LIREC project in New Scientist - Learning to love to hate robots

Maria Håkansson has been interviewed in New Scientist about our long-term study of the robotic toy dinosaur Pleo in the homes of families. Read the article here!

SIGGRAPH Asia in Yokohama

Lars Erik Holmquist chairs the Emerging Technologies section of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, in Yokohama, Japan. In Emerging Technologies, attendees experience works that show how computer graphics and interactive techniques are evolving to adapt to new technical, social, and environmental conditions. We collaborated with Södertörn University to produce a teaser video for the exhibition:

Maria receives grant from Nokia Research

Maria Håkansson has received a personal grant from Nokia Research Center Helsinki to do a user study of location-based services from a non-urban perspective! The project is planned for January-March 2010.

Rob Tieben working on ActDresses

Rob Tieben is working since september on the actDresses project: changing the appearance of robots in order to change their behaviour. Feed-back and feed-forward at the same time, incorporated in tags, wearables, or perhaps even robot clothes.
Rob is a student from the University of Technology Eindhoven, he is with us for 3 months and he is sharing his thoughts and ideas about the project on this blog

Henriette Cramer joins as a Postdoc at FAL

Henriette Cramer is a new ERCIM postdoctoral fellow at SICS and the Mobile Life Centre.

Henriette's done her PhD-research at the University of Amsterdam, where she focused on user interaction with autonomous and adaptive systems. Her experiments and user studies looked at people's reactions and trust when they interact with systems that appear to take their own decisions (e.g. spam filters, on-screen art recommenders, social robots). She's been looking at themes such as system autonomy vs. user control, transparency and systems' social behaviours such as proactivity, touch and empathy. Her work shows that people can show quite interesting unanticipated behaviour based on their perceptions and understanding of a system. She's also shown that 'features' suggested in the literature such as social behaviour and explanations for results cannot be directly applied in every situation.

More on her blog.

Book Release!

On July 17th the book titled Multiplatform E-Learning Systems and Technologies: Mobile Devices for Ubiquitous ICT-Based Education will be released. The book features the chapter Tools For Students Doing Mobile Fieldwork which is written by Mattias Rost, and Lars Erik Holmquist.

Here's the abstract of the chapter:

Students are not always sitting at their desk when learning new things – they are also out in the world. We present a set of tools we developed to support groups of students who are doing field studies. Initially, we gave the students a wiki for gathering field notes and their group work material. Based on observations on how they used it and collaborated, we developed additional tools to run along with the wiki. These include a mobile application for capturing data (photo, video, audio, and text) and automatically uploading to the wiki, and a set of web tools which run on top of the wiki for increasing the awareness between students, and for browsing the captured data. We describe the implementation of these tools and report on the experience from having students using them on their own equipment during the course.

You may order the book here.

Tangible and Embodied Interaction @ Liseberg

FAL had an internal conference in Göteborg this Tuesday, which we spent at the Lindholmen area, where the Viktoria Institute is located. In the evening, we visited the Liseberg amusement park to experience some intense interactions...