UbiComp closing panel

Lars Erik Holmquist will take part in the closing panel at UbiComp 2008 in South Korea. The topic of the panel is the past, present, and future of ubicomp as a field, a research area, a technology direction and as a conference. See you in Seoul!

Demo at UbiComp in Seoul

Mattias Rost, together with Fredrik Bergstrand, will give a demo of a new mobile application called Columbus at UbiComp 2008 in Seoul, South Korea. Columbus is an application for exploring the world around you through photos. Going to a physical location will enable you to see photos taken at this location, while photos at other locations are not accessible until the location is visited.

Journal paper

Mattias, Ylva and Lars Erik recently got a paper published in a Special Issue on Human Interaction with Domestic Robots for the Journal of Physical Agents. The paper details the whole development of GlowBots as well as a preliminary user-study and can be downloaded here.

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!