Photography study at CHI 2009

Sara Ljungblad will present the paper Passive Photography from a Creative Perspective: "If I would just shoot the same thing for seven days, it's like... What's the point?" at CHI 2009, the annual ACM SIGCHI conference on Computer-Human Interaction. The paper describes a study of Sensecam, a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention. The paper is based on work conducted with Richard Harper at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. The CHI conference will be held in Boston, USA, on April 4-9, 2009.

Autonomous Wallpaper at Smart Space

On Dec 11 Autonomous Wallpaper was shown as a demo at Smart Space by Heidi Harman in Herning, Denmark. This one day conference focused on smart materials, smart living and smart green, and attracted an audience consisting of architects, designers and researchers. Autonomous wallpaper exemplifies a future wallpaper that creates a dynamic flower pattern from images that are sent by bluetooth (e.g. images taken and sent by a mobile phone). Currently, this is installed as a projection on a wall, complemented with an ultrasonic sender. This way, the users can physically point to the wall to "place" one or several flowers that will grow from their picture.

Mobile Life in TechCrunch and CrunchGear!

John Biggs from leading technology blog CrunchGear visited the Mobile Life Centre in Kista and reported from our current research! Each article contains a video of the demonstrations. Some of the news also made it to partner site TechCrunch.

The featured systems included:

GeoChatting application lets you pick a friend in your general area

GlowBots: Robots that learn what you like

Mobile Life Subway Demo: Meet me on the 6

Affective Diary: Your computer knows when you're blue

Workshop at CSCW

Mattias Rost will participate in the workshop: Beyond the Laboratory: Supporting Authentic Collaboration with Multiple Displays, at this years CSCW conference in San Diego. The workshop is on Saturday and he will attend the rest of the conference starting on monday.

Robot Workshop at NordiCHI'08

Ylva, Mattias and Sara, together with Alex Taylor from Microsoft Research, UK are arranging a robot workshop at NordiCHI'08 on the 19th of October. The workshop will discuss the intersection between HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and Human Robot Interaction (HRI). The participants are an interesting mix of designers, robot researchers, and HCI people... and we look forward to many interesting discussions!

See you in Lund!

The workshop:

http://www.sics.se/~majac/workshop/

The NordiCHI conference:

http://www.nordichi2008.org/

ArtBots

Mattias, Sara and Ylva participated in this years ArtBots exhibition in Dublin. On site we held interviews with all the artists on their perspectives on working with robotics materials and their thoughts on ethical issues related to robotics. We also kept a small area open for gallery visitors to reflect upon questions like "Why should we be afraid of robots?" and "Why do we love robots?" and put them up on a wall as post-its, for other visitors to view.

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!