Winter Graduation 2006

It's that happy time of the year - again. We had Nicola getting her M.Sc. by research and Andy his Ph.D.

The Interactive Media class received their awards, and so did the Music Technology class. We wish you all the very best!

IDC and MetaMusic in the media

This week, there has been excellent media coverage of the IDC MetaMusic Project, led by Mikael Fernstrom.
The project featured in the RTE program This Note's For You, as well as in the Irish Times.
The video clip can be seen online on the RTE website.

It's all song and dance

We've had a couple of interesting visitors in the IDC over the last few days. First, Todd Winkler, and we're working on the Celeritas project with Tyndall, and possible continuation. Next we had Gianpaolo Evangelista, discussing possible FP7 project on sound, haptics and interaction.

Revving up for ecscw 2007

We'll be hosting ecscw 2007 here in Limerick next year! The website and blogs are now live, and the call for paper has been presented at the recent cscw06 conference in Banff, where Anders was the IDC official representative. The conference chairs will be Liam Bannon, IDC director and Ina Wagner from the Technical University of Vienna. The program chairs are Richard Harper and Carl Gutwin.
Preparations are well underway here in Limerick. The conference venue, the Limerick Hilton, is being built and we got a chance to visit it last night! After donning hard hats, size 8 boots and high-viz vests we were shown around by Paul, the site manager, and Hilary, the hotel sales manager. Of course, it's still a messy buidling site, but it shows great potential, especially the seventh floor, completely dedicated to business meetings, with fantastic views of the river and the city...The workshops will have o be very interesting to not let people getting distracted by the view!!!

The Portal Experience Part II

Daniela Petrelli visiting the IDC

Daniela Petrelli from the University of Sheffield is visiting the IDC as part of the "Memoir" Project.
At Sheffield, Daniela teaches electronic publishing, digital multimedia and web-design.
Her current research interests are:
- information access, including multilingual (searching information in many languages) and multimedia (particularly historical archives of images and videos);
- information and knowledge management for sharing in manufacturing (Rolls Royce jet engine design, building and worldwide maintenance);
- personal digital memories.

Daniela moved to the UK in 2000 and previously I was a researcher at IRST in Trento, Italy where she did research on adaptive and mobile guides for museums, natural-language based interaction, intelligent interface interaction.
In a far past (1990-1993) she was at the Italian Telecon Research centre and worked on CSCW and teleconferencing systems mainly doing interface design and development.

The Memoir project will last for 4 years and is about the capturing, storage, organization, retrieval and sharing of multimedia personal memories. Personal memories are intended at large: email, documents (word, excel, powerpoint), messages on the phone, personal pictures, videos etc. Accessing means not today but in 10, 20 or more years time.
Several people are involved:
- 4 academics from the University of Sheffield (Daniela is one of those)
- 3 research associates (just recruited, 1 HCI, 1 Video/Image, 1 IR)
- 3 senior visiting fellows for 3 months on: ethics of memories, psychology of memories, social history.

Daniela's interest in the project is about sharing memories in a family context across different generations (children, parents, grandparents but siblings and cousins are welcome too ;-)
The goal is to design a something to facilitate the capturing composition and sharing of the memories across generations of tightly connected people.

VIP visit to IDC

Today, Jim and Margo Keyes visited the Interaction Design Centre at UL. They enjoyed a number of our demos, from JJ's sound sculpture, MetaMusic, Motes and the DBMT haptics.

MetaMusic (a.k.a. Abaltat) handover

For the past two years, a dedicated team of programmers and computer musicologists in the Interaction Design Centre in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick have been working on developing a novel software package. The idea was to create software that automatically can compose music to video clips, such as television advertisements promos and documentaries, that would otherwise cost producers a lot in terms of music royalties.

The project's team-leader Mikael Fernström, the co-originator of the project and well-known computer-music composer, commented that “I’ve been working for so many years on finding new kinds of music by means of computing, but when the Abaltat team approached us as and asked if we could do popular music, we said Why Not!“

The resulting software prototype is now being transferred to an exciting new Irish start-up company, Meiticheol Teoranta, trading as Abaltat. Abaltat is located in Spiddal, Co. Galway. The development was sponsored by Enterprise Ireland’s Innovation Partnership programme. Abaltat is also supported by Údarás na Gaeilge, The Western Development Commission and Enterprise Equity Investment Fund.

At the recent IBC trade show in Amsterdam, Abaltat previewed AbaltatMuse. The software and was nominated for the prestigious IABM Peter Wayne Award. The product was also selected as pick of the show by Broadcast Engineering magazine and has been shortlisted by TVB Europe for their IBC awards to be announced in October

Mr Justin McCarthy, one of Ireland’s most well-known video editors and Technical Director of the company said "Based on our market research and the response at the international IBC trade show, we are confident that we have a worldwide success on our hands. The future of broadcasting includes the ability to deliver programming over all media including the web. The issue of music royalties is becoming more and more of a hinderance. Our software solves this problem giving editors an exciting and creative solution. Editors can now control how the music is written, using an editing interface.

The television world will never sound the same...

Special thanks to Eoin, Ian, Tony and Brian who have worked so hard, for so long, on delivering this vision. We'll do it again, next week ;-)

Good Luck Steve!

After years of service, Stephen has left the IDC for greener pastures!
Here he is pictured at his going away party, already scared by what awaits him...
Good Luck Steve, and thanks for all your work with us!

Interactive Media and Music Technology 2006

It's that happy time of the year. I-media and MusTechs are finalising their projects. We're all hoping that they'll do really well, and make us proud in the DAWN2006 show.

Limerick Milkmarket

So, our next design is Limerick Milkmarket. Why the hell am I writing this, it should be Parag! Anyhow, we've created an on-line cookbook.
We have spread some postcards to get people to send us their recipes. Hopefully we'll get some healthy suggestions.

More on Shannon Portal

A QuickTimeVR panorama of the portal.

The Portal Experience

Here's the most relevant article written on the Portal in the past couple of weeks. It appeared in the Irish Independent.
Now that the Portal's exhibition is nearly over, a brief overview of people's interactions with it can be seen here.
The images "donated" by people to the Portal Gallery can be seen here.

The Portal Up and Running at Shannon Airport

The Portal is finally up and running in the transit lounge of Shannon Airport. A lot of interesting interactions around it and very positive feedback so far!

Well Done Italy!

Portal getting ready for Shannon Airport

So, this is it. On Tuesday, the contraptions we've built will move to Shannon. As the core team is now quite [too] small, we will probably ask all IDC:ers to help out at some stage.

ICAD2006

Last week, Cyberviking and Braz were at ICAD2006 in London. Apart from presenting our paper, this year's competitive activity was to sonify a number of concepts:

• Communism


• Red


• Drama


• Diversity


• A Pint


• A Dragon


• C'mon England

The results of Group I can be heard here.

NomadS Seminar: Supporting Mobile Work: Approaches to designing technology

On Thursday, MAy 25th, the NomadS project hosted an open seminar: "Supporting Mobile Work: Approaches to designing technology". The seminar was aimed at discussing how the design of novel technological tools could improve the lives of "nomadic" workers. The seminar was sponsored by the NomadS through its funding bodies, Science Foundation Ireland and IRCSET. The seminar saw presentations of the work conducted on NomadS, and the participation of an invited speaker: Dr. Monika Buscher, University of Lancaster (UK).

Monika is an ethnomethodologist, ethnographer and designer interested in the study of people's practical action and the design of innovative technologies. She works with landscape architects, health professionals, patients, software designers, industrial designers, and sociologists, currently in a project called PalCom, which is part of the EU’s 6th Framework Programme.

Monika's talk was entitled "Extreme nomads: Mobility and embodied conduct in emergency teamwork".
Emergency situations demand fast, effective creation/preparation/maintenance of many different work places and connecting routes under often extremely chaotic conditions. It requires collaboration between diverse actors. Police, fire services, and medical personnel need to secure the scene, create access routes and ensure they are kept free, categorise, treat and transport victims, handle hazardous materials or deal with contamination, and coordinate work with emergency service personnel in emergency vehicles, dispatch centres, and hospitals. Communication is crucial, but often difficult under immense time pressure, in extremely complex and often dangerous settings. Embodied conduct plays a crucial role for communication and the coordination of mobility and the creation/preparation/maintenance of workplaces and routes. In this paper I discuss ethnographic observations from training exercises for major incidents and some prototypes for technological support for communication and coordination in emergency situations with a focus on the role of embodied conduct.

Thanks to all who participated!

Change

It's been a good day. Interesting seminar from Nomands project.
We all need to start to prepare [realise] that the IDC this autumn will be a different place, as almost half of the postgrads finish or bugger off. My ultimate fear is that I'll be the only techie left. I'll have nobody to talk to [or few].
Perhaps I should get a real job and develop Irish Homeland Security ;-)

Celeritas

This past week we had a hack-fest. Tyndall's latest motes with inertial measurement units were tested together with MAX/MSP for the purpose of creating the Celeritas composition.

Todd, Cian, Cindy, Andy

Steve, Giuseppe, Cindy

Mike 30

Great party! Good fun!

IDC Poll 25 January 2006: Movies and Celebrities

Looks like the IDC people are up there with A-B-C and D list celebrities, and have featured in a number of movies!

Appearances of IDC folks can be found in "Braveheart", "Michael Collins" (which also features Daniel's coat), and "a low-budget movie while Summering in the Hamptons in 1998". The wonderful walking skills of IDC people were also put to use in "walking past in the background" scenes in two German films (unknown titles) in Berlin 2000, and in a "people strolling down the street" scene for "Law & Order" in 2005.

Besides the silver screen and TV appearances, the world of theatre has been invaded by an IDC presence. Dr. Gabriela Avram recounts: " I had a part in a theater play when I was 6. I played about 30 times on a real stage (Timisoara National Theatre), with top class actors, in an excellent play. I was impersonating the daughter of a famous Romanian writer, and I was chosen not because I was cute or smart, but because I had the same name as hers!"

As for celebrity sightings, the juicy list includes: Madonna, Mel Gibson, Nicky from Westlife (met by Darragh at one of their concerts), Ian Dempsey, Alan Rickman, Bertie, Prince Albert (ask Tony), Thandie Newton (ER, "Crash", "Mission: Impossible II"), Jewel Staite (Kaylee from Firefly/Serenity), Faye Dunaway (Gabriela thinks it was her) Bill Gaver, Liam Bannon and Mikael Fernström (met by several IDC members in a number of occasions).