Archive for the 'People' Category

Social Computing by Tom Erickson

Published on 11/10/2011 in People and References. Closed Tags: , .

An autoritative overview of Social computing and its relation to social media:

As humans we are fundamentally social creatures. For most people an ordinary day is filled with social interaction. We converse with our family and friends. We talk with our co-workers as we carry out our work. We engage in routine exchanges with familiar strangers at the bus stop and in the grocery store. This social interaction is not just talk: we make eye contact, nod our heads, wave our hands, and adjust our positions. Not only are we busy interacting, we are also remarkably sensitive to the behaviors of those around us. Our world is filled with social cues that provide grist for inferences, planning and action. We grow curious about a crowd that has gathered down the street. We decide not to stop at the store because the parking lot is jammed. We join in a standing ovation even though we didn’t enjoy the performance that much. Social interactions like these contribute to the meaning, interest and richness of our daily life.

More: interviews with Tom Erickson

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Erickson, Thomas (2011): Social Computing. In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). “Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction”. Available online at http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/social_computing.html

Movies with subtitles for education

Published on 10/18/2006 in Diary and People. 5 Comments

Philip Wagner sent me a couple movies that he edited to help people with reading difficulties to learn from movies. Basically he colorized the actor that speaks and put the caption as a comic balloon close to him/her. Then he uses a karaoke-style highlight to match the pronounced word with the text in the caption.

Robinhood Colorized

In his words:

I have more things which in total are about eight hours long.  I have two Robin Hood movies on Dvd discs that  are together about 50 minutes long They are partly slide show and partly movies.  When there is talking it is a slide show with the subtitles and when there is little talking and lots of action it is a movie without subtitles. I use “The Adventures of Robin Hood” Volumes 1 and 2 DVDs that can be purchased from Amazon.com economically. There are 4 episodes on the Volume 1 and 4 Episodes on Volume 2. The episodes are from the tv series begun in 1955 starring Richard Greene as Robin Hood produced in England.  Before I burn them onto DVDs I colorize the actor who is speaking and the faces and hands of the other actors in the scene.  My burn program enhances the scenes by brightening and focusing them better. I burn them into HDTV format which allows more space on the left and right of each frame so I am able to put more captioning on the pictures. I have made textreading programs with no pictures for

“Treasure Island”, “Moby Dick” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” of which I used my own voice for dubbing the sound which can be used immediately as I have not applied for a copyright for them.

Philip is willing to teach anybody the process that he used to produce these movies. You can reach him at the address philip5147 [@] yahoo.com.

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Clay Shirky

Published on 5/19/2005 in People. Closed

Clay Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

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Marvin Minsky

Published on 4/14/2005 in People. Closed

Marvin Minsky has made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in The Society of Mind (CDROM, book) which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT.

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3 people I want to meet in the near future

Published on 4/12/2005 in People. Closed

The first is John Bateman, University of Bremen DE. He is the leader of the project: Spatial Ontologies for Communication;

The second is Andrew Frank, TU of Wien AT. He wrote extensively on Multi-Agent simulations for Maps communications et similia.

The third is Valentino Braitemberg. Now retired, he is one of my favorite authors of AI approaches.

Benjamin Kuipers

Published on 4/11/2005 in People. Closed

Benjamin Kuipers holds an endowed Professorship in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He investigates the representation of commonsense and expert knowledge, with particular emphasis on the effective use of incomplete knowledge. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College, and his Ph.D. from MIT. He has held research or faculty appointments at MIT, Tufts University, and the University of Texas. His research accomplishments include developing the  TOUR model  of spatial knowledge in the cognitive map, the  QSIM algorithm for qualitative simulation, the  Algernon system for knowledge representation, and the  Spatial Semantic Hierarchy model of knowledge for robot exploration and mapping. He has served as Department Chairman, and is a Fellow of AAAI and IEEE.

Paul Virilio and Velocity

Published on 1/27/2005 in International politics and People. Closed

Recently I have been interested in Paul Virilio’s work about velocity, about criticizing technological progress and the globalisation. One of the idea that was striking me is that of the loss of perspective. Virilio says that because of the velocity at which we move and communicate we lack of the perspective that was proper of previous ages. Here the term perspective it is not just in the physical meaning but it is intended in a more broad sense: historical, anthropological, economical, etc.

‘Velocity’ is the key word of his thinking, the post-modernity treasure, and the modern society capital. Reality is no longer defined by time and space, but in a virtual world, in which technology allows the existence of the paradox of being everywhere at the same time and being nowhere at all. The loss of the site/city/nation in favour of globalisation implies also the loss of rights and of democracy that is contrary to the immediate and instantaneous nature of information. McLuhan’s global village is nothing but a ‘World Ghetto’.

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights is reserved by the respective author/s.

Enrico Franconi

Published on 7/13/2004 in People. Closed

Enrico Franconi is associate professor at the Open University of Bolzano, Italy. His interests are in Description Logic, Knowledge Representation, Ontologies and Conceptual Modelling, Artificial Intelligence.

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Lars Erik Holmquist

Published on 6/15/2004 in People. Closed

Lars Erik Holmquist is leader of the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute in Göteborg, Sweden. Before this, he founded and led the PLAY research group from 1997-2001. He received his master’s degree in Computer Science in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Informatics in 2000, both at the Göteborg University.  His research interests include human-computer interaction, information visualization and ubiquitous computing. He has been member of many international conference committees and published extensively in these research fields. In 2002 he chaired the international conference on ubiquitous computing, UbiComp 2002, which attracted almost 500 visitors from companies, universities and research institutes all over the world. He is an associate editor of the Springer journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

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Thad Starner

Published on 6/14/2004 in People. Closed

Thad Starner is an Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, where he founded and directs the Contextual Computing Group. Thad holds four degrees from MIT, including his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory in 1999. Starner was an Associate Scientist with BBN’s Speech Systems Group in 1993 when he created one of the earliest high-accuracy on-line cursive handwriting recognition systems. Starner is one of the pioneers of wearable computing and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications and book chapters in mobile computing, computer vision, augmented environments, and pattern recognition. Starner co-founded the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) and is one of the founding members of the IEEE Technical Committee on the subject. He is also a founder of the MIT Wearable Computing Project and Charmed Technology. His work includes a gloveless, real-time sign language recognizer; various intelligent agents in support of everyday memory; theoretical frameworks for power generation and heat dissipation for wearables; several augmented realities; and a computer-vision based interactive workbench for which he received a “best paper” award at VR2000. Thad’s current work researches the use of computational agents for everyday-use wearable computers.

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Peter Suber

Published on 6/9/2004 in People. Closed

He is a philosopher, a university teacher and a researcher. He designed the game Nomic. He is also involved with the Open Acess project.

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Werner Kuhn

Published on 6/7/2004 in People. Closed

Prof. Kuhn is a professor at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster; and a lecturer (Dozent) at the Department of Geoinformation at the Technical University Vienna.

From his site:
The fundamental question underlying my research is how the meaning of geographic information can be mapped from one context to another. Typical contexts are human activities, professional disciplines, or natural languages. Contexts are ingrained in human minds, data models, user interfaces, business models, laws and regulations.

Alexander Kippel

Published on 5/26/2004 in People. Closed

Dr. Alexander Kippel is a Postdoctoral research associate a the University of Bremen, Germany. He works in the cognitive systems group and his interests are Spatial Cognition, Wayfinding, Chorems, Conceptual and Spatial Information Experimental Cartography.

He wrote a thesis on Wayfinding Chorems: conceptualising wayfinding ans route direction elements.

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Marc Augè

Published on 4/21/2004 in People. Closed

Marc Augé

Marc Augé a présidé l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de 1985 à 1995. Directeur de recherches à l’ORSTOM jusqu’en 1970, puis directeur d’études à l’EHESS, il a effectué de nombreuses missions en Afrique, principalement en Côte d’Ivoire et au Togo. Depuis le milieu des années 1980, il a diversifié ses champs d’observation, effectuant notamment plusieurs séjours en Amérique Latine et essayant d’observer les réalités du monde contemporain dans son environnement le plus immédiat (Paris, la France).

Il est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages, dont : Génie du Paganisme (Gallimard, 1982), La Traversée du Luxembourg (1985), Un ethnologue dans le métro (1986), Non-Lieux (Seuil, 1992), Domaines et châteaux (1992), Le sens des autres (Fayard 1994), Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains (Aubier 1994), Fictions fin de siècle (Fayard, 2000), Journal de guerre (Galilée 2002)…

Ben Russell

Published on 4/15/2004 in People. Closed

Russell is the author of headmap (www.headmap.org), a blueprint for wireless location aware devices and one of the founders of the Locative Media Lab (www.locative.net).
Previously head of the silicon valley office of the game physics company Mathengine (Mathengine physics is used in ‘A list’ games including ‘Enter the matrix’, ‘Unreal’, ‘Planetside’ and ‘Rainbow Six 3′. Mathengine physics is now a part of the Canon subsidiary Renderware’s advanced middleware solution for game developers).