31 May 2012

ACE 2012: 9th Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology Conference incorporating DIMEA 2012

posted in: Uncategorized |

ACE 2012: 9th Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology Conference incorporating DIMEA 2012 (7th Digital Interactive Media Entertainment and Arts Conference)

Venue: Kathmandu, Nepal, 5-7 November, 2012
http://www.ace2012.info/

Submit your work here: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ace2012-nepal
ACE 2012 is pleased to announce a special arrangement for publication of all conference papers (and other categories). In the theme of “entertaining the whole world” all papers will be published in the ACM Computers in Entertainment (CiE) website to promote free knowledge dissemination and interactive comments from peers around the world. Although authors will need to sign a copyright form with ACM, the papers will be FREE for download without charge to anyone in the world. Please see the CiE website at http://cie.acm.org/
IMPORTANT DATES
Papers Submission Due: 15 June 2012 (extended)
Workshop Proposals Due: 15 June 2012 (extended)
Art and Culture Track Submission Due: 1 July 2012
Creative Showcases (Demos) Submissions Due: 1 July 2012
Poster Papers: 15 July 2012

ACE has become the leading scientific forum for dissemination of cutting-edge research results in the area of entertainment computing. Interactive entertainment is one of the most vibrant areas of interest in modern society and is amongst the fastest growing industries in the world. ACE 2012 will bring together leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present their innovative work and discuss all aspects and challenges of interactive entertainment technology, in an exciting, cultural, and stimulating environment.

ACE is by nature a multi-disciplinary conference, therefore attracting people across a wide spectrum of interests and disciplines including computer science, design, arts, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and marketing. The main goal of ACE is to stimulate discussion in the development of new and compelling entertainment computing and interactive art concepts and applications. All ACE participants are encouraged to present work they believe will shape the future, going beyond the established paradigms, and focusing on all areas related to interactive entertainment.

The theme of ACE 2012 is “Entertaining the Whole World” Kathmandu in Nepal “The Roof of the World” has been chosen as venue. In line with this theme ACE 2012 will also emphasize the use of easily available technology. Technology for entertainment design is getting cheap or even extremely cheap. Designing interactive entertainment with commercial off the shelf technology (cheap sensors, Kinect, Arduino, etc.) is becoming regular business. How can we use this development to invent yet more new ways of harnessing the entertainment power of creating? Can we convert consumers of entertainment into creators of entertainment, where the process of creating is maybe as important than the resulting product? Also in line with the theme of this year’s conference there will be a special track on “Art and Culture” for which we are inviting position papers, games or other forms of entertainment, and interactive works of art showcasing the diversity of art and culture found in today’s digital artifacts. For details about this track see the ACE 2012 website.

ACE 2012 TOPICS
Aesthetics
Affective Computing
Animation Techniques
Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality
Avatars and Autonomous Characters
Cultural Computing
Cultural Differences and Game Design
Digital Broadcasting/Podcasting
Educational and Fitness Games
Emerging World Entertainment Creation
Emerging World Youth Usage of Entertainment
Emerging World Entertainment Products
Entertainment Design Theory
Ethics and Games
Exertion Games
Interaction and Experience Design
Funology
Game Design, Programming and Production
Human-Robot Interaction
Children-Computer Interaction
Location-Based Entertainment
Mobile and Ubiquitous Entertainment
Museum and Cultural Heritage Applications
Interactive Storytelling
Persuasive Entertainment
Pervasive and Online Games
Serious Games for Cultural Awareness
Smart Gadgets and Toys
Social Impact
Sound and Music Design
Tangible Interfaces
Urban Games
Usability and Playability
User-Centred Design
Visual Arts

To encourage presentation of such multi-disciplinary work, we invite submissions that fall into the following tracks:

– Papers
Papers present original unpublished work in technical, design, and theory or social aspects of interactive entertainment. We especially welcome papers that relate to this year’s conference theme ?Entertaining the Whole World?E Submissions to this track should not exceed 8 pages in ACM format.

– Art and Culture
Position papers, games or other forms of entertainment, and interactive works of art showcasing the diversity of art and culture found in today’s digital artifacts. Contributions are encouraged from researchers, artists, game designers, practitioners and everyone else sharing the common goal of creating entertainment for the world.
For more information about this track visit the ACE 2012 webpages.

– Creative Showcase and Interactive Art
The Creative Showcases Demonstrations track is open to a large variety of submissions including, but not limited to technical demonstrations of prototype technologies of advanced entertainment technology, all varieties of video and computer games, web and mobile-based computer entertainment, audio, visual and other sensory forms of digital interaction. Submissions to this track should not exceed 2 pages in ACM format.
For more information about this track visit the ACE 2012 webpages.

– Posters
Provides researchers with an opportunity to present their preliminary or exploratory work, smaller projects or research findings that are not yet suitable for a regular paper, but nonetheless are merit of discussion from an open forum. Submissions to this track should not exceed 2 pages in ACM format.
For more information about this track visit the ACE 2012 webpages.

– Workshops
Conference workshops typically provide valuable in-depth discussions of specific topics in computer entertainment technology. If you are working in an emerging area in entertainment computing, please consider organizing a workshop. They are an opportunity to move a new field forward and build a community. These workshops may consist of both invited and contributed papers that will highlight exciting new developments and currents trends of research.
Papers, Art and Culture contributions, posters and Creative Showcase abstracts will appear in the ACE 2011 Digital Proceedings. Selection of papers will appear in special issues of Computers in Entertainment (ACM), and International Journal of Arts and Technology (Inderscience).

Awards:
Best papers and creative showcases, including the Art and Culture track, will be selected based on a jury of well respected pioneers in the field attending the conference. We will honour the authors of these publications by presenting awards including:
* Paper award categories: Gold, Silver, and Bronze.
* Creative showcase award categories: Gold, Silver, and Bronze

NOTIFICATION DATES
Workshops: 30 June 2012
Papers: 15 August 2012
Posters: 15 August 2012
Creative Show Cases: 15 August 2012
Art and Culture track: 15 August 2012

CAMERA-READY DATES
Papers: 9 September 2012
Creative Show Cases: 9 September 2012
Art and Culture track: 9 September 2012
Posters: 9 September 2012

GENERAL CHAIRS
Aashmi Rajya Lakshmi Rana (Kathmandu, Nepal)
Ichiya Nakamura (Keio University, Yokohama-city, Japan)

PROGRAM CHAIR
Anton Nijholt (University of Twente, Netherlands)
Email: anijholt@cs.utwente.nl
PROGRAM CO-CHAIR
Teresa Romao (CITI, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)

SOCIAL MEDIA and POSTER CHAIR
Andres Lucero (Nokia Research center, Tampere, Finland)

ORGANIZING CHAIRS
Aashmi Rajya Lakshmi Rana (Kathmandu, Nepal)
Roshan Chamling Rai (Kathmandu, Nepal)
Ajith Perakum Madurapperuma (Keio-NUS CUTE Center, Singapore)

CREATIVE SHOWCASES CHAIRS
Dennis Reidsma (University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands)
Shoichi Hasegawa (The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan)

ART & CULTURE TRACK CHAIR
Guenter Wallner (University of Applied Arts, Vienna)
WORKSHOPS CHAIR
Fernando Birra (CITI, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)

ACE 2012 home page http://www.ace2012.info/
Follow us on Twitter @acedimea
Join us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/advances.in.computer.entertainment
For paper submission questions or help please contact submit@ace2012.info
For general questions about ACE 2012 please contact info@ace2012.info
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29 May 2012

Neurons have been found in the human heart.

posted in: Keynote Speeches and Talks |

In the Ogilvy FUEL conference there was a brilliant talk by Tam Khai Meng called Global Dreams where he showed very creative works in advertising worldwide. What I was amazed is many brilliant works from places I never think of for creativity such as Africa and South America.
At the end of the talk he showed a latest work which showed neurons have been found in the human heart. His point was to follow the human heart. But for me it was exciting further evidence that thinking and mind is a deep connection between brain and mind and that we need to trigger all of our senses for effective creativity and learning.

28 May 2012

Mind blowing discussion with brilliant mind Rory Sutherland on creativity and logic

posted in: Uncategorized |

Today I had the chance to have a deep discussion with Rory Sutherland who is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy about logic and creativity. He gave an excellent talk about behavioural economics at the Ögilvy FUEL event. In his talk he gave many examples of how logic is placed at highest priority in our society but in the real world logic can only answer a small subset of problems and creativity is required to find solutions. As an engineer I wanted to find out what he thought we could solve by logic. Since engineers are taught in logic. After a long discussion it seems that problems that fall under the category of newtonian physics can be solved by logic. But almost all problems in life involve non linearity and humans and therefore we need a combination of creativity and logic. A good example is someone turning the screw on your airplane wheels. We don’t need (or want) creativity in that case because it has a well proven logical solution, and following that logic is required for the system to work (and not crash the plane). But even in this case creativity should be applied at a META level. For example, maybe some other way of turning the screw is more efficient. But for most systems which are non newtonian and involve humans we need creativity. For example the air France crash where a logical control design didn’t take into account an opposite control signal to logical controller and the plane crashed. Or something simple like the problem that a school had that the corridors were too crowded. The logic solution will analyze increase corridor width etc. The creative solution is to stagger class times so all the students are not walking at the same time.
Rory recommended to read the Nobel Prize winning acceptance speech on The limits of information. It is at this link http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html
Rory said actually engineers are very good at understanding the limits of information. Because we have to deal with complex and human systems (although I think a lot of academic engineering ignores this and is in its own unreal world). He said the worst is finance people who want to reduce everything to numbers.
I was deeply impressed with the brilliant mind of Rory Sutherland. It really impacts the way I will look at the world.

28 May 2012

Augmented Reality Gurus

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Augmented Reality Gurus. I had the pleasure to have dinner with my good friends and gurus of augmented reality, Mark Billinghurst, Ron Azuma, Steven Feiner, amongst others. What I remembered was a similar dinner about 10 years ago in los Angeles at a SIGGRAPH. I noticed we are all grayer and fatter (of course me included). However one thing was the same. We were all like youngsters with our “geeky” discussions on technology and augmented reality. Steven Feiner showed a new AR glass he is making in the lab. We talked about how the cardboard was etched using a 3D printer. Mark told me about his new app which you can view the heritage buildings in Christchurch. I talked about tasting your food digitally. Yet somehow I felt no technology could ever replace such a real world dinner with old friends.

28 May 2012

Ogilvy FUEL in Kyoto

posted in: Keynote Speeches and Talks |

Ogilvy is one of the world’s largest advertising companies in the world. It is a truly global company. For the first time in seven years they are having an internal conference for their top global executives and it is in Kyoto. About 4 or 5 people have been asked to come to give talks and workshops. I have been asked to give an Innovation workshop. I will give it four times in a row. My plan is to give a short talk on methods to be creative, and then we will do a short workshop in groups. I have set up a workshop which is based on imagining you are a ninja from 17th century transported to 21st century. Using only materials available in 17th century you have to find a creative solution to recovering an ancient scroll from the Kyoto national museum. Then as a group we will story tell our idea and invention. The main message is to be creative use all parts of your senses and brain. Think, sketch, draw, make, communicate, and iterate.

So it is mainly Ogilvy company executives, and it is very interesting to be part of this company event. The conference is very powerful, at the opening, CEO Paul Heath said the aim is for the company staff to be the best in the whole world. That vision is really inspiring and that is the kind of vision I always want to be part of. Ogilvy is all about creativity. They want to be the best storytellers, natural collaborators, and to be effective in delivery. I agree with this. Innovation is about creative ideas. But without collaborating and making a real world output, it is simple an idea. We need to turn creative ideas into reality.

23 May 2012

Adrian David Cheok to speak at Seoul Digital Forum 2012

posted in: Keynote Speeches and Talks |

Adrian David Cheok to speak at Seoul Digital Forum 2012

Mixed Reality: Beyond the Real-Virtual Dichotomy, Expanding Human Potentials 2012-05-23

Visionary : Adrian D. CHEOK [Professor, Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University / Director, Mixed Reality Lab, National University of Singapore], Howard CHARNEY [Senior Vice President, Office of the President, Cisco], Genevieve BELL [Director, Interactions and Experience Research, Intel Labs, INTEL] Symposiarch : WOO Woontack [Professor, Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST]

The scope and reach of human influence is being extended. The new generation of mixed reality technologies is merging the real and the virtual, making possible simultaneous interactions between the two worlds. With its limitations in interface design and accessibility being mitigated, mixed reality is making tangible contributions to expanding the human potential in an increasing number of practical fields including healthcare, education, training and media by lowering spatiotemporal barriers. With the real and the virtual coming to coexist and be increasingly interfused, what kinds of benefits and obstacles lie in store for us?

(Source: http://www.seouldigitalforum.org/)
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