Positive Technology Journal

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.

First International Conference on Neuroprosthetic Devices will take place at National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan on March 19th and 20th, 2009. The mission of this newly founded conference is to foster West-East interaction and collaboration in the rapidly advancing clinical use of neuroprosthetics. The specific aim of the first conference is to expose unique technological and neurological research opportunities in Taiwan. National Chaio Tung University is one of the best universities in Taiwan and is located right next to the world-famous HsinChu Science Park hosting hundreds of biotechnology, semiconductor, and electronics companies.

The conference sessions will cover several key areas in the neuroprosthetic development, such as deep brain stimulation for treatment of Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy, devices for restoring hearing and overcoming muscle paralysis, microelectrode biocompatibility, and novel microelectrode technologies. For detailed conference program and registration information, please visit http://www.bsrc.nctu.edu.tw/ICND/.

The 14th Annual International CyberTherapy and CyberPsychology Conference (CT14) brings together researchers, clinicians, policy makers and funding agencies to share and discuss advancements in the growing discipline of CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Rehabilitation.

The focus of this conference is on the increasing use of interactive media in training, education, prevention, rehabilitation, and therapeutic interventions.Technologies featured at the conference include virtual reality simulations, videogames, wearables,  telehealth, the Internet, videoconferencing,  robotics, brain-computer interfaces, and non-invasive physiological monitoring devices.

Visit the conference website

HCI researchers, students and practitioners are invited to HCI 2008 to be hosted by Liverpool John Moores University, UK, next September (1st - 5th). Submissions are now open for the remaining categories . HCI 2008 is the 22nd running of the British HCI conference; one of Europe's largest and longest running HCI conferences. Accepted papers will be archived in the ACM Digital Library and the BCS eWiCS Library.

The tag line for 2008 is “Culture, Creativity, Interaction” reflecting the fact that in 2008 Liverpool is the European Capital of Culture. Throughout the year there will be cultural events ranging from community arts to headline events such as the Turner Prize. In the week before the conference there will be the Annual Beatles Week and immediately afterwards Liverpool will host the British Academy Festival of Science. The Biennial Festival of Contemporary Art also takes place, starting September. Our cultural theme reflects not just events in Liverpool but also recent developments in HCI where the arts and humanities offer us both new insights and new challenges. Though “culture” is not the only theme for the conference we hope to reflect the cultural events happening in the rest of the city and on Merseyside. Our hope is that culture will be a unifying theme for the various strands that form the HCI family of disciplines.

Liverpool itself has undergone a renaissance in recent decades and many of the city's projects will have reached their culmination in 2008. So as Liverpool is being re-made it may also be time to reflect on how HCI might be re-made. What new challenges do we face?  How many of our current approaches and methods meet these challenges? What has to change in HCI if we are to continue making progress? We look forward to submissions addressing new challenges and overturning accepted convention, or confirming past practice.

PRESENCE 2008
11th Annual International Workshop on Presence

Padova, Italy
October 16-18, 2008

Second Call for Papers

Submission deadline (extended): May 23, 2008

Academics and practitioners with an interest in the concept of (tele)presence are invited to submit their work
for presentation at the 11th Annual International Workshop on Presence, to be held in Padova, Italy, on
October 16-18, 2008.

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Call for Papers - Consciousness Reframed is an international research conference that was first convened in 1997, and is now in its 9th incarnation. It is a forum for transdisciplinary inquiry into art, science, technology and consciousness, drawing upon the expertise and insights of artists, architects, performers, musicians, writers, scientists, and scholars, usually from at least 20 countries. Recent past conferences were convened in Beijing and Perth, Western Australia. This year, the conference will be held on the main campus of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. The conference will include researchers associated with the Planetary Collegium, which has its CAiiA- hub at Plymouth and nodes at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arte, Milan, and the Zurcher Hochschule der Kunste, Zurich.

Call for Papers: New Realities: Being Syncretic - We cordially invite submissions from artists, theorists and researchers engaged in exploring the most urgent issues in the realm of hybrid inquiries into the fields of art, science, technology and society through theory and practice alike. We specifically encourage submissions that re-frame the concept of innovation in its relationship to progress and change within the context of perception and its transformation.

The Conference will be accompanied by a Book of Abstracts and the Conference Proceedings including full papers and a DVD, due to be released autumn 2008 by the renowned scientific publisher SpringerWienNewYork.

From Creative Technology Network website  

6 September 2007

Cross-sector seminar/workshop to generate new ideas for products, services and collaborations in the interactive arena

2pm - 5.30pm followed by drinks| Venue: Watershed, Bristol | 

From alternative reality games to located mediascapes, the internet offers a wealth of opportunity for collaboration around gaming and interactive experiences, and with its blend of digital creatives and highly skilled computer programmers, Bristol should be in a unique position to ride and exploit this wave.

Recent research commissioned by South West Screen highlights the significant number of SMEs working in disciplines like animation, education, interactive media and post-production who are already supporting the games industry. How do we network these producers and create opportunities to engage with emerging disciplines such as mobile gaming, pervasive media and serious games?

Showcasing a diverse array of Bristol based talent, this afternoon seminar/workshop will bring together experts and professionals from a mix of disciplines to explore innovation, content distribution and opportunities for collaboration in gaming and virtual worlds.