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Publications

CrossWorlds research published in Scientific Reports

Wirzberger, Schmidt, Georgi, Hardt, Brunnett, & Rey (2019)

A sophisticated example of interdisciplinary research was realized by CrossWorlds alumni Dr. Maria Wirzberger (formerly Psychology of Learning with Digital Media), René Schmidt (Computer Engineering) and Maria Georgi (formerly Computer Graphics and Visualization). Together, they developed a dialog-based memory training with a virtual agent and tested it with a sample of 62 elderly participants between 60 and 80.

Their results were recently published in the renowned Nature journal Scientific Reports and mark a proud milestone in CrossWorlds history. Taken together, the findings indicate a trade-off between performance and individual preferences when designing assistive technology for cognitive improvement.

The article is available via https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44718-x.

 

Dissertation project on Social Robotics gains attention

Dr. Andreas Bischof (3rd from right) awarded with the prize for an excellent dissertation on communication. One of the first congratulators was Dr. Eberhard Alles (right), Chancellor of the TU Chemnitz. Copyright: Dresdner Gesprächskreis

During his time as a CrossWorlds PhD-student Andreas Bischof conducted ethnographic research in social robotics labs around the world. The sociologist was eagerly interested to find out, how engineers and computer scientists make robots for everyday worlds ‘social’. His participant observations in human-robot interaction resulted in a study reconstructing the social conditions of social robotics and the practices within this field of research and development.

Bischof’s thesis, which he defended last year, and the following book »Soziale Maschinen bauen« are recently receiving great interest. After being awarded with the dissertation prize of the “Commerzbank AG Niederlassung Chemnitz”, the “Dresdner Gesprächskreis der Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft” awarded one of his annual prizes for outstanding young scientists last thursday.

One week earlier, the national daily newspaper F.A.Z. recognized his study as “realistic and reflected look behind the scenes” of human-robot interaction. The science journalist Dr. Manuela Lenzen wrote: “Bischof rightly raises the question of whether the design of the robots, which are supposed to live with us, can be left to such pragmatism. If tasks are broken down into technically manageable parts, the social aspects of social robotics could become shortened to an optimazation problem.” (F.A.Z., 11/11/2017, PayWall)

Andreas Bischof wrote his dissertation at the Chair of Media Communication, where he was supervised by Prof. Dr. Claudia Fraas. Today, Bischof is a member of the junior research group “Miteinander” at the Faculty of Computer Science.

 

Crossworlds edited Special Journal Issue available

i-com_14_2_Interdisciplinary_Approaches_to_Social_TechnologyThe latest issue of the Journal of Interactive Media, i-com vol. 14(2) is a special issue titled “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Social Technologies“. The issue was edited by Maximilian Eibl, Peter Ohler and Daniel Pietschmann and features peer-reviewed articles from several Crossworlds members from both the first and second group:

Michael Storz, Kalja Kanellopoulos, Claudia Fraas and Maximilian Eibl discuss Tabletops in their paper “Designing with Ethnography: Tabletops and the Importance of their Physical Setup for Group Interactions in Exhibitions”.

Benny Liebold, René Richter, Michael Teichmann, Fred Hamker and Peter Ohler investigate “Human Capacities for Emotion Recognition and their Implications for Computer Vision”.

Maria Wirzberger and Nele Russwinkel present their work in “Modeling Interruption and Resumption in a Smartphone Task: An ACT-R Approach”.

Madlen Wuttke, Valentin Belentschikow and Nicholas Müller discuss novel learning approaches in their paper “Storytelling as a Means to Transfer Knowledge via Narration”

 

Californication: HCII 2015 and Stanford

Best Paper Award at HCII 2015

Best Paper Award at HCII 2015

We had a busy July at Crossworlds with several of our colleagues travelling to LA to attend the HCI International Conference. During the conference, our colleagues presented a total of six papers. They covered a broad range of topics including the perception of virtual agents, game based learning, and spatial cognition in virtual environments. On top of that, our colleagues Daniel Pietschmann, Benny Liebold, Peter Ohler, and Georg Valtin received a best paper award in the Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality devision with their paper “Development of a media-independent Stereoscopic Ability Test to assess individual ability to process stereoscopic media“. Well done!

Before the conference, Daniel Pietschmann and Benny Liebold had the chance to visit the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) at two days, which is directed by Jeremy Bailenson. There, they shared experiences from their own VR research and talked VR tech—and of course they could try out the virtual environments that were used in local research projects.

 

New book available: Spatial Mapping in virtuellen Umgebungen

thesis-coverThe dissertation thesis from Dr. Daniel Pietschmann has been published by Springer in their new psychology research line. The book is written in German and constitues a revised version of the original thesis, concentrating on the theory and implications of spatial information and its use in virtual environments for entertainment or learning purposes.

The book also features an extensive review of cognitive UX concepts and studies on stereoscopy and natural mapping and is aimed at scholars in the fields of psychology, communication studies and human computer interaction as well as designers of virtual environments. It is available as softcover print or eBook via SpringerLink (and thus it’s free for many universities), Amazon and other retailers.

 

International Symposium for Information Science

Last week’s 13th International Symposium for Information Science was a very interesting experience for our collegiate Andreas Bischof and CrossWorld’s associated member Vera Obländer. Information Science is an interdisciplinary research field on the triad between knowledge, humans and information technology, as the German information science pioneer Gernot Wersig pointed out in 1993. Researchers from a broad vary of disciplines like library science, book science, applied informatics, hci design, interaction design, psychology or philosophy attended the conference at the Univesity of Apllied Science in Potsdam.

Among the key notes, talks and doctoral sessions several media informatics associates of Chemnitz University of Technology presented their work. Thomas Wilhelm gave insights on his concept for a web service to improve information retrieval technology. His colleague Marc Ritter presented a technical solution to improve digitization and extraction of metadata in video archives.

Andreas Bischof and Vera Obländer presented the first results from CrossWorld’s mutual research seminar, including all current members, associate researchers and students of Technische Universität Chemnitz. During the last semester we worked on an interdisciplinary, overarching taxonomy on interaction in human machine constellations. To combine and compare the different approaches to the term “interaction”, we developed a meta-definition with three structural features of definitions of interaction.

The paper (in German) and the whole conference proceedings can be found on the publication server of FH Potsdam.

 

Bernstein Conference Computational Neuroscience 2012

The Bernstein Conference Computational Neuroscience (BCCN) is the largest European conference in Computational Neuroscience. This year the conference was hosted by the Bernstein Center Munich (September 12-14). It was filled with three days of stimulating presentations of international top researchers from MIT, Harvard, UCL, Stanford, or MPI, giving insights in their newest brain research and modeling. The conference provided the opportunity to present new research approaches and results in two poster sessions in the evening.

Beside the interesting contributions of many other researchers all over the world the CrossWorlds member Michael Teichmann presented its well frequented poster to “Learning invariance in object recognition”. The poster reviews his current work and gives an insight how models of the visual system could be designed and trained to obtain human-like recognition and processing abilities. The poster abstract is published in the conference proceedings by Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience (Abstract)

 

Student Symposium at the Department of Computer Science

This year the first Student Symposium of the Department of Computer Science was held at Chemnitz University of Technology on July 4th 2012. It was an overwhelming success, as many undergraduate and graduate students contributed and raised it to an very successful event. The symposium provided students the opportunity to present their latest research including their thesis or their PhD project. The contributions could be in form of posters, short or full papers. Each contribution was subjected to a peer-review process to guarantee its quality.

The CrossWorlds member Michael Teichmann took this opportunity to present his current research as a short paper. In his contribution he brought the functioning of the human visual cortex together with methods of designing object recognition systems. For the interdisciplinary character of his paper and his presentation Michael Teichmann has been awarded a honorable mention. Read the rest of this entry »