Workshop at NordiCHI

Ylva, Sara and Mattias, together with Alex Taylor from Microsoft Research, will host a workshop at NordiCHI, on the theme of human-robot interaction and interaction design. The workshop will broadly aim to examine the intersections between HCI and HRI and how the two fields might learn from one another. Read more about the workshop call here.

Science Café

Gullan and Gulle are two new Pleo robot FAL-members that accompanied Ylva Fernaeus and Mattias Jacobsson at an event at Stockholms Kulturhus - LAVA, sponsored by Sveriges Ingenjörer. High school students had the opportunity to sit down, have a “fika” and talk informally with the robot researchers to get insights into the field and ask questions during a couple of Science Café sessions. Our guest performance was very much appreciated and we hope that we managed to inspire a new generation of engineers and researchers.

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!

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.