Ross
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Paper: Towards a service framework for remote sales support via augmented reality
New paper accepted at USECA 2011 has been uploaded here.Abstract. Real-time sales assistant service is a problematic component of remote delivery of sales support for customers. Solutions involving web pages, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with transactions revolving around physically complex artefacts. This process involves a number of services that are often complex in nature, ranging from physical compatibility and configuration factors, to availability and credit services. We propose the application of a combination of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments suitable for remote sales of physical artefacts, right in the home of the purchaser. A high level description of the service structure involved is shown, along with a use case involving the sale of electronic goods and services within an example augmented reality application. We expect this work to have application in many sales domains involving physical objects needing to be sold over the Internet.
Boast: PhD Thesis Success!
This week my PhD student, Alfredo Nantes, has passed his external thesis examination. In addition, he has been nominated for a QUT Outstanding Thesis Award by both his reviewers.
Well done Alfredo! :-)
Some of his work is detailed here and here. Special thanks also goes to Dr Frederic Maire, who assisted as associate supervisor.
Ross
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Information Technology and People Special Issue on [location] {location;}
Information Technology and People
Special Issue on
[location] {location;}
Call for Papers
Smartphones have enjoyed phenomenal growth in the latter part of the first decade of this century. By 2012 sales of such devices are predicted to outstrip sales of PCs, and by 2015 more people will be accessing the internet with such devices than they will be with a PC.
Key to the growth and popularity of such devices has been the convergence, not just of telecomms and photographic equipment, which helped drive mobile phone sales, and the addition of internet access, which defined the smartphone, but the addition, following the success of in-car satellite navigation devices, of GPS receivers into mobile internet devices. The integration of GPS technology into smartphones, coupled with the consumer-led approach of Apple’s iPhone, gave birth to a whole new class of location-based services for mobile internet devices, available in particular for the iPhone, but also for Android, and other devices.
As our lives become increasingly encroached upon by the digital virtuality of our exponentially advancing information society, will this be at the cost of our humanity? Writers such as Sherry Turkle and others seem to believe this is already happening in circles of people sitting together in silence engaging with their smartphones. When our senses are surrounded by interactive exposure to telepresent realities – the faces of those we are speaking to across the world overlaid upon the world before our eyes, streams of data passing across the pavements and shopfronts as we pass, electronic voices calling our name and tantalising us with goods they know we want (famously envisaged in the movie, Minority Report) – when the worlds around us are both real and virtual, will this grant us additional scope to express our humanity, or constitute such an overload that engagement fatigue exhausts our faculties?
At our off-grid holiday resorts in rugged mountainous territory or remote wilderness encampments, luxuriating in isolation-downtime, delighting in the simplicities of one-to-one, face-to-face conversation with no distractions, in natural landscape with no overlaid streams of historical and commercial data, out beyond the boundaries of location aware personal shopping avatars telling us where to get what they already know we would ‘Like’, will we savour a richer, more traditional humanity we feel the hi-tech virtuality-soaked everyday of our lives has come to miss? Or does this vision of a virtu-reality that beckons in the coming decade mistake digital virtuality for something other than simply the latest manifestation of the - very human – dreams our ingenuity and inventiveness has managed to create?
In the light of smartphone and GPS convergence, this workshop aims to explore and examine the implications of digital virtual technologies on our sense of place, our relationship with location(s) both real and virtual, and welcomes papers from any related disciplinary background on topics including, but not restricted to:
• The impact of GPS app(s) on social, organisational, political and other activities
• Theorising location in a smart world
• Down-time / going ‘off-grid’
• Emerging technologies likely to impact our sense of place
• Surveillance, privacy, trust – is it a generational issue?
• Locating ‘location’ – the evolution of our sense of place in the history and philosophy of technology
• Local / Global – are smartphone GPS systems a chainstore takeover of our traditional highstreet localisms?
Instructions for paper submission
Papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or are simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference with proceedings. Papers must be written in English; they should be at most 6000 words in total, including references and (well-marked) appendices. Papers should be intelligible without appendices, if any. See http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id... for author guidelines.
Submissions must be made via the IT and People site at Manuscript Central:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/itp
Important dates
Deadline for Submission of papers: October 15th 2011
Publication of Special Issue: by April 2013
Special Issue Editors
- David Kreps
Salford Business School, Salford University, UK
- Martin Warnke and Claus Pias
Computer Science & Culture, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Deutschland.
http://www.ifip95wg.org/sicfp
Special Issue on
[location]
Call for Papers
Smartphones have enjoyed phenomenal growth in the latter part of the first decade of this century. By 2012 sales of such devices are predicted to outstrip sales of PCs, and by 2015 more people will be accessing the internet with such devices than they will be with a PC.
Key to the growth and popularity of such devices has been the convergence, not just of telecomms and photographic equipment, which helped drive mobile phone sales, and the addition of internet access, which defined the smartphone, but the addition, following the success of in-car satellite navigation devices, of GPS receivers into mobile internet devices. The integration of GPS technology into smartphones, coupled with the consumer-led approach of Apple’s iPhone, gave birth to a whole new class of location-based services for mobile internet devices, available in particular for the iPhone, but also for Android, and other devices.
As our lives become increasingly encroached upon by the digital virtuality of our exponentially advancing information society, will this be at the cost of our humanity? Writers such as Sherry Turkle and others seem to believe this is already happening in circles of people sitting together in silence engaging with their smartphones. When our senses are surrounded by interactive exposure to telepresent realities – the faces of those we are speaking to across the world overlaid upon the world before our eyes, streams of data passing across the pavements and shopfronts as we pass, electronic voices calling our name and tantalising us with goods they know we want (famously envisaged in the movie, Minority Report) – when the worlds around us are both real and virtual, will this grant us additional scope to express our humanity, or constitute such an overload that engagement fatigue exhausts our faculties?
At our off-grid holiday resorts in rugged mountainous territory or remote wilderness encampments, luxuriating in isolation-downtime, delighting in the simplicities of one-to-one, face-to-face conversation with no distractions, in natural landscape with no overlaid streams of historical and commercial data, out beyond the boundaries of location aware personal shopping avatars telling us where to get what they already know we would ‘Like’, will we savour a richer, more traditional humanity we feel the hi-tech virtuality-soaked everyday of our lives has come to miss? Or does this vision of a virtu-reality that beckons in the coming decade mistake digital virtuality for something other than simply the latest manifestation of the - very human – dreams our ingenuity and inventiveness has managed to create?
In the light of smartphone and GPS convergence, this workshop aims to explore and examine the implications of digital virtual technologies on our sense of place, our relationship with location(s) both real and virtual, and welcomes papers from any related disciplinary background on topics including, but not restricted to:
• The impact of GPS app(s) on social, organisational, political and other activities
• Theorising location in a smart world
• Down-time / going ‘off-grid’
• Emerging technologies likely to impact our sense of place
• Surveillance, privacy, trust – is it a generational issue?
• Locating ‘location’ – the evolution of our sense of place in the history and philosophy of technology
• Local / Global – are smartphone GPS systems a chainstore takeover of our traditional highstreet localisms?
Instructions for paper submission
Papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or are simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference with proceedings. Papers must be written in English; they should be at most 6000 words in total, including references and (well-marked) appendices. Papers should be intelligible without appendices, if any. See http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id... for author guidelines.
Submissions must be made via the IT and People site at Manuscript Central:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/itp
Important dates
Deadline for Submission of papers: October 15th 2011
Publication of Special Issue: by April 2013
Special Issue Editors
- David Kreps
Salford Business School, Salford University, UK
- Martin Warnke and Claus Pias
Computer Science & Culture, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Deutschland.
http://www.ifip95wg.org/sicfp
Friday, July 8, 2011
Paper: A Prototype Augmented Reality Collaborative Process Modelling Tool
We have had a BPM 2011 Demo paper accepted describing our new augmented reality process modelling prototype. A copy of the paper is available here. A video of the prototype is available here.This work is the product of an Honours project by my new PhD student Erik Poppe. He will be continuing this work in his PhD project, supported by a scholarship from the Smart Services CRC.
Well done Erik!
Abstract at end of post.
Ross
Abstract.
Identifying, modelling and documenting business processes usually requires the collaboration of many stakeholders that may be spread across companies in inter-organizational business settings. While there are many process modelling tools available, the support they provide for remote collaboration is still limited. This demonstration showcases a novel prototype application that implements collaborative virtual environment and augmented reality technologies to improve remote collaborative process modelling, with an aim to assisting common collaboration tasks by providing an increased sense of immersion in an intuitive shared work and task space. Our tool is easily deployed using open source software, and commodity hardware, and is expected to assist with saving money on travel costs for large scale process modelling projects covering national and international centres within an enterprise.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Paper: Human resource behaviour simulation in business processes
Our PhD student Hanwen Guo has been busily working away on simulating human agent behaviours with regards to workflow systems such as YAWL. He has now developed and tested an HTN-based set of agents for testing resource models in virtual worlds. Preliminary results are available in an ISD (Era A) conference paper here, applied to a health care workflow scenario.Well done Hanwen!
Ross
Abstract
The structure and dynamics of a modern business environment are very hard to model using traditional methods. Such complexity raises challenges to effective business analysis and improvement. The importance of applying business process simulation to ana- lyze and improve business activities has been widely recognized. However, one remaining challenge is the development of approaches to human resource behavior simulation. To ad- dress this problem, we describe a novel simulation approach where intelligent agents are used to simulate human resources by performing allocated work from a workflow manage- ment system. The behavior of the intelligent agents is driven a by state transition mechan- ism called a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN). We demonstrate and validate our simulator via a medical treatment process case study. Analysis of the simulation results shows that the behavior driven by the HTN is consistent with design of the workflow model. We be- lieve these preliminary results support the development of more sophisticated agent-based human resource simulation systems.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
CFP: Cultures in Virtual Worlds
Cultures in virtual worlds
A special issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia
Guest-edited by Jeremy Hunsinger and Adrienne Massanari
Virtual worlds (VW) embody cultures, their artefacts, and their praxes; these new and old spaces of imagination and transformation allow humans to interact in spatial dimensions. Within these spaces, culture manifests with the creation, representation, and circulation of meaningful experiences. But virtual worlds are not novel in that regard, nor should we make the mistake to assume that they are novel in themselves. Virtual experiences have been around in some respect for hundreds of years, and virtual worlds based in information technology have existed for at least 40 years. The current generation of virtual worlds, with roots over four decades old in studies of virtual reality, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), sociology, cultural studies, and related topics, provide for rich and occasionally immersive environments where people become enculturated within the world sometimes as richly as the rest of their everyday lives.
We seek research that encounters and investigates cultures in virtual worlds in its plurality and in its richness. To that end, we invite papers covering the breadth of the topic of cultures in and of virtual worlds.
Some possible areas/approaches of inquiry:
1. How culture of virtual worlds affect relationships
2. VW interfaces and culture/s
3. Hidden subcultures/communities in virtual worlds
4. Ages and VW cultures
5. Emic and etic experiences of virtual worlds
6. Producing VW cultures
7. Traditional cultural/critical studies inquiries of VWs
8. Transnational or cosmopolitan cultures in/of VWs
While all forms of scholarship and research are welcome, we prefer theoretically and empirically grounded studies. We seek a Special Issue that exemplifies methodological pluralism and scholarly diversity. The use of visual evidence and representations is also encouraged. We especially seek pieces that investigate virtual worlds that have received little scholarly attention.
Submission guidelines
This special issue is Guest-Edited by Jeremy Hunsinger (Virginia Tech) and Adrienne Massanari (Loyola University Chicago). Queries regarding the Special Issue should be directed to them at jhuns@vt.edu and amassanari@luc.edu. The Guest-Editors welcome contributions from both new researchers and those who are more well-established. Submitted manuscripts will be subject to peer review.
Length of papers will vary as per disciplinary expectations, but we encourage articles of around 7000 words (longer articles may be possible, if warranted). Short discussion papers of around 3000 words on relevant subjects are also welcomed as 'Technical Notes'. Detailed author submission guidelines are available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1361-4568&linktype=44.
Papers must be submitted via the journal’s online submissions system: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tham Please indicate that your submission is for the Special Issue on Culture in Virtual Worlds.
The special issue will be published in summer 2012.
Important dates:
November 11, 2011 Paper submission deadline
February 10, 2012 Author notification
May 5, 2012 Final copy due
Summer 2012 Publication
Jeremy Hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
Virginia Tech
A special issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia
Guest-edited by Jeremy Hunsinger and Adrienne Massanari
Virtual worlds (VW) embody cultures, their artefacts, and their praxes; these new and old spaces of imagination and transformation allow humans to interact in spatial dimensions. Within these spaces, culture manifests with the creation, representation, and circulation of meaningful experiences. But virtual worlds are not novel in that regard, nor should we make the mistake to assume that they are novel in themselves. Virtual experiences have been around in some respect for hundreds of years, and virtual worlds based in information technology have existed for at least 40 years. The current generation of virtual worlds, with roots over four decades old in studies of virtual reality, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), sociology, cultural studies, and related topics, provide for rich and occasionally immersive environments where people become enculturated within the world sometimes as richly as the rest of their everyday lives.
We seek research that encounters and investigates cultures in virtual worlds in its plurality and in its richness. To that end, we invite papers covering the breadth of the topic of cultures in and of virtual worlds.
Some possible areas/approaches of inquiry:
1. How culture of virtual worlds affect relationships
2. VW interfaces and culture/s
3. Hidden subcultures/communities in virtual worlds
4. Ages and VW cultures
5. Emic and etic experiences of virtual worlds
6. Producing VW cultures
7. Traditional cultural/critical studies inquiries of VWs
8. Transnational or cosmopolitan cultures in/of VWs
While all forms of scholarship and research are welcome, we prefer theoretically and empirically grounded studies. We seek a Special Issue that exemplifies methodological pluralism and scholarly diversity. The use of visual evidence and representations is also encouraged. We especially seek pieces that investigate virtual worlds that have received little scholarly attention.
Submission guidelines
This special issue is Guest-Edited by Jeremy Hunsinger (Virginia Tech) and Adrienne Massanari (Loyola University Chicago). Queries regarding the Special Issue should be directed to them at jhuns@vt.edu and amassanari@luc.edu. The Guest-Editors welcome contributions from both new researchers and those who are more well-established. Submitted manuscripts will be subject to peer review.
Length of papers will vary as per disciplinary expectations, but we encourage articles of around 7000 words (longer articles may be possible, if warranted). Short discussion papers of around 3000 words on relevant subjects are also welcomed as 'Technical Notes'. Detailed author submission guidelines are available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1361-4568&linktype=44.
Papers must be submitted via the journal’s online submissions system: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tham Please indicate that your submission is for the Special Issue on Culture in Virtual Worlds.
The special issue will be published in summer 2012.
Important dates:
November 11, 2011 Paper submission deadline
February 10, 2012 Author notification
May 5, 2012 Final copy due
Summer 2012 Publication
Jeremy Hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
Virginia Tech
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