Human Robot Interaction

The third conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2008) was held in beautifully located Felix Meritis of Amsterdam March 12^th – 15^th. Mattias and Ylva attended a workshop on Coding Behavioral Video Data led by Professor Peter H. Kahn, Jr. from University of Washington. During the workshop the FAL-duo presented some of the gathered video from preliminary user studies with GlowBots and discussed different possibilities for coding such intricate data. The conference itself was also relatively senior dense, and with a much larger attendance rate than expected it was a given success.

First out on the video session was GlowBots – A Love Story, receiving a fair amount of applauds. In summary, the conference felt to be more tilted towards human and robot rather than interaction – leaving a lot of space open for us to explore.

Designing Interactive Systems

Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) took place in South Africa on February 25-27. Maria Håkansson and Lalya Gaye presented a full paper, Bringing Context to the Foreground: Designing for Creative Engagement in a Novel Still Camera Application, about the Context Photography project.


The closing keynote was given by Professor Bill Gaver of Goldsmith College, who soon will be coming to Sweden to act as opponent for Sara Ljungblad's Ph.D. thesis.


And of course, there were some opportunities for more relaxing activities, like a very small safari...