Positive Technology Journal

Positive Technology is 5 years old.

Since then, 1650 published entries, and hundreds of comments generated.

A warm thanks to all readers, commentators and submitters of projects and news!

The First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information, organized by the MIT SENSEable City Lab, gathered many stakeholders from multiple disciplines to share on the issues surrounding the application and management of personal electronic information:

The goal of this forum is to explore the novel applications for electronic data and address the risks, concerns, and consumer opinions associated with the use of this data. In addition, it will include discussions on techniques and standards for both protecting and extracting value from this information from several points of view: what techniques and standards currently exist, and what are their strengths and limitations? What holistic approaches to protecting and extracting value from data would we take if we were given a blank slate?

Position papers and presentations are now online.

 

I just can not wait for the new James Cameron's movie Avatar...

The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO) is a new repertoire-based ensemble using mobile phones as musical instrument. MoPhO's interactive musical works take advantage of the unique technological capabilities of today's hardware and software, transforming multi-touch screens, built-in accelerometers, built-in microphones, GPS, data networks, and computation into powerful and yet mobile chamber meta-instruments.

The researcher behind the idea, Ge Wang, believes cell phones are becoming so powerful that we “cannot ignore them anymore as platforms for creativity. . . . It levels the playing ground in some ways, because everyone has a cell phone.”

The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra’s performance on December 3 at Palo Alto (CA) used an Apple iPhones amplified by speakers attached to small fingerless gloves. Here is a video of the concert.

RAVE 2010 - Real Actions in Virtual Environments - Call for Papers

See website: http://www.raveconference.com

* When: 3rd March, 2010.

* Where:

Palau de les Heures, University of Barcelona, Campus Mundet, Passeig de la Vall d’Hebron, 171 08035 Barcelona.

* Keynote Speaker - Dr Hunter Hoffman,

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/hunter/, University of Washington, USA

* Papers -  may be submitted directly for oral presentation at the conference and a special issue of PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, MIT Press, to be published in August 2010.

* Abstracts may be submitted for oral presentation at the conference or will presented as posters (see website for details).

***Deadline for paper submission: 8th January, 2010*** 23.59 Central European Time (Paris, Madrid)

In the last days, I have been brainstorming non stop about the concept of Positive Technology.

After almost four years of gathering ideas in this blog, I feel it’s time for a summary...

As first step, I have tried to collect my thoughts in this presentation, which I gave last week at the Stensen Foundation in Florence.

Audience feedback was pretty good - nobody was sleeping - so it looks a promising start.

Last Monday I attended Frontiers of Interaction V, where I gave a talk on Participative Ecology. The conference took place in Rome, at the wonderful Acquario Romano, Casa dell'Architettura.

I was really excited to be there, because I consider Frontiers the most interesting interaction design event in Italy.

Frontiers is organized and produced by Leandro Agrò and Matteo Penzo, who are also the founders of the Idearium community, the largest e-community on Interaction Design in Italy.

The format of the conference is very informal and fresh. You can meet people of all sorts, from academic researchers to superstars of interaction design, from anthropologists to futurists and young entrepreneurs, a mix of creativity and talent.

At the end of the meeting I felt physically exhausted but full of positive energy.

Here are some videos

(and, last but not least: Frontiers is completely free of charge, only registration is required. This is great since this makes the event accessible to young students)

W Frontiers!

PRESENCCIA and SKILLS are two integrated projects that both aim to advance Virtual Reality technology. These projects are highly interdisciplinary encompassing, among others, computer science, robotics, engineering, interaction design, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. All these fields, however diverse their interests, come together in the goal of integrating human interaction in mixed and virtual reality environments in order to enhance the user’s experience and enabling him to act and interact in a natural and familiar way by means of enactive paradigms.

The most interesting, challenging and useful digital environments are social, focussing on supporting (group) interaction between real people and other remote people or real people and virtual people. The aim is to understand, track and give appropriate feedback in verbal, non-verbal and implicit interactions while also making digital content more believable and intelligent.

Likewise, a number of methods need to be developed allowing users of virtual environments to not only perform actions effectively in a variety of different scenarios but also be able to choose from a repertoire of suitable actions. This requires adequate digital representations of human skills and also techniques to capture, interpret and deliver them by means of multimodal interfaces, robotics and virtual environments within enactive interaction paradigms.

At the low-level end of the spectrum we also aim to understand the neural basis of presence and its response. Its enhancement and its application is the fundamental object of study from many different points of view, and including visual, haptic and auditory modalities.

To participate to the Workshop, please register on line:
http://www.percro.org/registrationXVR2009/

Keynote Speakers

Salvatore Maria Aglioti, Psychology Department , Università di Roma "La Sapienza” and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma (http://w3.uniroma1.it/aglioti/) ù

Flesh made Soul: Bodies in the Brain.

Talking about the body implies talking about the very “special object” that allows a deep interconnection between the ability to have self-consciousness and the ability to experience a world of objects. My talk will be based on the studies in healthy and brain damaged subjects we performed in the past fifteen years on the neural representation of the body. I will put forward the idea that, although trivially made of flesh, blood and bones, the body can be considered the “psychic object” par excellence, which mediates and implements a variety of complex functions, ranging from the notion of self to social interactions and negotiations.

Jan Peters, Dept. Empirical Inference, Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany (http://www-clmc.usc.edu/~jrpeters/)

Towards Motor Skill Learning in Robotics.

Autonomous robots that can assist humans in situations of daily life have been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence,
and cognitive sciences. A first step towards this goal is to create robots that can learn tasks triggered by environmental context or higher level instruction. However, learning techniques have yet to live up to  this promise as only few methods manage to scale to high-dimensional manipulator or humanoid robots. In this talk, we investigate a general framework suitable for learning motor skills in robotics which is based on the principles behind many analytical robotics approaches. We propose new, task-appropriate architectures, such as the Natural Actor-Critic and the PoWER algorithm.
and cognitive sciences. A first step towards this goal is to create robots that can learn tasks triggered by environmental context or higher level instruction. However, learning techniques have yet to live up to  this promise as only few methods manage to scale to high-dimensional manipulator or humanoid robots. In this talk, we investigate a general framework suitable for learning motor skills in robotics which is based on the principles behind many analytical robotics approaches. We propose new, task-appropriate architectures, such as the Natural Actor-Critic and the PoWER algorithm.