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...

Today two of our B.Sc thesis students - Johan Sundin and Victor Luque successfully presented their project entitled "Autonomous RFID Robot With Behavior Combination". This is part of the ongoing ActDresses project where we currently are implementing research prototypes to demonstrate how dressing things up and accessorizing can be thought of as a way for doing tangible programming. The robot is built from scratch and features omni-directional wheels, a rotating IR-detector and an RFID-reader that can read multiple tags simultaneously.

Push!Music on Video

Push!Music is a mobile music sharing application that uses ad-hoc wireless networking to allow co-located people to share music between each other. This can be done in two ways. First, songs can autonomously copy and send themselves to another player based on similar music listening histories. Second, users can personally recommend songs to others simply by sending them. The Push!Music project was part of the European Union project ECAgents, and has been covered in e.g. a demonstration at UbiComp 2005, and a paper at ECSCW 2007.

Watch the video below where Maria Håkansson and Mattias Rost demonstrates Push!Music!

New Video: Push!Photo

Push!Photo is a mobile photo sharing application. It runs on wireless handheld computers, and photos can be made public and immediately accessed by anyone nearby. The application also automatically searches for photos on nearby devices to find interesting and relevant photos based on the context and history of the users. Push!Photo shows how it is possible to share digital photos in a mobile setting just as easily as paper photos. The Push!Photo project was part of the European Union project ECAgents. It was first demonstrated at UbiComp 2006.

Below, watch as Mattias Rost gives a demonstration of Push!Photo!