#SxSC outline schedule
by Graeme Earl
This is an outline schedule of talks and demonstrations for #SxSC. Anyone attending is invited to talk and demo their work.
10.30am
Composer Benjamin Mawson investigates ways to use space as an expressive layer in studio-produced music. Developer Enrique Tomas has built a tool using GPS to interpret a listener’s position and movement in order to create a unique way of hearing music. Musical compositions can now be spread across a landscape, mapped to a territory. Music is created which can now exist in a dialogue – at times symbiotic at others contradictory – with its physical surroundings.
11am
Alain Renaud will be talking about distributed music. Alain’s research explores high-speed networks as a medium for developing real time interactive performances in a multiplicity of spaces. Alain’s background in is music production and sound engineering. He is a senior lecturer in Music and Audio Technology at Bournemouth University. His research focuses on the development of networked music performance systems with an emphasis on the creation of strategies to interact over a network musically and the notion of shared networked acoustic spaces http://alainrenaud.net
11.30am
Our keynote speaker will be Alan Patrick who is the co-founder of Broadsight:
Broadsight focuses on market intelligence, strategy and systems development across the multi-media ecosystem. Broadsight has consulted to many of the major digital-media players in Europe and has helped start or turn around a number of startups. They have also developed innovative technology for a number of clients. Alan also writes the well regarded Broadstuff blog on technology development (www.broadstuff.com).
The topic of Alan’s talk is “Technology Hype and Bubbles – Why do they Exist?”
He will deal with Creative Destruction, the role of bubbles in these cycles, and the role of hype in creating bubbles – and what you need to look for to understand where you are in the cycle. Alan will examine how this is applied to (complicates) technology prediction, going through various prediction models and laws. He has also developed the ‘Broadstuff Bubble-o-Meter’ tracking the current Social Media bubble’s evolution, which has been picked up by other technology blogs and the Guardian.
12.30pm
Ajay Chakravarthy and Paul Walland will demonstrate a new way of viewing digitised 3D objects from cultural heritage collections. They will talk about some of the cool applications they see for this kind of virtual model representation. Ajay is a researcher at ITI, expert in knowledge modelling using Semantic Web. He has a PhD from Sheffield in knowledge acquisition, has worked on various media projects at ITI among other things. Paul is a manager at IT Innovation responsible for media-based collaborative projects and social networking.
1:00pm
Adam Procter will be talking about the growing way we interact with social networks via “streams” and the emerging conversation economy. http://www.adamprocter.org/
1.30pm
Peter Bennett will talk about Chronotape which is a tangible timeline for family history research, developed as part of the PATINA project within the Bristol Interaction & Graphics group. The chronotape explores the concept of using a tangible interface to control time, effectively turning the abstract concept of time into something that can be held and controlled.
2pm
John Ribbins from Roll7 will be talking about “Serious Games and Fun”. He will also be demoing some new Roll7 games http://roll7.blogspot.co.uk/
2.15pm
The Re-reading the British Memorial project is investigating the potential for using a variety of technologies for the recording, interpreting and sharing of data about church memorials in the UK. Find out about them at: http://ourti.orgGareth and Nicole Beale will be talking about the project and demonstrating Highlight based Reflectance Transformation Imaging capture using Digital SLR cameras and RTI with an iPhone Camera.
2.30pm
James Miles will outline the use of Reflectance Transformation Imaging – a simple and cheap surface imaging tool – on existing three dimensional datasets in a virtual environment. He will show some worked examples, and evaluate the potential of the methodology within cultural heritage. He will focus on comparing the different datasets and will highlight the surface detail that could be overlooked through conventional means of visualisation.
2.45pm
The Tsinghua-Southampton exchange program was set up to serve as a platform for young researchers to exchange ideas on key issues within Web Science. The chosen project was to analyse, extract and visualise how the young perceived the world using online data. As part of the Visualisation team Christopher Hughes will be demonstrating the chosen tools that were used to represent the data, highlighting some key issues and concerns.
3:00pm
Martin Warne and Elliot Salisbury will be talking about their mobile audio D-Touch projects.
4pm
Close – Diverse musical interludes
Demonstrations will also be taking place throughout the day
- Ben Oliver will show that there is some evidence that structured training can benefit cochlear implant (CI) users’ appraisal of music as well as their music perception abilities. There are currently very limited music training resources available for CI users to explore. This demo will introduce the ‘Interactive Music Awareness Program’ (IMAP) for cochlear implant users, which was developed in response to the need for a client-centered, structured, interactive, creative, open-ended, educational and challenging music (re)habilitation resource http://www.soton.ac.uk/mfg
- Peter Bennett will demonstrate http://chronotape.com/ which has been developed by him as part of http://www.patina.ac.uk/
- James Miles, Nicole Beale and Gareth Beale will demonstrate highlight based reflectance transformation imaging, using an iPhone and other methods.
- Ben Mawson and Enrique Tomas will be performing throughout the day.
- Martin Warne and Elliot Salisbury will be demonstrating their mobile audio D-Touch projects.
- Jaipal Channa is a composer who specializes in creating music for virtual, interactive environments and will be displaying his work at #SxSC. www.jaipalchanna.com
Southampton hosts RCUK Digital Economy "IT as a Utility" Network+
by Graeme Earl
Many congratulations to Professor Jeremy Frey whose £1.5 million Network+ award has now been announced by RCUK.
“As part of a new way of better taking forward existing research and training investments the RCUK Digital Economy (DE) Theme has set up a network in each of its four priority challenge areas: IT as a Utility, Communities and Culture, New Economic Models and Sustainable Society.
“Each ‘Network+’ has received £1.5 million funding over three years, with a broad scope that goes above and beyond the standard network remit.
“In line with the DE Theme objectives, each Network+ will focus on harnessing digital technologies to bring about transformational impact on community life, cultural experiences, future society, and the economy. They will co-create Grand Challenges, engage with and build communities, and inform the research agenda. A series of initial networking events in January 2012 specifically focused on the instigating the Network+ activities.
“The Network+ will:
- Hold ‘standard’ networking activities, including workshops, meetings and interactive forums
- Support N+N activities to bring together people and foster best+best interactions with UK and overseas groups
- Link to other RCUK-supported initiatives such as the AHRC-led Connected Communities Programme and the AHRC KE Hubs
- Make and maintain links with the full spectrum of industry and users, including the third sector
- Identify and prioritise the research and societal challenges in the appropriate DE Challenge Area and develop future Grand Challenges in the DE area. They will generate various reports and other outputs – for example, working with Government departments may help to inform and influence policy.
- Develop placements/secondments, a big feature of each network, which will encourage ideas-generation and knowledge exchange between users and the knowledge base.
- Support up to 10 ‘scoping study funds’ per network, for prioritised activities at up to £50,000 each. This should help in the creation of higher quality research proposals.”
Network+ holders are:
Sustainable Society; Dr Cathy Mulligan, Nottingham
Communities and Culture: Dr Helen Thornham, Leeds
IT as a Utility: Professor Jeremy Frey, Southampton
New Economic Models: Professor Roger Maull, Exeter
SXSC Demo: Tsinghua-Southampton Visualisation
by Sotonde
The Tsinghua-Southampton exchange program was set up to serve as a platform for young researchers to exchange ideas on key issues within Web Science. The chosen project was to analyze, extract and visualize how the young perceived the world using online data. As part of the Visualization team Christopher Hughes will be demonstrating the chosen tools that we used to represent the data, highlighting some key issues and concerns.
SXSC Presentations: Virtual RTI
by Sotonde
James Miles will outline the use of Reflectance Transformation Imaging – a simple and cheap surface imaging tool – on existing three dimensional datasets in a virtual environment. He will show some worked examples, and evaluate the potential of the methodology within cultural heritage. He will focus on comparing the different datasets and will highlight the surface detail that could be overlooked through conventional means of visualisation.
SXSC Presentation and demonstration of “Music You Can Walk Inside”
by Sotonde
Music composed in the digital studio has always been heard on loudspeakers. All of the theatre and unpredictability of a performance is absent.
Composer Benjamin Mawson investigates ways to use space as an expressive layer in studio-produced music.
Developer Enrique Tomas has built a tool using GPS to interpret a listener’s position and movement in order to create a unique way of hearing music.
Musical compositions can now be spread across a landscape, mapped to a territory.
Music is created which can now exist in a dialogue – at times symbiotic at others contradictory – with its physical surroundings.
Link
SXSC Presentations: ICON – A content exchange mechanism for 3D Cultural Heritage Models
by Sotonde
Ajay Chakravarthy and Paul Walland will demonstrate a new way of viewing digitised 3D objects from cultural heritage collections. They will talk about some of the cool applications they see for this kind of virtual model representation.
Paul is a manager at IT Innovation responsible for media-based collaborative projects and social networking. He has many years experience running R&D groups in media equipment companies (from fibre optics to cameras to 3D to compression and digital TV). Ajay is a researcher at ITI, expert in knowledge modelling using Semantic Web. He has a PhD from Sheffield in knowledge acquisition, has worked on various media projects at ITI among other things.
The ICON project is developing a content exchange mechanism, through which 3D digitised design artefacts will be made available for reuse by the digital media industries. High-quality digitised 3D models and textures are required for use in film and television post production, games development, architectural visualisation and, most recently, furnishing virtual business premises within VR worlds like Second Life. Traditionally these models and textures have been created from scratch by digital artists as required, but this is a costly and time-consuming process. The task of just researching the source designs takes a significant amount of effort before modelling can even begin.
ICON will allow for pre-digitised furniture, decorative objects, fashion, fabric designs and wallpaper patterns to be made available for the dressing of virtual sets and clothing avatars amongst many other uses. Users of ICONcontent will benefit from easy access to pre-built high-quality authentic period and contemporary digital models. For design rights holders, ICON will provide new promotional channels from pre-digitised designs. The projectaddresses the technical challenges that must be overcome in order for this vision to be realised.
Link
SXSC Presentations: Using the potential of high speed networks for real time distributed musical interactions
by Sotonde
Alain Renaud will be talking about distributed music. Alain’s research explores high-speed networks as a medium for developing real time interactive performances in a multiplicity of spaces. The technological usefulness of the latter is of limited importance if the various musical, sociological and philosophical aspects are not considered. Once the latter factors are taken into account, high-speed networks provide a timeless and borderless collaborative medium for mixing musical cultures, acoustic environments and performance practices which offer potential for developing applications that use the network as a core for interactions. Moreover, such research spans across a multitude of disciplines where natural interactions are needed, including the development of smart connected spaces, which can be used in a wide variety of ways.
Alain’s background in is music production and sound engineering. He is a senior lecturer in Music and Audio Technology at Bournemouth University, and holds a PhD from the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His research focuses on the development of networked music performance systems with an emphasis on the creation of strategies to interact over a network musically and the notion of shared networked acoustic spaces. He performs regularly over the network with the NetVs.Net collective and the Jackson4s. Alain held residencies at the Banff Centre for the Art and The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.
SXSC Presentations: Re-Reading the British Memorial
by Sotonde
We are starting to get in details of some of the presentations at SXSC:
The Re-reading the British Memorial project is investigating the potential for using a variety of technologies for the recording, interpreting and sharing of data about church memorials in the UK. Find out about them at: http://ourti.org
RTI captured using an iPhone
Gareth and Nicole Beale will be talking about the project and demonstrating Highlight based Reflectance Transformation Imaging capture using Digital SLR cameras and RTI with an iPhone Camera.
Creative Digifest #SxSC is now just one week away!
May 10, 2012
by Lisa Harris
A few tickets are still available for this event on 18th May in the Student Union at Southampton University – you can register here
Our keynote speaker will be Alan Patrick who is the co-founder of Broadsight:
Broadsight focuses on market intelligence, strategy and systems development across the multi-media ecosystem. Broadsight has consulted to many of the major digital-media players in Europe and has helped start or turn around a number of startups. They have also developed innovative technology for a number of clients.
Alan founded Broadsight after a career both consulting to, and working at, senior level for leading global multimedia companies. Prior to setting up Broadsight, he was Managing Director and COO at Jacobs Rimell, who specialise in multi-media OSS systems. Before that he held positions as VP Corporate Development for Globix Corporation in New York, Head of Internet Business Development at British Telecom, and consulted widely on multimedia to a number of major TV and cable companies in his consulting career at McKinsey and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He has worked in the US, Europe, South Africa and the Far East. Alan also writes the well regarded Broadstuff blog on technology development (www.broadstuff.com).
The topic of Alan’s talk is “Technology Hype and Bubbles – Why do they Exist?”
He says: “Over the years Broadsight has done a number of technology trend prediction papers for clients. We use a fairly rigorous system dynamic approach, and one of the things we have found quite interesting is the cyclical (aka Bubble) nature of the industry. I was asked to give a talk on technology prediction at the Design of Understanding conference in January this year, and one of the topics we touched on was the role of bubbles, and hype, in the ‘creative destruction’ process of new business innovation. The part on hype and bubbles drew the most questions, so I have developed a more in depth ‘Part 2’ for the talk, as well as dealing with its interaction with predicting technology evolution. This talk will deal with Creative Destruction, the role of bubbles in these cycles, and the role of hype in creating bubbles – and what you need to look for to understand where you are in the cycle.”
A precis of Part 1 can be found on the Broadstuff blog
Alan will examine how this is applied to (complicates) technology prediction, going through various prediction models and laws. He has also developed the ‘Broadstuff Bubble-o-Meter’ tracking the current Social Media bubble’s evolution, which has been picked up by other technology blogs and the Guardian. If you wish to read of its developments check out the postings on the Bubblewatch section.
Look out for another post shortly with more information about our other fabulous speakers…and there is still time to volunteer your own talk or demonstration :-)
Sponsored Digital Economy PhD Opportunity
May 10, 2012
by Lisa Harris
Funding available to support PhD research into small business and cultural heritage interpretation partnerships in the Digital Economy
A team of Digital Economy members have just been awarded a Vice Chancellor’s Award to recruit a PhD student who is interested in researching this topic. A grant of £7K p.a. for 3 years (or pro rata for part time work) will be available to cover fees and contribute towards living costs. The project needs to begin before 1st December 2012.
This project provides an opportunity for the successful student to provide significant practical value to local heritage sites and representatives from the creative industries, while drawing upon multi-disciplinary academic perspectives such as:
- Digital marketing and online community development
- Innovation and creativity in high tech firms
- Archaeology
- Visual communications
The successful applicant will develop a project to manage new digital communities around local heritage sites. The objective is to encourage visitors to engage more specifically with these sites and appreciate the stories they have to tell, by updating what are often rather old fashioned displays with creative applications of digital technologies. This might involve, for example, partnering with small businesses with expertise in augmented reality, virtual worlds, video, touch screens, mobile apps, serious gaming etc. Technologies such as motion capture allow sophisticated approaches to the 3D reconstruction of heritage sites, and when taken together with augmented reality applications, they provide new opportunities to enhance our understanding and appreciation of what living at these places must have been like for the benefit of both visitors and scholars.
The project will explore mechanisms for building industrial/ cultural heritage partnerships to increase footfall, improve visitor experience and engage new demographics. Southampton’s unique expertise at the interface of the web, design, HCI, marketing and innovation and cultural heritage will enable an innovative piece of work to be completed while stimulating new collaborative research across the faculties. The topic is one which has considerable public, industrial, academic and third sector impact potential.
If you have any queries about this application or if you can recommend a student who might like to apply for this role please contact Lisa Harris (l.j.harris@soton.ac.uk ) for more information. The email address for submission of applications on the standard University PhD application form please is PGapply.FH@soton.ac.uk