Mattias and Ylva visited KTH on the 26th of May for a presentation of Nao - a small humanoid robot developed by a french company - Aldebaran Robotics. Nao will for instance replace Sony's canine robot Aibo as a standard platform for RoboCup and is at the same time very open source oriented. Also - if you order four of them, you get the fifth for free!

Working and Living with Robots

Ylva and Mattias participated in a two days workshop at ABB in Oslo, May 14-15.
Apart from learning a lot about different kinds of robots, we also presented some of the results in LIREC, had a full day of brainstorming on novel interaction styles, and tried out two ways of programming industrial robots (during which Mattias managed to prove the fundamental difference between simulation and reality...). Very fun!

On the move – sharing music, inspiration and fun

Maria Håkansson has been invited to contribute with a text about Push!Music and mobile music sharing in issue #22 "Seizing the moment" of Vodafone receiver. Read it here!

Successful PhD defence

On February 26, Maria Håkansson successfully defended her PhD thesis "Playing with Context: Explicit and Implicit Interaction in Mobile Media Applications" in Man-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University.

Opponent was Assistant Professor Eric Paulos from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. The evaluation committee members were Professor Jonas Löwgren, Interaction Design, Malmö University; Docent Annika Waern, Mobile Life Centre/Stockholm University; and Professor Árni Sverrisson, Sociology, Stockholm University.

Maria is currently working at SICS and in the Mobile Life Centre.