LCC and GVU Faculty member Fox Harrell has received an NSF CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation." The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the National Science Foundation's "most prestigious award" in support of tenure-track faculty. His distinction is accompanied by a grant for $535,000, awarded through the NSF's Human-Centered Computing Division. Fox is director of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab (icelab.lcc.gatech.edu).
[11/02/09]
Education Laid-off IT Pros Head to the Classroom
A government grant is helping 30 unemployed IT professionals in Georgia start new careers as high school computer science teachers. With a $2.5 million grant from the NSF, the Georgia Institute of Technology 's College of Computing has launched "Operation Reboot." The program pairs a laid-off IT professional with an existing high school teacher for at least one year, "allowing the IT professional to learn the ins and outs of a classroom, and the teacher to get an education in IT," the college said in a statement. . . . "Through the teacher workshops at Georgia Tech, courses needed for certification, co-teaching and mentoring, we will transform these IT workers' identity into that of a computing teacher," said Barbara Ericson, director of the program, in the statement.
Robotic Musicians on the Science Channel, Nov 2 at 9 pm
Robot musicians teaching all of us to become great musicians. Watch Gil Weinberg's robot musician on the Science Channel today at 9pm, Nov3@12am, Nov4@4am, Nov5@11pm, and Nov6@3pm.
Gaming is not a passing fad. According to the NPD Group, a 35-year-old market research company that provides consumer and retail information for a wide range of industries including entertainment, total U.S. revenue for games, consoles, and accessories has been on the rise, jumping 43 percent to $18.8 billion in 2007,¹ and to $21.3 billion in 2008.² Game sales are expected to rise 7.9% annually over the coming years.³ ... Cell phone games, like console, arcade, and computer games, have evolved from simple 2D two-color graphics to full-color 3D games, rich in plot and story... Hosting a gaming event that incorporates use of smartphones may also be of interest, such as a round of Cruel 2 B Kind (Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, (Georgia Tech 2006) in which teams check in via text messaging or a scavenger hunt that requires digital photos. School and Library Journal - November 1, 2009
[10/29/09]
Georgia Tech is Awarded Funds for Developing a Database of Biological Design
On October 26, 2009, researchers at Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID) were awarded $768,000 by the National Science Foundation for the future development of a database of biological systems. The team, lead by Spencer Rugaber and Ashok Goel, of engineers and biologists hope to build an interactive tool that will look at certain biological systems and assist in applying those systems to new engineering design models. The tool will also function as an extensive database of biological systems (all functionally represented), on any level.
Videogames with zombies, gunfights, prostitutes, super heroes or explosions usually make the headlines. But the so-called brain game genre is enjoying a quiet success and injecting the industry with a fresh take on what's fun. The latest batch of brain games, which include puzzles, strategy and casual games, aren't marketed loudly with claims of improving your IQ or memory... "It's almost like an insurance policy. You can't really go wrong playing these games, and it's enjoyable," says Ian Bogost, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who researches and designs videogames.
Blair MacIntyre imagines a world where tiny clouds of information -- Facebook statuses, business cards, Twitter posts -- float above all of our heads. In some ways, it's not that far from reality. Advancements in mobile phone technology have cleared the way for a coming wave of "augmented reality" applications that merge the physical world with information compiled about people and places on the Internet. "When the technology gets there, this stuff could be amazingly useful and mildly terrifying in some ways," said MacIntyre, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has taught classes in augmented reality for a decade. The idea of pairing digital information with our real, 3-D environments is not especially new -- think robot-human vision in the "Terminator" movies. MacIntyre even plodded about college campuses in the 1990s wearing a 40-pound backpack and nerdy goggles, trying to make something similar happen.
... A bit over a decade ago, before the Internet became a household staple, Virtual Reality was the next great wave of technology. Magazines happily foretold that every home would have a VR helmet with motion-sensing gloves, letting families escape to simulated environments right from home... A few mobile applications – apps in tech-speak – are already available and more are in the pipeline... “These apps are cute, but they’re not very compelling,” said Blair MacIntyre, director of the Augmented Environment Labs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “They’re very specific to one type of information.”... "We’re past this hump where people are seeing AR is a viable technology and investing in it,” MacIntyre said. “Once companies get interested, they will devote resources to fund university research to do this kind of work.”
Elderly Interpret Certain Emotional Expressions of Robots Differently, Researchers Find
Admittedly, it sounds a little "science-fiction-esque." But overcoming one roadblock towards wider acceptance of robots in the home involves improving their facial expressions. Georgia Tech grad student Jenay Beer says that's not so easy, because there's an age gap in how people interpret robotic emotions: "For example, if a robot is demonstrating that it misunderstood a command, it might make some sort of negative facial expression in addition to stating I don't understand'; however, if an older adult might be viewing that expression, they might be interpreting that expression differently." WABE - October 21, 2009
[10/22/09]
Another Use for Your Phone: 'Augmented Reality'
You're walking down the street, looking for a good place to eat. You hold up your cell phone and use it like the viewfinder on a camera, so the screen shows what's in front of you. But it also shows things you couldn't see before: Brightly colored markers indicating nearby restaurants and bars... Among the other augmented reality programs that recently have hit Apple's App Store is Robotvision, a 99-cent program built by Portland, Oregon-based developer Tim Sears. Consumers may feel that way initially, too. But Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor who runs the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, worries that the technological limitations these applications currently face will keep them from living up to what people imagine they can do. Similar disappointments followed early hype for virtual reality, a cousin of augmented reality in which the landscape is entirely computer generated.
People are social creatures. Robots … not so much. When we think of robots, we think of cold, metallic computers without emotion. . . .Scientists at Georgia Tech decided to test our ability to interpret a robot's "emotion" by reading its expression to see if there were any differences between the ages... "Home-based assistive robots have the potential to help older adults age in place. They have the potential to keep older adults independent longer, reduce healthcare needs and provide everyday assistance," said Jenay Beer, graduate student in Georgia Tech's School of Psychology. Beer, along with Wendy Rogers and Arthur Fisk, professors of Engineering Psychology at Georgia Tech and directors of the Human Factors and Aging Laboratory, used a virtual version of the iCat, called appropriately enough the virtual iCat, to test the difference among adults between the ages of 65 and 75 and 18 to 27.
Teletubbies? No, real research at Georgia Tech... If you can't determine the emotional states expressed by this virtual robot, chances are you might be an older adult, according to a study by Georgia Tech. You might also have trouble serving our future robot overlords. But I digress. In a rather strange study, researchers in the school's Human Factors and Aging Laboratory tested people's ability to gauge the emotional state of a robot by presenting them with a virtual feline displaying seven emotional states at various levels of intensity: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and neutrality. cNet - October 20, 2009
[10/20/09]
Versatility in Hand; Say Hello to Using Cellphone to Make Art
New technology is catnip to artists. Like the video camera and the computer before it, the cellphone has piqued their curiosity and creativity. As demonstrated by the works in Spruill Gallery's "On the Flip Side," artists are finding it a versatile tool. . . .Spruill Gallery director Hope Cohn, who organized the exhibition, includes a demonstration of an application designed by Georgia Tech professor Gil Weinberg, which turns the phone into a musical instrument and a device for writing musical compositions.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution - October 20, 2009 (Print edition*)
[10/19/09]
Augmenting Aerial Earth Maps
Kihwan Kim, Sangmin Oh, Jeonggyu Lee, and Irfan Essa of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology are introducing methods for augmenting aerial visualizations of Earth (from tools such as Google Earth) with dynamic information obtained from videos. Their goal is to make Augmented Earth Maps that visualize the live broadcast of dynamic sceneries within a city. They propose different approaches to analyze videos of pedestrians and cars, under differing conditions and then augment Aerial Earth Maps with live and dynamic information. They also analyze natural phenomenon (clouds) and project information from these to the AEMs to add the visual reality.
...The mobile-music movement is particularly pronounced in the Apple's iPhone app store, where more than a dozen downloadable applications, many of which are free or cost less than $3, let would-be musicians turn their smartphones into keyboards, drums, guitars and all kinds of futuristic synthesizers. . . .But smartphones are giving the trend more mainstream appeal. The iPhone's accelerometer, which allows users to control apps by tilting the phone, makes the ZOOZbeat app possible, said Gil Weinberg, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology and founder of ZOOZbeat. Weinberg hopes the app will help save the struggling music industry by getting people more engaged in the music they love. "You don't have to have a lot of money, and you also don't have to have a lot of experience in music" to be an iPhone musician, he said. "We will help you experience whatever level of creativity you would like." ZOOZbeat recently released a new version of its app that will make this experience more social. The new app lets people "toss" recordings from one phone to another, helping them collaborate on track engineering... Andrew Beck, a masters student in music technology at Georgia Tech who works at ZOOZbeat, envisions a future when apps like ZOOZbeat will let concert audiences participate in live shows. "It'd be cool if people were somehow involved in the concert," he said, "but we're not sure exactly how that would work yet." CNN - October 15, 2009
[10/16/09]
Older Adults Want Robots That Do More Than Vacuum
Researchers at Georgia Tech have discovered that, contrary to previous assumptions, older adults are more amenable than younger ones to having a robot "perform critical monitoring tasks that would require little interaction between the robot and the human." The findings will be presented at the upcoming HFES 53rd Annual Meeting, y, October 22, 2009. Despite manufacturers' increased development of in-home robots, it's unclear how much interaction people would be willing to have with them... To gauge how willing people might be to have a robot perform these kinds of more interactive tasks, Drs. Neta Ezer (now at Futron Corporation), Arthur D. Fisk, and Wendy A. Rogers sent a questionnaire to 2,500 Atlanta-area adults ages 18 to 86 and received 177 responses. One of their questions addressed respondents' level of experience with technology and robots that do things like mow, clean, guard, and entertain. Older adults (ages 65 to 86) had significantly less experience with technology than younger ones (18+), but younger adults had only slightly more experience with robots currently on the market
In this article I'll discuss a game creation method through iteration for small, unique projects, and will describe how the failures and success of the process of designing our studio Mobile Pie's upcoming iPhone and iPod touch title B-Boy Brawl: Breakin' Fingers shaped that methodology... I will consider video game design according to Ian Bogost's (Georgia Tech) theory of Unit Operations; this suggests video games are constructed from discreet unit operations which function to create a system which delivers a desired meaning. We can hypothesize that our approach to building a complete system, or video game, must be based on a sound understanding of how these unit operations function with each other to achieve a desirable outcome. Gamasutra - October 15, 2009
[10/13/09]
Self-adjusting Video Games
You go online and read all the reviews. Finally, you pick out a computer game that looks just perfect. After all, didn't the reviewers say it was clever, challenging and fun? Then you pop it into your computer, Xbox, or PlayStation... and 10 minutes later, you're bored, bored, bored. Now, Julian Togelius of Copenhagen, Denmark, thinks he has the answer to your gaming woes. According to New Scientist, it's "a new breed of game [that] aims to suit everyone by adapting to an individual's playing style." . . .Will the concept of a self-adjusting game catch on? It seems there's some resistance to the idea in the game development world. Says Ian Bogost at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, "Some wonder if this effort destroys the potential for art to produce the unfamiliar or disturbing." Tonic - October 11, 2009
[10/13/09]
When The Going Gets Tough…Let The Game Play Itself
...In the 70s and 80s, the heyday of gaming’s explosive appearance in homes and arcades, playing a video game with your brother usually meant taking turns. Or, if you were the younger, less-skilled brother, it meant asking for help, learning from your older sibling... Ian Bogost, associate professor at Georgia Tech and author of several books on games, most recently Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, likens the Super Guide to the video game equivalent of fast forwarding a movie or skimming a book. “Certainly games are long, too long perhaps,” he said. “Designers have combated this problem partly through shorter games, like casual games and minigames, particularly on the Wii. But such games also can’t carry the sort of longform spatial or narrative experience that we’re used to from games like Super Mario Bros.”
The 2009 FOLEY SCHOLARS are Marshini Chetty and Erika Poole
Foley Scholar awards will be presented to Marshini Chetty and Erika Poole, both Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. candidates in the School of Interactive Computing.
The Foley Scholars Endowment is awarded on a merit basis for overall brilliance and potential impact. Marshini and Erika were selected by GVU’s external board from an outstanding group of eight finalists; Betsy DiSalvo, Matt Flagg, Andrea Grimes, Thomas Smyth, Erich Stuntebeck, and Sarita Yardi.
Marshini Chetty is a fifth year HCC Ph.D. candidate. She received her masters and bachelors degrees in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2005 and 2002. During her dissertation research, she has studied households in Atlanta, Seattle and Cambridge (UK) to understand how they manage their networked technologies. Currently, she's implementing and evaluating Kermit, a visual home networking tool for showing households how different people in the home are using network resources. Her aim is to understand the social consequences of introducing real-time resource monitoring tools into the home, and to derive design implications for future domestic technologies. Marshini's other interests include creating technologies for environmental sustainability and the field of human computer interaction for international development.
Erika Poole is a sixth year HCC Ph.D. candidate. Her research focuses on how people cope with technological complexity at home. She studies the source of user experience problems with interconnected home technologies and how people share advice with one another to overcome these issues. Through this research she aims to create more effective and enjoyable ways for people to give and receive technical advice to one another. Erika holds a bachelor degree in computer science from Purdue University and a master degree in computer science from Georgia Tech.
The 2009-2010 Foley Scholarship winners and finalists will be honored at Foley Scholars Reception & Dinner co-hosted by GVU's industrial partner Google on Wednesday, October 14 at the Ansley Golf Club.
[10/09/09]
Adaptive Games Promise High Scores for Everyone
For those who fret that their hard-earned money might be wasted on a dud computer game, help could soon be at hand. A new breed of game aims to suit everyone by adapting to an individual's playing style. Computer games have had an element of adaptability for decades, says Julian Togelius at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. "If you play well the game gets harder and if you are lousy it might get easier," he says ... While some games developers are interested, "there is also considerable resistance to these ideas", says Ian Bogost at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "Some wonder if this effort destroys the potential for art to produce the unfamiliar or disturbing."
One sign of a successful pilot program is when it gets extended beyond its initial timeframe. Another is when it gets additional funding. A third is when it inspires copycats. Georgia Tech’s effort to improve computer science education beginning at kindergarten and continuing all the way through doctoral programs, Georgia Computes!, is attracting attention and money for its success in drumming up interest in the field. . . .Rather than focusing on just one minority population or age group, Georgia Computes! aims to “broaden the entire pipeline” of computer science in the state’s public education system, says Mark Guzdial, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech and lead primary investigator for the project. “From programs for Girl Scouts to middle school summer camps to preparing more teachers to teach Advanced Placement Computer Science to the programs at all the colleges and universities in the state,” he says, “we’re trying to get more people interested in computer science.” . . .One project, Glitch, led by graduate student Betsy DiSalvo, introduces male African-American teenagers to video game testing, giving them 20 hours a week of work trying out games for Electronic Arts, Game Tap and other companies. “Training them to be testers is a good way to get them to look below the surface at the computing technologies that go into creating a program,” Guzdial says.
Among the other augmented reality programs that recently have hit Apple's App Store is Robotvision, a 99-cent program built by Portland, Ore.-based developer Tim Sears. If you hold your phone parallel to the ground, Robotvision displays a map of your surroundings. Hold the phone up, however, and it goes into augmented-reality mode, highlighting places like coffee shops and bars... "Looking at the world around you is something everyone can get. That, to me, is what makes it so fascinating," he said.
Consumers may feel that way initially, too. But Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor who runs the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, worries that the technological limitations these applications currently face will keep them from living up to what people imagine they can do. Similar disappointments followed early hype for virtual reality, a cousin of augmented reality in which the landscape is entirely computer generated.
What if you could take Google Earth, combine it with the many cameras out there watching us, and end up with a technology that lets you watch live movement from above? Traffic, football games, what’s going on at the park… all at your fingertips. Cool or Big Brother? In the 10a ET hour in the Newsroom, I’ll show you ... Here’s the info from the researchers at Georgia Tech, with YouTube ... Thanks to Kihwan Kim and Professor Irfan Essa. CNN - October 1, 2009
[10/01/09]
'Arcade Reality': iPhone 3.1 Opens Doors to Augmented Reality Games
With the release of iPhone OS 3.1, developers are now allowed to produce augmented reality (AR) apps for the iPhone. We first covered this technology on the iPhone back in March, when we met with game researcher Blair MacIntyre (Georgia Tech) about his work in the field. Unfortunately, at the time, the iPhone SDK prevented full exposure to the proper APIs required to implement it. All that changed with iPhone 3.1.
GVU Alumnus, Krishna Bharat Introduces Google Fast Flip
Fast Flip, which is based on Google News, tries to address what Google considers a major problem with news sites: they often are slow to load, and so they turn off many readers. Google, the leader in Web search services and advertising, argues that if reading news online was closer to the experience of scanning through physical newspapers or magazines, people would read more.
“Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print,” said Krishna Bharat, a distinguished researcher at Google who developed Google News in 2002. “When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.”
Augmented Google Earth Gets Real-Time People, Cars, Clouds
Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and layer it onto Google Earth, adding dynamic information to the previously sterile Googlescape.
They use live video feeds (sometimes from many angles) to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioral simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth.
Industrial robots have been helping in the factories for a while, but most robots need a complex hand and powerful software to grasp ordinary objects without damaging them. Researchers from Harvard and Yale Universities have developed a simple, soft robotic hand that can grab a range of objects delicately, and which automatically adjusts its fingers to get a good grip. The new hand could also potentially be useful as a prosthetic arm. "When you start to bring robots into human environments, all of a sudden there's a big advantage for being compliant," says Charlie Kemp, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech who designs home-assist robots. "You can't always know what is where. You don't just want to push through the world and break something. You want to have the mechanics comply.
Nancy Nersessian Elected Fellow of Cognitive Science Society
Nancy J. Nersessian, Regents’ Professor with a joint appointment in the College of Computing and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech, was elected as a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society this summer. The society is an international organization that promotes interdisciplinary research in the field of cognitive science, which is comprised of disciplines as diverse as artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and education.
“I’m honored to be elected a Fellow,” said Nersessian. “I see it as recognizing the fact that for over 25 years I’ve been engaged in research on the cognitive practices of scientists and engineers and have contributed to establishing a sub-field within cognitive science that focuses on scientific and technological thinking. Although much of the research aims to understand basic cognitive processes, one major application area has been to learning in science and engineering.”
Nersessian is known as one of the founders of the field of cognitive studies of science and has a study appearing in the October 2009 issue of the journal Topics in Cognitive Science.
Beth Mynatt was invited by Justin Rattner (Intel’s CTO) to take part in the final plenary presentation. Mynatt talked about the future of social media and highlighted some of the exciting work coming out of the GVU Center here at Georgia Tech.
[09/24/09]
Atlanta Flood Monitored Through Social Media
... Atlantans communicated by traditional means during Monday’s flooding, but many traded information, photos and videos through such social media as Twitter and Facebook . “In an emergency situations you find the social networks you’ve been building up on a daily basis, that sometimes seem like a waste of time, suddenly become very useful,” said Amy Bruckman, associate professor of interactive media at Georgia Tech. “Person to person you can learn more about what’s really going on in an ongoing situation much faster than you can from professional media.”
The 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services - MobileHCI - ended last Friday. –For four days, about 300 researchers, software developers and hardware designers presented and discussed the latest research results and ideas for the use of small mobile devices. . . .As one example, researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology (Nirmal Patel and James Clawson) presented a Two-Thumb-Chording approach where a character is produced by pressing several keys at once like playing a chord. It takes some time and effort to master, but then text input is clearly faster. Other research investigates the use of different amounts of pressure with virtual keyboards, e.g. pressing a little harder to type a capital letter.
Cellular News.com - September 22, 2009
[09/23/09]
Intel Asks Students to Design Future of Mobile Internet Computing
Intel is sponsoring students from six design schools around the world to develop out-of-the-box ideas on computing as part of its Design Expo. The effort complements "Intel's Sponsors of Tomorrow" campaign and has the potential to impact the next generation of mobile computing. Student projects will illustrate creative ways to bridge design and technology across the areas of user interaction, industrial design, and mobile applications and solutions. Intel worked closely with design programs from California College of the Arts; Delft University of Technology; Georgia Institute of Technology; Royal College of Art; UCLA and the University of Southern California.
Motorola Veteran Renu Kulkarni Joins Georgia Tech to Head FutureMedia Initiative
With world-class university research, proven engineering and commercialization expertise, a successful community of entrepreneurs – and leading digital media, communications and entertainment industries – Georgia is poised to be a global pioneer and innovator in shaping the future of social, digital and multimedia. As head of Georgia Tech’s FutureMedia Initiative, Renu Kulkarni’s charter is to help bring all these elements together in an open-innovation environment that will make the state of Georgia both a leader in developing new media and a model for how to bring new ideas to market. “Mine is a collaborative role, one that will help all the players span the innovation cycle from research to discovery to creation, commercialization and scale-up,” she said. “My job will be to connect universities, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry to create a rich and robust open innovation ecosystem that builds on and leverages our world-class resources.”
Momentum has been building behind augmented reality, particularly AR incorporated into mobile devices, but applications that rely on GPS receivers and compasses built into those devices have been less than consistent. "These sensors are astonishingly bad at what people are trying to do with them," says Associate Professor Blair MacIntyre of Interactive Computing. New Scientist - September 18, 2009
[09/15/09]
Family Ties Compel Some Scientists to Tackle Autism
Gregory Abowd, who develops video-capturing technology at the Georgie Institute of Technology first realized he could apply his work to autism in 2002, when he was reviewing family videos. Abowd’s 5-year-old son, Aidan, had been diagnosed with autism three years earlier. Watching footage of Aidan as a toddler, Abowd was shocked to see dramatic behavioral changes in his son between 18 and 26 months of age, including physical posturing and a discomfort around his mother. . . .Over the following few years, Abowd and his students began developing ’smart’ video technology that automatically records important events during therapy sessions by monitoring the therapist’s use of a pen and paper outfitted with electronic sensors. Since then, he has created similar systems to help teachers and parents identify early signs of developmental delay. Having children with autism “gives me the desire to work on the problem, but also an understanding of how it impacts people like me,” Abowd says. “There’s nothing that beats having passion about something.
Forget about 20/20. “Perfect” vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg. The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world “augmented reality.” Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?... A fundamental challenge this contact lens will face is the task of tracking the human eye, said Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor and director of the augmented environments lab at Georgia Tech College of Computing. MacIntyre is not involved in the contact lens product, but he helped develop an augmented-reality zombie shooter game. “These developments are obviously very far from being usable, but very exciting,” MacIntyre said. “Using them for AR will be very hard. You need to know exactly where the user is looking if you want to render graphics that line up with the world, especially when their eyes saccade (jump around), which our eyes do at a very high rate.
...Like Solitaire and Free Cell in the 1990s, BrickBreaker is little more than a giveaway on a popular business device... The game itself hardly seems worthy of obsession. Ian Bogost, a video game researcher and designer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said in an interview that BrickBreaker is a poor-quality Breakout clone, referring to the 1970s arcade game. The player uses the phone’s trackball to move a paddle across the bottom of the screen, bouncing a ball into stacks of “bricks” that disappear when they are struck. Breaking particular bricks yields powers — the ability to catch the ball, say, or shoot the bricks — and each successive board becomes more complex. . . .That last number, Professor Bogost said, holds the key to why BrickBreaker is an even more pervasive time-waster than Solitaire once was: You don’t have to be at your desk to play it. New York Times - September 12, 2009
[09/14/09]
Google Earth + Augmented Reality = Wow
Academics at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created an 'as live' version of Google Earth in which cars travel on motorways, people play in parks and shops and offices are open for business. The technology (displayed in this video which manages to make something exciting seem rather dull) could herald a wave of new marketing opportunities for companies looking to promote their range of services.
Shopping centres, theme parks, high street shops and car manufacturers could potentially use the technology to showcase their wares in a life-like scenario. The technology is still at an early stage but will be the subject of a thesis by academics of the Georgia Institute of Technology. revolutionmagazine.com - September 14, 2009
[09/14/09]
Can Video Game Testing Spark Interest in Computing Among Black Youth?
Research shows that young African American males approach video games differently than do their white peers. Betsy DiSalvo, doctoral candidate in the School of Interactive Computing, has a hunch that she can use black teens' gaming habits to spur interest in computer science--and so far it's working.
Andrea Thomaz and Maya Cakmak play with Simon, whose expressive head responds to beats and cues in the music being while four of its appendages play the Marimba, a percussion instrument
In Japan and other developed nations, robots have been billed as a solution for many critical issues that their societies face. An aging population has prompted the creation of humanoid robots designed to work in the fields of healthcare, garbage collection, education, and even cooking! In order to build a robot that can function and cohabit with humans, researchers at the US-based Georgia Institute of Technology are creating programmable robots, which are capable of learning and adapting to complex human environments, like workplaces, city streets, and homes. It’s called Socially Guided Machine Learning, and Andrea Thomaz, assistant professor in interactive computing at Georgia Tech develops machine learning algorithms to help robots learn physical tasks more quickly, particularly from teachers who are not necessarily programmers. Ahmedaba Mirror - September 8, 2009
[09/03/09]
GameSetInterview: On High School Bug Hunts With Glitch Game Testers
For the typical game tester, plowing through titles and spotting bugs are things to be done outside the classroom, as part-time jobs. Yet a number of high schools and colleges are offering game-testing pursuits as part of curricula, and a fine example lies in Glitch Game Testers. Founded by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Morehouse College, the program finds a dozen high-school students playing, evaluating, and bug-hunting their way through the latest games on deck at GameTap, Hi-Rez Studios, EA, Cartoon Network, and other Georgia-based companies. For a look at just how Glitch Game Testers came about, we went to Betsy DiSalvo, the Georgia Tech student who serves as Glitch’s research leader and program manager:
. . AtGeorgia Institute of Technology the Synaesthetic Media Lab has created another interactive tabletop surface – the Tangible Tracking Table – and used it to design another version of laser chess – Optical Chess. Purple Pawn.com - August 31, 2009
[08/27/09]
Could Auto Battery Advances Lead to Better Robots?
Every robot has its limit. For the famous Roomba vacuum, it's two to three hours. For the several thousand robots deployed in Iraq, about the same. For the warehouse robots sorting our sneaker orders, eight hours. And the Energizer Bunny? Forget about it -- a few minutes, tops. Perhaps more than any other factor, the life span of batteries has limited the infiltration of robotics into daily life... While the majority of this funding will manifest first in the garage, it will likely allow robotics to push into entirely new, mobile realms, according to Henrik Christensen, the director of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We are going to piggyback on whatever they're going to do," he said. "We're never going to be big enough to drive the market alone. "There is no doubt that new development in robot technology is very much going to benefit from battery technology," he added... The current breed of mobile robots is limited also in their strength. The Roomba is a perfect example of this, Christensen said. Its actual vacuum is underpowered compared with plugged-in robots, simply because it cannot spare the charge. Improved batteries will bring truly mobile vacuums and lawnmowers, able to do substantial work for extended periods.
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations ... Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations ... Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte (PhD candidate at Georgia Tech), who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.) “Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
Mobile Computing - Smartphones: Is There Anything They Can't Do?
...Ever since I bought an Apple iPhone, I have been hooked on apps . Apple's App Store is a virtual shopping mall with all the shopaholic joy of a real mall but none of the annoying teenagers... What is clear is that apps are set to become an ever greater part of our lives. As the technology of handsets improves, the next wave of apps will join up the real and virtual worlds even more. Many will be based on "augmented reality", which involves overlaying computer graphics on a view of the real world captured through the phone's camera. In the Android marketplace, apps such as Wikitude and Layar already use the handset's video camera, directional sensors, location information and internet connection to allow users to look "through" their phones to see a virtually augmented building or landscape. Once developers tap into the full capabilities of the latest version of the iPhone, a flood of similar apps is likely to emerge in Apple's App Store, says Blair McIntyre of Georgia Institute of Technology, an authority on augmented reality.
Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.
Andrea Thomaz, 33, Georgia Institute of Technology: Robots that learn new skills the way people do
Before robots can be truly useful in homes, schools, and hospitals, they must become capable of learning new skills. Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor of interactive computing, wants them to learn from their users, so that experts don't have to program every task. She aims to make robots that not only understand a human teacher's verbal instructions and social signals but give social feedback of their own, using gestures, expressions, and other cues to let the person know whether they have correctly understood the directions.
Thomaz has designed machine learning algorithms based on human learning mechanisms and built them into her robots Junior and Simon, which have faces that make basic expressions and hands that can grasp simple objects. In experiments with people untrained in formal teaching, Junior has quickly learned enough about things in its environment to catch on to tasks such as opening and closing a box.
Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.
Shwetak Patel, 27, GVU alumnus, now University of Washington: Simple sensors to detect residents’ activities
Walls can talk, and Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, captures their stories: tales of how people move through their homes and how they use electricity, gas, and water. Patel has shown that each electrical appliance in a house produces a signature in the building's wiring; plugged into any outlet, a single sensor that picks up electrical variations in the power lines can detect the signal made by every device as it's turned on or off. This monitoring ability could be particularly useful for elder care, but there was previously no practical way to achieve it, because it would have required numerous expensive sensors. Last year, Patel did something similar with ventilation systems, designing a sensor that detects subtle changes in air pressure when a person leaves or enters a room. More recently, he's shown that slight pressure changes in gas lines and water pipes betray the use of specific appliances or fixtures, such as a stove or faucet. Patel believes that providing people with information about their patterns of resource consumption can help them reduce it. He has cofounded a startup that will provide consumers with utility bills itemized by appliance.
