We have just published the detailed program for our conference: 23 speaker, four thematic sessions, five keynotes and invited talks and one demo session!
CrossWorlds 2014 – Theory, Development & Evaluation of Social Technology will start monday june 30th at Technische Universität Chemnitz. Please find all information about travel and accomodation here. There are still some places for participants available, zou find our registration form here. The participation is free of charge.
The preliminary program for the first CrossWorlds Conference on theory, design, and evaluation of social technology, on June 30 and July 1 2014 in Chemnitz/Germany, is now published!
We will have five invited speakers and five interesting sessions, giving insights into various topics as social aspects of technologies, robots, design, real and virtual worlds. Further, a demonstration session is planed, involving novel technology based interaction schemes, emotion based work planning, and more.
Attending the conference will be free of charge for all participants due to funding by the German Research Association (DFG). We further managed to provide several free tickets for the conference dinner in a local restaurant granted on a first come first serve basis. Thus, we would like to encourage early registering to benefit from the free conference dinner vouchers. The registration will remain open until June 16.
On April 25th and 26th the 10th Studentische Medientage took place at the new auditorium building (NHG) at Technische Universität Chemnitz. In accordance with this year’s theme ‘Get Connected!’ numerous communication professionals discussed the importance of networking in lectures and workshops.
Once again the CrossWorlds team supported the conference by displaying their research projects. Amongst other examples, the second prototype table platform of Kalja Kanellopoulos and Michael Storz, presenting a card game and a game of Pong, was open to public experimentation. Currently, their second table is aboard the ship ‘MS Wissenschaft’ and travels across the rivers of Germany. Furthermore, Michael Heidt preseted a join
t human-computer exploration device and Anke Tallig tested the detection capabilities of non-verbal communication behavior by her new robot-guide installation.
And in addition to the professional audiences, the mentoring program ‘Girl’s Tandem’ visited the symposium and interacted with the various exhibitions from CrossWorlds.
The ‘Studentischen Medientage‘ are developed and organized solely by students of the Institute for Media Research at the Technische Universität Chemnitz but nevertheless established itself as a networking platform for other students and media professionals across Germany. This annual conference, established in 2005, meanwhile attracts more than 500 visitors from science and practice, in order to discuss media-relevant developments, new media perspectives and ideas.
“Registration” by NHS Corporation on Flickr under Creative Commons 2.0 BY
The registration for the first CrossWorlds Conference on theory, design and evaluation of social technology on June30th and July 1st 2014 in Chemnitz/Germany is now open!
Attending the conference will be free of charge for all participants due to funding by the German Research Association (DFG). We further managed to provide several free tickets for the conference dinner in a local restaurant that are granted on a first come first serve basis. We would thus like to encourage registering early to benefit from the free conference dinner vouchers. The registration will remain open until 16 June.
To register for CrossWorlds 2014, please use our ConfTool.
Room reservation will not be part of the online registration. We made special arrangements for accommodation with the “Hotel an der Oper“. Conference attendees will be able to enjoy Chemnitz’ best city view for 60 Euro per night!
Please book your room yourself using the code for the special arrangement provided on the conference page.
We are very happy to announce our first CrossWorlds conference! We are inviting researchers from various disciplines to Chemnitz for two days of interdisciplinary discussion of social technology.
The online registration for our conference will start soon! We would be glad if you take the chance to visit Chemnitz and discuss with us!
The conference will take place in project house METEOR on monday 30th of june and tuesday 1st of july. Our program committee is currently curating a program of the submissions from various disciplines. We can already announce our keynote and invited talk speakers:
Prof. Dr. Werner Rammert,
Werner Rammert is one of Europe’s leading sociologist of technology, most known for his model of distributed agency in socio-technical constellations. He is a full professor at TU Berlin. (Publications)
Prof. Dr. Nicole Krämer,
Nicole Krämer is full professor for social psychology at the University Duisburg-Essen. Her research interests are social aspects of virtual environments with a special emphasis on virtual agents. (Publications)
Celso de Melo, PhD.,
Celso de Melo is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on virtual agents expressing emotions and the impact on social interaction. (Publications)
Prof. Dr. Eva Hornecker,
Eva Hornecker is a full professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her research interests are the design and user experience of ‘beyond the desktop’ interaction with a special interest in interactive museum installations. (Publications)
Betty Mohler, PhD.,
Betty Mohler is the project leader of the group “Perception and Action in Virtual Environments” (PAVE) at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. Her group focuses on understanding various aspects of human behavior, perception and cognition using ecologically valid and immersive virtual environments. (Publications)
“Robokid” graphic by Ilona Straub to illustrate the programme.
To face dynamic environments and everyday situations is currently the biggest challenge for robotics. As part of their research project on the development of service robotics in Japan and Europe the sociologists Gesa Lindemann, Gregor Fitzi, Hironori Matsuzaki and Ilona Straub invited both robotic scientists and social scientists to discuss the implications and challenges of the goal to take robots beyond the laboratory.
Our fellow Andreas Bischof had the chance to present the outlines of his reserach question in analyzing social robotics to this very instructive conference. The greatest effort of GBTL conference was to bring together researchers with different perspectives on robotics, what is unfortunately rather rare in this context. HRI specialists like Morana Ala? or Selma Šabanovi? met german sociologists like Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer and Martin Meister. Legal [1, 2] and philosphical positions met famous robotic engineers, like Prof. Takanishi from Waseda University. It’s worth to have a look for upcoming publications from the organizing group of University of Oldenburg.
This years edition of Germany’s primary conference on human computer interaction “Mensch und Computer” took place in bremen with high involvement of CrossWorlds’ researchers. Since the conference character emphasizes interdisciplinary exchange between academics, practioners, computer scientists, UX designers and social sientists several of our research fellows participated actively in the event.
(C) by dm@tzi.de
Last week, CrossWorlds fellows Benny Liebold and Daniel Pietschmann went to Würzburg to present research papers with their respective working groups on “Emotionally Neutral Cues in Virtual Agent’s Expressive Behavior Impair Recognition of Emotions in Other Modalities” (Liebold) and “Effects of Video Game GUIs on the Construction of Rich Spatial Situation Models and Spatial Presence” (based on the Masters Thesis of and presented by Steve Nebel) at the 8th Conference of the Media Psychology Division of the German Psychological Society. Further talks included “Social Interaction in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: An Evolutionary Perspective” (Pietschmann), “No Evidence for Persuasion Effects of Emotional Advertisement on Attitudes towars Social Groups – The Case of Ageism” (Liebold) and “Gaze Path Analysis of Differences in Task Related Perception of Data Visualization” (Müller). Daniel also participated in the PhD Workshop the day before the conference.
We had a great time at the lab of Prof. Frank Schwab and colleagues in Würzburg and thank the organizers for putting together a great conference for the Media Psychology Division this year.
With the biannual conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction that aims at the intersection of research on human emotion and computational models of emotion, research on emotion both in humans and virtual entities found an important platform for interdisciplinary exchange. This year the 5th conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 2–5.
On Thursday, September 4, CrossWorlds fellow Benny Liebold gave a talk on “Multimodal emotion expression of virtual agents. Mimic and vocal emotion expressions and their effects on emotion recognition”. The talk addressed human recognition of emotion expressions of virtual agents. It was found that our ability to recognize emotional states from virtual agents is worse when virtual agents use unimodal expressions of emotions compared to multimodal expressions. Even more interestingly, unimodal expressions of emotions together with neutral nonverbal cues are recognized worse than isolated unimodal expressions of emotions. The latter might be a result of users perceiving the neutral expression of virtual agents as a relevant component of the virtual agent’s emotional state. Further results can be obtained from the conference proceedings, which are going to be indexed in IEEE Xplore.
A total number of 55 papers covered a vast area of research from psychological research in human emotions to computational models of emotional processes, such as empathy and automated emotion recognition. We thank the Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory and the Swiss Center of Affective Sciences from Geneva University, who did a great job in organizing the conference, putting together a great conference program including the very interesting keynote speakers.
This July the CrossWorlds fellows Anke Tallig, Michael Heidt and Michael Storz presented their paper submissions at the HCI International 2013 Conference in Las Vegas. With its two different thematic areas and nine affiliated conferences the conference had a very broad scope on many different aspects of human computer interaction. The large amount of submissions (1666 Papers and 303 Posters) gave attendees the opportunity to choose between many parallel sessions.
HCII’13 Keynote by Hiroshi Ishii
Anke Tallig presented on her work Border Crosser A Robot As Mediator Between Virtual and Real World, Michael Heidt his contribution Examining Interdisciplinary Prototyping in the Context of Cultural Communication and Michael Storz his work Annotate Train Evaluate. A Unified Tool for the Analysis and Visualization of Workflows in Machine Learning Applied to Object Detection and A Support Framework for Automated Video and Multimedia Workflows for Production and Archive for his college Robert Manthey.