CVMT Colloquia 2010

Time and place: 1 pm in 3-228 (Las Vegas room)

It has to be recognized that designing usable Information Technology across Cultures is an Art, for it being highly creative and sensitive, situational unique, and contextually self-defined. While our cross-cultural IT research continuously strives to contribute towards the development of HCI appropriate cross-cultural models and best practices, we need to be aware of the specificity of each development context and the influence of each participant. Communities all over the world have established own value systems which do not necessarily correlate with the intrinsic values of technology. Thus longtime established methods, understandings of quality concepts and metrics of socio-technical systems can no longer be assumed to be universals. Based on empirical research in cross-cultural design and evaluation in Namibia, the presenter argues for a local appropriation of concepts, processes and products.
 
Short Bio:
Heike Winschiers-Theophilus is dean of School of Information Technology at the Polytechnic of Namibia. She has lived in Namibia and lectured in the field of software engineering at the University and Polytechnic since 1994. Her Ph.D. research explored cross-cultural design issues and suggests a framework for culture-centered dialogical design. Since then her research has focused on the cultural appropriation of design and evaluation methods of information systems supporting local content creation, storage, organization, and retrieval.

This colloquium has been cancelled by the speaker and will be rescheduled for the fall

Time and place: 1 pm in 3-228 (Las Vegas room)

This presentation is about the design and evaluation of sound games for multimodal interfaces: How is it possible to encourage players to engage with each other musically and socially in their co-creation of musical and sonic content? The designs focus on sound as the only medium feedback in order to have players interact face to face. As an inherent part of the game designs presented, there are mechanisms in the games that 'listen' to all player input in order to adapt to each player's style of play and provoke new ways of engagement with the musical content that is made available in each game. In order to be able to 'listen' to the players, some built in realtime analysis methods are presented alongside with the game designs in order to discuss how a game can 'interpret' joint player action.

The picture shows an example of how the computer could be in the loop of joint user interaction in a "call and response" type of sound game.

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In this presentation I give an overview of two areas of my research activity where there exists the potential for collaboration with Media Technology. These are:

 

Time and place: 12.30 pm in B2-104 (note room and time ... )

   

Time and place: 1 pm in 3-228 (Las Vegas room)

I present work which makes contributions to the sparse approximation and efficient representation of complex signals, e.g., acoustic signals, using greedy iterative descent pursuits and overcomplete dictionaries. As others have noted before, peculiar problems arise when a signal model is mismatched to the signal content, and a pursuit makes bad selections from the dictionary. These result in models that contain atoms having no physical significance to the signal, and instead exist to correct the representation through destructive interference. This diminishes the efficiency of the generated signal model, and hinder the useful application of sparse approximation to signal analysis (e.g., source identification), visualization (e.g., source selection), and modification (e.g., source extraction). While past works have addressed these problems by formulating a pursuit to avoid them, in our work we use these corrective terms to learn about the signal, the pursuit algorithm, the dictionary, and the signal model. We show that a better signal model results when a pursuit builds it considering the interaction between the atoms. We formally study these effects and propose novel measures of them to quantify the interaction between atoms in a model, and to illuminate the role of each atom in representing a signal. We propose and study different ways of incorporating these new measures into the atom selection criteria of greedy iterative descent pursuits, and show analytically and empirically that these "interference-adaptive pursuits" can produce models with increased efficiency and meaningfulness.

A recent publication discussing these results is: B. L. Sturm and J. J. Shynk, “Sparse approximation and the pursuit of meaningful signal models with interference adaptation,” IEEE Trans. Acoustics, Speech, Lang. Process., vol. 18, pp. 461–472, Mar. 2010.

Bio
Bob L. Sturm has received an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder (B.A. 1998), a graduate degree in computer music from Stanford University (M.A. 1999), and a few other graduate degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara (M.S. 2004, M.S. 2007, Ph. D. 2009). He continued his research in sparse approximation and signal representation as a Chateaubriand Fellow post-doctoral researcher at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), Paris 06. Currently, Bob is an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, AAU at University Campus Ballerup, UB, the Copenhagen Institute of Technology.

Time and place: 1 pm in 3-228 (Las Vegas room)

With this presentation I am going to introduce myself by giving you an account of my previous research and ongoing and planned projects. Thus, the presentation is twofold. First, I am going to talk about the methodological approach of developing interactive systems with virtual characters and will give some examples from areas of cultural and affective computing. The second part then deals with the now and then and presents my current interests and ongoing projects. I will focus on three collaborative projects in the making dealing with support for indigenous knowledge management, context-aware cultural interactions and seamless interaction across realities.

The use of gestural information, such as hand movements, as a data input source to control computer-influenced environments has been around since the advent of the computer mouse.  More recently, hand, arm and body movements are becoming increasingly used as data input via such devices as the Wii® Controller or iPhone®.  New computer interfaces are becoming increasingly available which transform other biologically-generated activity into viable data input sources for computers.  Human-sourced activity such as the biologically generated signals manifested by the heart, skeletal muscle, neuronal activity of the brain, eye movements, skin conductance or pulse are also viable input data sources for computers and provide a wealth of information not readily available via alternate means.  Methods for collection, analysis and interpretation of these types of data will be presented.

Note from organizers: the department recently purchased a data acquisition system from Biopac in anticipation that research and student projects increasingly will need this type of input for testing and inut generation purposes.
The colloquium by Alan Macy will be preceeded by a training session the day before (sign up with Dan Overholt, dano@imi.aau.dk)

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