Pervasive Retail: Theme of the April-June edition of Pervasive Computing (IEEE)

This is just a teaser.  I'll have time to read it next week when I'm on break!


FYI: This is one of my favorite tech journals. This issue's theme focuses on the use of pervasive technology in retail settings.   Other topics in this issue include wearables, pervasive health, smartphone computing in the classroom, innovative Ubicomp products, and more.


IEEE Pervasive Computing

Connected Youth: Theme of the July-Sept issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing

The guest editors of the July-September 2010 issue of IEEE's Pervasive Computing magazine are John Canny, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jason Hong, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.  Their article provides an introduction to the publication's timely theme, Connected Youth.  The editors find that the study of the current generation of children and teens provides useful information about the future of computing as in integrates more seamlessly into our daily lives, the way we learn, and our relationships and interaction with others across time, place, and generations.

I'm in the middle of reading this issue of Pervasive Computing.  The articles that have caught my eye so far include "Story Time for the 21st Century", which describes the research an implementation of an interactive book-reading system designed to connect children, family members, and grandparents who live in distant locations. The system involves videoconferencing with paper books and interactive content, and enables grandparents to read with their grandchildren via the Internet.



Additional information about Story Play, a system that is still under development, can be found on the Nokia Research Center website: "Family Story Play: Story Time for the 21st Century".  A follow-up project to Story Play is Story Visit:



I'll post more about the articles from the Connected Youth issue of Pervasive Computing in the future.

2010 International Computer Music Conference in NY. I wish I could go!

I'm usually too busy during the last month or so of the school year to attend conferences.  One I'd really like to attend is the 2010 International Computer Music Conference in N.Y.  Music is an important component of interactive multimedia content, and new technologies have made things a lot easier for musicians who are technologically inclined.  Conferences like ICMC are a great way to see - and hear - what is going on.

Links:
ICMC Paper Schedule 
ICMC 2010 Poster/Demo Schedule
Thomas Erbe's ICMC Workshop:  Pure Data Object Programming
(see bio and plug below)

Intriguing Topics: 
"Gestural Shaping and Transformation in a Universal Space of Structure and Sound"
"SoundCatcher:  explorations in audio-looping and time-freezing using an open-air gestural controller"
"Sense/Stage - low cost, open source wireless sensor infrastructure for live performance and interactive, real-time environments"
"The Four M's:  Music, Mind, Motion, Machines"
"A Wireless, Real-time Social Music Performance System for Mobile Phones"
"Because we are all falling down: Physics, Gestures, and Relative Realities"
"Argos:  An open-source application for building multi-touch musical interfaces"
"Peacock: a non-haptic 3D performance interface"
"Head Tracking for 3D Audio using the Nintendo WII"
"The Avatar Initiative- An Interdisciplinary Approach to Digital Media Research and Education"
"Computer Controlled Video as a Multi-modal Interface in Live Acousmatic Music"
"The Machine Orchestra"
"Eye. Breathe. Music"
"Combining audiovisual mappings for 3D musical interaction"

ICMC Unconference Categories

PdBarCamp
Sensory Interaction in Composition and Performance
Language, Neurology, and Acoustics
Open Scores and Accessible, Consumer Devices
Issues in Computer Music Performance
Computer Music and Society:  Questions of Dissemination

Realistically,  I'd be happy with a bit more time to play my keyboard! 
(The very first class I took when I decided to return to school to take computer classes was computer music technology.)

My plug for Tom Erbe, from the ICMC website 

Instructor Bios:

"Tom Erbe has had an important role in American experimental and electronic music of the last 20 years. In addition to his pioneering and widely used program SoundHack, he has become one of the most sought after and respected sound engineers for contemporary music. In 2004 he rejoined the faculty of UCSD in the Department of Music and serves as Studio Director. Most recently Tom has released SoundHack Spectral Shapers, the first of a planned set of three plugin bundles to bring extreme spectral processing to the VST, AU and RTAS formats."

If you are thinking about experimenting with sound, Tom Erbe's SoundHack freeware is awesome. His spectral shapers are worth every penny.  (I used the +binaural filter to create a 3D effect of racing car sounds for one of the students I work with who has autism and loves racing cars.)

+binaural

This filter places a sound at a specific position around the listener's head. Use it with a reverb to create a virtual environment. When used with it's LFO, +binaural can place various beats or parts of a loop in specific repeatable positions.

SOMEWHAT RELATED
When I get a moment, I'm reading my latest issue of IEEE Multimedia cover-to-cover:
Special Issue:  Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia


(The second class I took after I returned to school to take computer classes was Computer and Internet Multimedia.)

IEEE One Voice: Sharing the accomplishments and potential of people involved in technology and engineering. Great for sharing with students to encourage STEM studies!

John R. Vig, IEEE President and CEO, recently wrote a column about the need to share with the world the importance of the accomplishments of people who work in technological fields. In his column, he refers to the IEEE One Voice video, which I think is something all young people should view as they gather information for making important decisions for the future.

IEEE is a professional organization that is not limited to the stereotype of an "engineer". If you are a parent, teacher, school counselor, or mentor to a young person, take the time to learn more about the range of careers related to engineering and technology.

If you know a seventh or eighth grade student, take a look at IEEE's Future City Competition, designed to provide young people an opportunity to learn more about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields while teaming with engineers who are volunteer mentors to create computer models, then three dimensional models, of a future city. The Future City program is part of the National Engineers Week foundation.

RELATED National Engineers Week Foundation Discovering Engineering Toolkit Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day (February 18, 2010) Engineering Your Life ( This is a great site for encouraging girls to consider engineering and related fields, great for career exploration activities, as it covers a variety of engineering disciplines.) Below is a list of the various IEEE societies, taken from the IEEE website.  If we want to encourage our young people to consider STEM fields, it is important that we know we're talking about! IEEE Aerospace & Electronic Systems Society IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society IEEE Broadcast Technology Society IEEE Circuits and Systems Society IEEE Communications Society IEEE Components Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Society IEEE Computational Intelligence Society IEEE Computer Society IEEE Consumer Electronics Society IEEE Control Systems Society IEEE Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society IEEE Education Society IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society IEEE Electron Devices Society IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society IEEE Geoscience & Remote Sensing Society IEEE Industrial Electronics Society IEEE Industry Applications Society IEEE Information Theory Society IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society IEEE Magnetics Society IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society IEEE Photonics Society IEEE Power and Energy Society IEEE Power Electronics Society IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society IEEE Professional Communication Society IEEE Reliability Society IEEE Robotics & Automation Society IEEE Signal Processing Society IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society IEEE Standards Association IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society IEEE Technology Management Council IEEE Ultrasonics Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society IEEE Vehicular Technology Society IEEE Women in Engineering

Brief Post and Links: Multimedia Semantics, Focus of the December issue of IEEE's Computing Now

I haven't read the latest issue of IEEE's Computing Now, but it looks like it has a few good articles that might be of interest:

Multimedia Metadata and Semantic Management

Guest Editors' Introduction, IEEE Computing Now

Harald Kosch and Christian Timmerer, December 2009

"Effective multimedia management must span the metadata life cycle—from its creation through processing, storage, distribution, and deployment—and work whether the metadata is tightly connected with or independent of the media it describes.

Finally, we need better integration of situational context. This includes not only domain knowledge, but also legal and cultural issues, metadata and semantic quality, compression and encryption techniques."

3D Media and the Semantic Web pdf

Michela Spagnuolo and Bianca Falcidieno, National Research Council of Italy

Managing and Querying Distributed Multimedia Metadata Collections pdf

Sebastien Laborie, Ana-Maria Manzat, and Florence Sedes

Using Social Networking and Collections to Enable Video Semantics Acquisition pdf

Stephen J. Davis, Christian H. Ritz, Ian S. Burnett

RELATED

IEEE MultiMedia  

Some of my favorite tech journals/magazines:

IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia Dec. 14-16, San Diego, CA

The IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia will be held in San Diego, CA. December 14-16, 2009. A variety of workshops will be held in conjunction with this symposium - links are provided below.

The information below is from the ISM 2009 website:

The IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM2009) is an international forum for researchers to exchange information regarding advances in the state of the art and practice of multimedia computing, as well as to identify the emerging research topics and define the future of multimedia computing. The technical program of ISM2009 will consist of invited talks, paper presentations, and panel discussions.

Submissions of high quality papers describing mature results or on-going work are invited. Topics for submission include but are not limited to:

Multimedia systems, architecture, and applications
Multimedia networking and QoS
Peer-to-peer multimedia systems and streaming
Pervasive and interactive multimedia systems including mobile systems, pervasive gaming, and digital TV
Multimedia meta-modeling techniques and operating systems
Architecture specification languages
Software development using multimedia techniques
Multimedia signal processing including audio, video, image processing, and coding
Visualization
Virtual Reality
Multimedia file systems, databases, and retrieval
Multimedia collaboration
Rich media enabled E-commerce
Computational intelligence including neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms
Intelligent agents for multimedia content creation, distribution, and analysis
Internet telephony and hypermedia technologies and systems
Multimedia security including digital watermark and encryption
Mobile Multimedia Systems and Services
Multimodal Interaction, including Human Factors
Multimodal User Interfaces: Design, Engineering, Modality-Abstractions, etc.
Multimedia tools including authoring, analyzing, editing, and browsing

Conference Organizing Committee

The conference will offer a variety of workshops:

The ISM2009 Workshop Call for Proposals can be found here.

Papers submitted to each workshop will be reviewed by the program committee and external reviewers of the workshop.

The following workshop proposals have now been accepted:

DSMSA
Data Semantics for Multimedia Systems and Applications

MTEL
Multimedia Technologies for e-Learning
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~knipping/ieee/ism09-mtel/

MIPR
The Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval
http://www.cis.fiu.edu/conferences/mipr09/

MASP
Multimedia Audio and Speech Processing: advancing the state-of-the-art
http://speechlab.ifsc.usp.br/ism2009/

CBTV
Content-based audio/video analysis for novel TV services
http://ism2009.eecs.uci.edu/cbtv09/

MS
Third International Workshop on the Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics

AdMIRe
International Workshop on Advances in Music Information Research
http://www.cp.jku.at/conferences/admire2009/

Any general questions regarding ISM2009 Workshops and workshop proposals should be directed to the ISM2009 Workshop Co-Chairs:

Shu-Ching Chen, Florida International University, USA
Chengcui Zhang, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Atsuo Yoshitaka, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Ilja Radusch, Technische Universitaet Berlin, Germany

at: ismwork@eecs.uci.edu

Check the website for updates.

Digital 2008: 2nd IEEE International Conference on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning

The 2nd IEEE International Conference on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning will be in Banff, Canada, from November 17-19, 2008.

The call for papers is in process.

Here is some information from the conference website:

"Despite the surging interest in this emerging research, there are plenty challenging research issues to be investigated. For example, can one really learn meaningfully and deeply from games? Will there be new theories that explain phenomena of learning with fun? What constitute game pedagogies? How this genre of technology enhanced learning can be adopted to formal and informal learning settings? What are the possible dark sides of game and toyed education and how to prevent them? "

The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Foundation and theory for design
Evaluation
Case studies and exemplars
Artificial intelligence
Virtual characters
Vitual storytelling and game narrative
Multiplayer and social game design
Simulation and animation
Entertainment Robots for Education
Augmented/Mixed Reality
Interfaces
Training
Sport
Non-Visual Senses (smelling, touching, hearing)
Mobile games and its linking to online games
Location-based games and ubiquitous technology
Identity in gaming to learn: roles and role-playing
Optimal experience and flow
Engagement and emotion
Collaboration, competition and community
Social and Cultural aspects

Contact Information:

Contact Information

Kinshuk, General Chair (kinshuk@ieee.org)

Michael Eisenberg, Program Chair (duck@research.cs.colorado.edu)

Jill Calliou, Local Administrator (jillc@athabascau.ca)