UL IDC to host first Irish HCI meeting

The Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick will host a 1-Day Workshop on the topic of Human-Computer Interaction in Ireland (iHCI07) to be held at on May 2nd, 2007.
The purpose of this Workshop, which we hope will become an annual event, is to promote networking and collaboration among academics and practitioners in the broad area of people interacting with technology, and as such, the topic includes such areas as: usability studies, interface design and evaluation, accessibility issues, cognitive ergonomics, human factors in computer systems, computer supported cooperative work, human computer interaction, multimedia and interaction design.

Our intent with this initial meeting is to bring together researchers, practitioners and teachers interested in the field, to document past and current activities, and to setup a database of information in this area on an all-Ireland basis. To this end, this first Workshop will focus on brief presentations from all the participating groups.

We envisage that this Workshop will help provide a better profile for individuals and groups involved in the HCI area in Ireland, as currently, despite the size of our software industry, we have not yet developed as significant an impact as one might expect, given the importance of our topic.

New Shared Worlds Journal Publications to Appear

The forthcoming May issue of IEEE Computer will feature a research paper by the IDC Shared Worlds team documenting the Shannon Portal: "The Shannon Portal Installation: Interaction Design for Public Places".
Another Shared Worlds paper by Luigina Ciolfi discussing the Shannon Airport installation from the point of view of affective computing will appear in the forthcoming issue of CoDesign, and will be presented at the Affective Communication in Design conference in Leeds in June.
And more are on the way!

The IDC to be privatized - becomes independent research institute

A group of private benefactors (who would like to be anonymous) have donated an undisclosed amount to buy the entire Interaction Design Centre, its staff, faculty and students from UL, to become a fully privatized international research institute. It is believed that the amount of funding involved is at least forty-two million Euro.

One of our major discoveries that attracted the investors was a new form of computing that eventually will enable the development of computers capable of infinite improbability states. While computers up until now are based on logical gates switching between ones or zeroes (true or false), our new technology will most often use the state of “maybe”. To continue our groundbreaking work in Human-Centred Computing, it is envisaged that the emergence of femto-technology will enable us to create a pain-free diode, which is believed to be at the core of the development of humanoid robotics. Further more, the new institute’s President claims that we have a new framework for understanding the socio-technical reality that will be the foundation of the approaches to software development and communication technologies. In a comment, a spokesperson said that:

“We all know that things like email-spam and pornography has been central to the popularity of the World-Wide Web. It is now time to re-frame our thinking and look at a fundamental change in global perspectives. For example, if for each spam-message the spammer had to make a donation to a charity, or, if porn-sites changed their approach on narrative structure so that users could be enriched with an educational experience in for example anatomy and philosophy as well as looking at more evolutionary trends.”

The working title for the project is The Institute for Life, the Universe and Everything (ILUE)

Mikael invades England

Mikael delivered the keynote at the International Workshop on Interactive Sonification 2007 in York. UK.

There were many interesting papers and works-in-progress presented throughout the day, and many really good demos.
The previous day, we had a Management Committee meeting in the COST Action ConGas. Next meeting, which is the last in this action, will be in Reykjavik in May.

Mikael on Rte Radio One

Mikael was on today's Mooney Goes Wild on RTE Radio One, talking about sounds and the sounds people hate. You can listen to the clip here (MP3).

This year's CSIS Christmas Party!

This year, our head of department decided to organise a big Christmas party not only for the teaching and admin staff, but also including all the related research centers! Up to 100 people showed up at the venue, and enjoyed the night!

The result exceeded all expectations! Have a look yourselves:


Thanks to Colm for taking good quality pictures and for this nice collage! You're a pro!

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!