MindSee at PhyCS 2015

Representatives from the MindSee project were in Angers, France last week  attending and representing the project at the 2nd International Conference on Physiological Computing.

MindSee was one of the projects presented as part of the European Project Space Session, on Day 1 of the conference. This was a precious opportunity for the consortium to disseminate results as well as project's ideas to a community very much in line with MindSee's proposition and areas of research.

Partners  also participated to the Doctoral consortium, presenting a paper titled: Bringing Psychological, Affective and Motivational Relevance Frameworks to Real Information Retrieval Systems (Oswald Barral). The paper was very positively received, so much that it won the Best Doctoral consortium award!

The paper will be included in the CD-ROM of the proceedings of the conference as well as in the SCITEPRESS Digital Library.               MindSee also showcased a dedicated booth with demos and posters to increase visibility and discuss potential collaboration with other EU/FET projects. The stand was particularly successful, bringing interest from many attendees.

PhyCS 2015: 2nd International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems

The MindSee project will be present at PhyCS in Angers, France  11 - 13 February 2015.

PhyCS is the annual meeting of the physiological interaction and computing community, and serves as the main international forum for engineers, computer scientists and health professionals, interested in outstanding research and development that bridges the gap between physiological data handling and human-computer interaction.

Look out for our stand, showcasing posters and demos on our latest research and findings. 

We will also be presenting the MindSee project on the first day of the conference, Wednesday the 11th,  as part of the European Project Space Session. 

See you in Angers!

1st Symposium on Brainwave Visualisation and Sonification Art

Given the relevance to our project, we would like to share this two days event to be held at Bournemouth University’s Executive Business Center on the 4th of February and the 22nd of April 2015.

rtists from fields as diverse as performance, music composition and dance are opening routes to create new audiovisual forms via Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs). Transmission explores new strategies and existing avenues in the field of brainwave interpretation for arts and research. Bournemouth Media School, a center for excellence in media production hosts a 2 day conference to debate synergies, current developments and future objectives on the intersection between art and technology.

Transmission brings together artists and researchers in the field of BCI visualisation and sonification, providing the opportunity to present ongoing projects, exchange ideas and to define the cornerstones of future developments. The Transmission Symposium offers a worldwide unique forum for an emerging network between arts and science.

 

3rd International Workhop of Symbiotic Interaction

The 3rd International Workshop of Symbiotic Interaction was held in Helsinki on the 30th and 31st of October 2014, chaired by Prof. Giulio Jacucci (University of Helsinki), Prof. Luciano Gamberini and Anna Spagnolli (University of of Padova) and Prof. Jonathan Freeman (Goldsmiths University of London), all partners in the MindSee project.

The workshop  was co-located with NordiCHI (a high profile conference functioning as the main Nordic forum for human-computer interaction research) and gathered more than 50 participants from Europe as well as the US. 

The workshop was opened by the greetings of the Ambassador of Italy in Finalnd, His Excellency Giorgio Visetti on the 30th of October, and continued on the following day opened by a Keynote speech on "Contextual Robotics" by Prof. David Kirsh of University of California, San Diego,  and closed by the Keynote of Prof. Rod Murray Smith of University of Glasgow on "Models and Measures of Human–Computer Symbiosis". 

In line with the previous two events in 2012 and 2013, the workshop aimed at promoting the exchange of scientific experiences in designing symbiotic systems, studying the way in which they affect human behaviour and defining the principles for a functional interdependence of humans and machines. Compared to previous editions, the workshop had considerably grown in terms of length, effort, academic relevance and impact. A call was open for papers, posters and demos (all peer-reviewed) with proceedings published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (to appear), while the program committee included internationally recognised experts from more than 20 institutions from various fields.

The event was also designed to be highly collaborative, engaging both speakers and attendees throughout the day via the live participation system Presemo.

Given the growing relevance and interest gathered, it has been announced that the Symbiotic Workshop series will continue in 2015...see you all in Berlin!

Google makes us all dumber: the neuroscience of search engines and the need for a good symbiosis

A very interesting and thought provoking article by Ian Leslie, has recently appeared on the news site Salon.com. The author argues that as search engines get better, people become lazier and hooked on easy answers, undervaluing asking good questions with potentially dangerous consequences for human curiosity. People lose curiosity because they find information ready to use; they are rarely in an unknown situation making them in a condition of superficial knowledge that does not push to explore and go deeper in the discovery of information. Leslie explores the "power" of information seeking in learning, arguing that asking themselves questions is what “launches the journey of exploration”. For Leslie the gap between question and answer is “where creativity thrives and scientific progress is made”.

 

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Symbiotic workshop: Register now!

Symbiotic2014 will be held in Helsinki on the 30th (Poster and Demo reception) and 31st (main workshop) of October.

The workshop is co-located with NordiCHI2014. David Kirsch (UC San Diego) is Keynote speaker, and will open the event with a talk about "Contextual Robotics". See the full program here. 

Register for free by the 20th of October  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/symbiotic-2014-tickets-13628018771.

 

Predicting abstract judgments from brain waves

An interesting article recently published by PLoS ONE has found that people make immediate judgments about images they are shown even before their brains have had time to consciously process the information. Dr. Bode (University of Melbourne) and the other authors' findings illustrate that there is more information encoded in our brain activity than previously assumed.

Mores specifically, the found that the stimulus dimension of arousal as well as the abstract dimension of time reference (the degree to which participants subjectively rated positive images to be related to the present or to the future after the experiment) could be predicted from brain activity recorded during passive visual stimulation. 

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3rd CONSORTIUM MEETING

The 3rd MindSee Consortium meeting was held in the beautiful city of Padova, Italy on the 24th and 25th of September. The meeting was organised by the HIT (Human Inspired Technology Research Centre) at The University of Padova. 

Thank you all for participating! 

Coming up event is Symbiotic2014: the International Workshop on Symbiotic Interaction co-located with NordiCHI in Helsinki Finland on the 30th and 31st of October. 

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