Internship at Ugobe

Next week Mattias Jacobsson will travel to Boise, Idaho to do an internship at Ugobe Labs. The people at Ugobe have created an innovative atmosphere, developing technology that take robotics to the next level, where sustained interaction with artificial creatures would actually be realized for the first time. Their first product - Pleo, was just hatched before Christmas, and has very reasonable price-tag.
Mattias will work on making robotics more appealing from a community perspective by working close with their researchers and look at issues concerning sustainable interaction. He will also explore the middle ground between entertainment robotics and mobile technology.
The internship is sponsored by a personal mobility grant from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.

New member of FAL

Ylva Ferneaus has just started working at the Future Applications Lab! She received her Ph.D. degree from the department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University in March 2007. The title of her thesis was Let’s make a digital patchwork, and it explored social, bodily and cultural forms of computer programming. At FAL, she will work in the European projects ECAgents - Embodied Communicating Agents and LIREC - Living with Interactive Companions, where she will explore novel robot technologies, with special focus on qualities that people are attracted by, and how these could be further addressed in research.

New intern

Nicolas Belloni is a new intern at the Future Applications Lab, who will be located at the Mobile Life Center in Kista. Nicolas is in his last year at a school of engineering called CPE Lyon (diploma equivalent to a M.Sc. in Electronics, Informatics and Telecommunications) in Lyon, France. For the last 5 months he has been an Erasmus exchange student at KTH in Stockholm, where he discovered the Mobile Life Centre. He will be doing his last internship (equivalent to a Master Thesis) on the Mobile 2.0 project for 6 months. Taking as a starting point several earlier projects about social mobile applications, including the Hummingbird and Push!Music, he will focus on how to combine social awareness and positioning in specific contexts like public transportation.

Acceptance at WMUTE 2008

Tools for Students Doing Mobile Fieldwork, by Mattias Rost and Lars Erik Holmquist got accepted for WMUTE 2008, being held in Beijing, China, 23-26 of March. The work presented describes three tools designed for students learning ethnography, and has been conducted within the iDeas project.