Sheldon, R. (2008). Information Sky: Exploring Ceiling-based Data Representations. International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV08), London, UK, 100-105. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4577933&isnumber=4577908

Which one do you like best?

Juli 15, 2009Juli 15, 2009 admin 2 Kommentare

We got samples for USB sticks for the proceedings of the automotive conference – which one do you like best?

Auto-UI Conference accepts 12 full papers and 10 notes

Juli 12, 2009Juli 12, 2009 admin Schreibe einen Kommentar

For the 1st International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI 2009) we got many quality submissions. The review process is now complete and we accepted 12 full papers and 10 notes for oral presentation at the conference. The list of accepted contributions is online at auto-ui.org.

As a number of people have asked if the still can submit to the program and as many of the rejected papers raise interesting aspects we decided to have Posters as a further submission category. We have a continuous submission process for poster abstracts till Sept 1st 2009. Earlier submissions receive feedback within 2 weeks. For details see the poster call for AutomotiveUI 2009.

If you submit somit your poster abstract during the next week, you will get the notification before the early registration deadline, which is August 6, 2009.

The registration is open and the conference is held in Essen, Mon/Tue 21 – 22 September 2009 – right after mobile HCI 2009 (which is in Bonn, just 100km away).

Faculty meeting in Velen

Juli 11, 2009Juli 11, 2009 admin Schreibe einen Kommentar

Friday and Saturday we came to Velen (Hotel SportSchloss Velen) to discuss mainly administrative and strategic issues – and there are plenty. The place is amazing and I was annoyed with myself for not bring my SLR… Nevertheless I took some photos with my N95.

Such meetings highlight for me that the German scientific system is undergoing a major change – with many opportunities and risks. A lot of political constraints are pushed onto the university – many seem to be just copies of other systems that are working less than perfect (e.g. bachelor/master, research evaluation, etc.). Being optimistic and seeing the creativity of my colleagues I think we will find interesting and successful solutions.

DIY Segway – to motivate embedded programming?

Juli 1, 2009Juli 1, 2009 admin Schreibe einen Kommentar

Elektor magazine features in the current issue a DIY Segway called Elektor Wheelie. The system is build around a ATMEGA32 and has obviously a lot of mechanics. For sensing an ADXL320 (acceleration sensor) and an IDG-300 (gyro) are used. Looks like a fun project – and you have full access to the software (not sure what you really would program differently, perhaps one can tune it to get faster 😉

Perhaps it could be a platform to motive embedded programming – with clear real-time constraints, as it hurts if you fall off… Next term we are teaching digital system design and programming of microcontroller systems – should we get one for the lab? Someone willing to built it?

Making Computer Science Exciting for Children – Kinderuniversität

Juni 26, 2009Juni 26, 2009 admin 1 Kommentar

Petra is teaching at the primary school in Satteldorf. As there is no University close by we decided to have a university afternoon at school. The idea behind this (in German Kinderuniversität) is to get young children excited for scientific topics and show that research is fun. The lecture should make them curious and motivate them to ask fundamental questions.

My lecture was on principles and technologies for communication (in German) and we looked fundamentally at what information is, how it relates to probabilities, how to encode information, and what devices people used and use for communication. For me this was a very exciting experience and also showed that we (as a discipline Computer Science) should probably look more into didactic and how to communicate fundamentals of our subject in school. So far many students associated computer science with using PowerPoint 🙁 but there are interesting starting points, e.g. a German book on algorithms for school children [1].

[1] Vöcking, B.; Alt, H.; Dietzfelbinger, M.; Reischuk, R.; Scheideler, C.; Vollmer, H.; Wagner, D. (Ed.). Taschenbuch der Algorithmen. 2008, ISBN: 978-3-540-76393-2

Aaron Quigley will become director of HITLab Australia

Juni 25, 2009Juni 25, 2009 admin Schreibe einen Kommentar

Aaron announced that he is going to be the founding director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory Australia and Professor at the University of Tasmania. After HITLab in Washington and New Zealand this is the third one. It is quite a challenge- but he is the person for it!

What can one say? Congratulations and a quote from Mark Twan: Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

PS: Found myself checking two things: (1) where Tasmania is and (2) when I have my next sabbatical …

Linking the activities in the physical world to actions in the digital/virtual

Juni 25, 2009Juni 25, 2009 admin 1 Kommentar

Currently we have an assignment in our Pervasive Computing class that asks students to design and develop a system where actions are associated with artifacts. Technically students should develop a web based solution using RFID. Apropos RFID, … if you look for a good introduction on RFID read Roy Want’s IEEE Pervasive Magazin paper [1].

We use the hardware from http://nabaztag.com/ (Ztamp:s and Mir:ror) as the focus is on the concept and application and not on the underlying technology. To ease development Florian and Ali have developed a little system that offers WebCallBacks (students can register a URL and that is called when a tag is read).

Linking by tagging of objects has been well explored, e.g. [2] and [3], and I think it is about time that this technologies will make an impact in the consumer market – the technology gets cheap enough now (and perhaps one of our students has a great idea).

Some years back (in the last millennium) a company tried to push linking of paper adverts and digital content with the CueCat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat) – I was impressed and inspired at that time but in my view it had two major weaknesses: (1) technically too early and (2) encoding of serial numbers instead of URLs. The RadioShack catalog and the Wired Magazine that included codes showed the potential – but it was too cumbersome as it was restricted to the PC …

We did some work on the topic, too around that time – at RFID reader integrated in a glove – which resulted in a Poster at ISWC [4] and a patent [5].

[1] Want, R. 2006. An Introduction to RFID Technology. IEEE Pervasive Computing 5, 1 (Jan. 2006), 25. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2006.2

[2] Harrison, B. L., Fishkin, K. P., Gujar, A., Portnov, D., and Want, R. 1999. Bridging physical and virtual worlds with tagged documents, objects and locations. In CHI ’99 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 15 – 20, 1999). CHI ’99. ACM, New York, NY, 29-30. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/632716.632738

[3] Ljungstrand, P. and Holmquist, L. E. 1999. WebStickers: using physical objects as WWW bookmarks. In CHI ’99 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 15 – 20, 1999). CHI ’99. ACM, New York, NY, 332-333. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/632716.632916

[4] Schmidt, A., Gellersen, H., and Merz, C. 2000. Enabling Implicit Human Computer Interaction: A Wearable RFID-Tag Reader. In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE international Symposium on Wearable Computers (October 18 – 21, 2000). ISWC. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 193. (Poster as large PNG)

[5] US Patent 6614351 – Computerized system for automatically monitoring processing of objects. September 2, 2003. http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6614351/description.html

Human Computer Confluence – Information Day in Brussels

Juni 24, 2009Juni 24, 2009 admin Schreibe einen Kommentar

By the end of the month FET Open will launch the call for the proactive initiative on Human Computer Confluence. The term is new and hopefully it will really lead to new ideas. Today was already an information day on the upcoming proactive initiatives. I arrived the evening before and it is always a treat to talk a walk in the city.

The presentations were not really surprising and also the short intros by the participants remained very generic. Seeing the call that is now finalized and having been at the consultation meetings it seems to me that the focus is rather broad for a proactive initiative… but with many people wanting a piece of the cake this seems inevitable.

I presented a short idea of „breaking space and time boundaries“ – the idea is related to a previous post on predicting the future. The main idea is that with massive sensing (by a large number of people) and with uniform access to this information – independ of time and space – we will be able to create a different view of our realty. We think of putting a consortium together for an IP. Interested? Then give me a call.