Successful Ph.D. defence

On April 25, Sara Ljungblad defended her Ph.D. thesis Beyond Users at Stockholm University. The opponent was Professor Bill Gaver from Goldsmith college, and the evaluation committee included Jonas Löwgren (Malmö University), Annika Waern (Mobile Life, Stockholm University) and Lisbeth Svengren-Holm (Stockholm University School of Business). The thesis goes beyond a user-centred design approach to explore potential future applications and modes of interaction, including digital photogaraphy, robots and tangible interaction. Sara is currently an intern at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and will join the LIREC project at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science later in the year.

CHI 2008

The annual ACM SIGCHI conference on human-computer interaction, CHI 2008, took place in Florence, Italy. FAL's Mattias Jacobsson came back briefly from his stint in Idaho to present a note on the see-Puck, the display that was used to implement the GlowBots (see picture below). Co-author Lars Erik Holmquist also attended, as did Ylva Fernaeus (but only for the parties!) As usual, the technical program was packed and the social program even more exhausting. See you in Boston in 2009!

Being Human book launch

Microsoft Research have produced a new book, Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in
the Year 2020. It was the result of a workshop on the future of HCI last year, and FAL's Lars Erik Holmquist is one of the contributors. The book was launched at an event in London on April 2. One of several media attending and reporting from the launch was BBC - you can read their report and watch some video online.

New video featuring GlowBots

New Scientist have just published a video called The rise of the emotional robot which features the GlowBots from the Future Applications lab - chack it out from YouTube, below, or on the magazine's video page!