Maria Wirzberger introducing her PhD project within a focus group

CrossWorlds member Maria Wirzberger attended the 2nd Summer School Human Factors in Berlin at July 24th. The one-day event has been organized by the Institute of Psychology and Ergonomics at TU Berlin and offered PhD students, working within various fields of human-machine interaction, the opportunity to gain feedback on their research.

Projects could be introduced either within conventional talks or in an interactive manner within focus groups. The latter gave the chance to discuss the current stage of work more broadly and get valuable input from the attending professors and fellows. Besides of strenghtening existing connections, new contacts were built up during the day and the exciting social event in the evening!

Impressions from the final discussion

CrossWorlds scientists Kevin Koban and Maria Barlag had the pleasure to work with some of the most important people in media research at the summer school “Living With Media” from July 19th to July 24th in Cologne. It has been organized by the Graduate School of the Human Sciences at University of Cologne in collaboration with the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University. Discussed topics ranged from potentials and limitations of serious games, interpersonal knowledge and interpersonal communication, to embodiment, identity and morality.

Leonard Reinecke talking about media use

Besides of listening to exciting talks, each day workshops could be attended to gain deeper knowledge on different topics and additionally enhance experience in working and collaberating with people from all over the world. Within these workshops as well as the accompanying social events, we spent our time with fruitful discussions and in this vein had the chance to extend our research networks!

René, Benedikt and Tobias presenting their posters at Dagstuhl

Once a year, members of DFG research training groups related to computer science meet at beautiful Dagstuhl castle, located in Saarland. For CrossWorlds, our colleagues Benedikt Etzold, René Schmidt and Tobias Höppner participated. Together with PhD students from 16 other research training groups, they looked forward to a rich programme of talks and workshops. The opening consisted of a fast-forward-session, providing each PhD student with a time slot of two minutes to introduce his or her project. Although this doesn’t seem much, for 70 participants even such a short introduction took its time. After this “appetizers” there was the chance to discuss interesting topics to a greater extent within the supportive poster session. Talks on the detection of malware and scientific visualizations completed the programme. Fortunately, enough time remained to get in touch with other PhD students working on similar topics. All in all, our colleagues can look back on three inspiring days!

Daniel Pietschmann and Benny Liebold together with Michael Brill, a cooperating researcher from the University of Wuerzburg.

CrossWorlds members Benny Liebold, Daniel Pietschmann and Kevin Koban recently presented their research on presence and motor skill learning at the Annual Main Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Together, they presented four papers: Two were traditional presentations in the Computers and Technology and Game Studies divisions, the other two were interactive paper presentations (a mix between a powerpoint presentation and an additional poster session) in the Information Systems division.

With the slogan “Communication Across the Lifespan” the 5-day-conference hosted over 2000 papers in about 600 sessions with nearly 4000 authors.

Best Paper: Coordinated 3D Interaction in Tablet- and HMD-Based Hybrid Virtual Environments by Jia Wang & Robert Lindemann (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

Our Ph.D. Candidate Steve Erik Funke joined the symposium that last for two days (Oct 4-5). The ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI) was the second international symposium. It is an unique opportunity for industrial and academic researchers to exchange about the state-of-the-art spatial and 3D interaction research. This considersboth spatial input and output, with an emphasis on the issues around interaction between humans and systems.

We focused on the user interface challenges that appear when users interact in the space where the flat, two-dimensional, digital world meets the volumetric, physical, three-dimensional (3D) space we live in. We had an intensive exchange with industrial and academic researchers working in the area of spatial user interaction.

The keynote was given by Keynote by Prof. Ken Perlin, NYU Media Research Lab.
The second Keynote by Prof. Mark Bolas, ICT, LA followed immediately by ACM UIST 2014.

The sponsors were ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, SIGCHI and the Interaction Design Foundation.

Quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis.

Numerous participants of German Research Training Groups (RTG) met each other at the 8th Joint Workshop. The network meeting, funded by the German Research Foundation, took place on June
15 – 18 at Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics.

To contribute to the chief task of Schloss Dagstuhl and the desiderata of computer science the RTGs emphasized “Interdisciplinary scientific working principles” which not only influence the attractor space of diverse computer scientific approaches and concepts, but also change the structure, formats and methods of computer science research programs, the academic conversion of related curricula, and the transfer-processes between theory and practice.

Student talks, cross-thematic seminars, student-professor and invited talks provided deeper insight into opportunities how to deal with the circumstances of the desiderata of an interdisciplinary computer science. In a formidable way the Joint Workshop demonstrated that coming events and analysis shall not be limited to “a review of the actual position of the discussion” of research in computer science, but also might have to address the self-commitment that could be a common vanishing point.