Sunday, December 21, 2008

A Good Journal Finally...

Elsevier have come up with a high quality journal for Entertainment Computing. This can only benefit the development of an Entertainment Computing as an academic discipline. Many of the journals that have been created in this area have lacked rigour, this will be a welcome space to publish.

Ross

MPEG-V Standard


Metaverse1 has put forward a proposal for an MPEG-V data standard for Virtual Worlds. I view SL and other virtual worlds as visualisation front-ends for application domains - in my case Business Process Management. It can only benefit these applications if interoperability standards are implemented, enabling the easy incorporation of information from other sources, and thus the easy creation of virtual world applications. Second Life is quite well setup for such service oriented computing via HTTP request from scripts, but it could be better. So hopefully this standard will catch on soon.
Ross

Sunday, December 14, 2008

IP and Research Threats.

Seems our friends at worlds.com are keen to get mit alpha male on our collective virtual posteriors. Worlds.com is seeking to enforces its patents on Virtual World technology.

Not particularly worried about the commercial side of things, it is just the Open Source issues that concern me. Open Source facilitates much research, and if Worlds.com decide to try and monopolise the area, then researchers like me and my kith and kin are in trouble, as they can dictate very restrictive terms on the use of software.

I will be following this one very closely indeed.

Ross

Thursday, December 11, 2008

And the manifold keeps turning...

I was reading BoingBoing over my cup of crap Nescafe 43 blend (ran out of grounds) this morning, and came across these exquisite sculptures of financial charts by Andreas Nicolas Fischer, an artist in Berlin. The one on the left reminded me of some early images of computer graphics from the 70/80s. Apart from the aesthetic beauty of the data representations, the fact that they are in real 3D aids insight into understanding the underlying data. All present displays are 2D in nature, even stereo is just a 2D display incorporating parallax to fool the eye, thus confusion can result with large amounts of data. At the moment we can use 3D printers, but they are definitely a batch oriented solution - like old school computer graphics.

What we need is a Real-Time 3D Printer/Display...but that might be a while off.

Ross

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Apply now: OII Summer Doctoral Programme 2009, Brisbane, Australia

I am delighted to announce that we are accepting applications for the OII Summer Doctoral Programme 2009, to be hosted this year by our partners at the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia.

OII SDP 2009: Brisbane (6-17 July, 2009) http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/teaching/sdp/

The programme aims to stretch the thinking of all students on a range of issues, to provide valuable advice and support for students' thesis research, and to establish a peer network of excellent young researchers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the thematic focus this year will be on 'Creativity, Innovation and the Internet': our partners on the SDP since 2003, the Creative Industries Faculty is at the forefront of pioneering international research initiatives in creative industries policy, applied creative industries research, digital media design, and the creative and performing arts.

As in previous years, the programme will involve daily research seminars and panel sessions given by leading academics, with students having the opportunity to present their research to their peers in informal seminars. Break-out sessions will allow groups to focus more narrowly on research questions of mutual interest, and time is made available for individual research and informal contact with tutors and fellow students.

Student feedback on the Summer Doctoral has always been overwhelmingly positive, and the SDP 2009 promises to be yet another excellent year in this series. I hope you will consider applying, encourage your students to apply, or forward this email to people who may be interested! Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any queries.

Best wishes,
Dr Victoria Nash
Director of Graduate Studies, Oxford Internet Institute

http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/teaching/sdp/
mailto:sdp@oii.ox.ac.uk

BPMVE at BPTrends.com

Our work at QUT in using Second Life and YAWL to visualise business processes has made its way to the popular website www.bptrends.com, run by Paul Harmon.

The link to the article is here.

Ross

Monday, December 1, 2008

International Workshop on Smart Services for Smart Worlds (SS4SW)

International Workshop on Smart Services for Smart Worlds (SS4SW)
http://www.ss4sw.org/
Explore new applications, business ideas and research challenges
at the intersection of things and services
Colocated with the UIC-09 Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing
Brisbane,Australia, 7-10 July, 2009

=============================================================================

* IMPORTANT DATES
Feb 15, 2009 Paper submission deadline
Mar 25, 2009 Authors notificaton
Apr 10, 2009 Camera-ready papers due

* AIM & SCOPE
Services are the dominant type of economic activity in industrialized economies. The term Internet of Services relates to the representation and (partial) execution of services - in the
economic sense - in the Internet. Many issues around the mapping between economic services
and services in the IT sense are still unresolved. Additionally, only a small fraction of services
are entirely dematerialized; the vast majority of services ultimately relate to things in the real
world: to the Internet of Things. The Ubiquitous Computing community has already made
considerable advances in closing the information gap between services and things. One well-known example is the use of RFID tags in logistics. Yet this is only the beginning, there still
exists a largely untapped source of innovation at the junction of services and things.
This workshop is about bringing together industry and academia to explore how advances in
ubiquitous computing techniques can help improve existing economic services and create
opportunities for new services. We are also interested in how services can add value to smart
things. This is a forum for industry to learn about recent advances in both services and
Ubicomp and also for researchers to learn about the problems faced by industry that may
spark new research questions and the next wave of Ubicomp applications. We solicit a) technical papers with a proven original scientific contribution and b) systematic, well-founded experience reports and requirements / demands analyses. Core IT papers and papers at the boundary of technology and business or humanities are also invited.

We also welcome contributions that address solely the topic of services, independently of
ubiquitous computing, since we believe this also contributes to cross-fertilization of ideas in
the context of UIC-09. Technical, business and legal aspects of services all have their place
here.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Identification of services in existing systems and business processes
_ Approaches for fostering the creation, use and re-use of services
- Aggregation, brokerage and re-purposing of services
- Personalisation of services to classes of users and individual users
- Channels and technologies for accessing services
- Service lifecycle management
- Legal aspects of service ecosystems
- New business models enabled by smart things
- Doing business better, cheaper, faster, greener with smart things
- Economics and sustainability of using smart things
- Applications of things and services in media and advertisement
- Applications of things and services to delivering healthcare and services to citizens
- Applications of things and services to manufacturing and supply chain management
- Lifecycle management of smart things
- Discovering services through smart things
- Discovering smart things using services
- Machine-process able representations of services stored in smart things
- Linking smart things to their related services
- Representation of real world things in virtual worlds
- Running services inside smart things
- Privacy and security issues with things and services

* SUBMISSION & DISSEMINATION
We invite all researchers to participate by submitting an original paper of up to 6 pages in IEEE
CS style. Please see the workshop website for document templates and for details on the
submission procedure. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two members of the PC.
Accepted papers will be published by the IEEE in a single volume with proceedings from all UIC-
09 workshops. Extended versions of the best papers may be invited for publication in a journal
at a later stage.

* WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Dr. Julien Vayssière (Smart Services CRC, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Dr. Erwin Aitenbichler (TU Darmstadt, Germany)

* PROGRAM COMMITTEE (in alphabetical order)
Dr. Erwin Aitenbichler (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Dr. Alistair Barros (SAP Research Brisbane, Australia)
Dr. Ross Brown (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Prof. Michael Fry (University of Sydney, Australia)
Dr. Tim Mansfield (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Prof. S. Panchanathan (Arizona State University, USA)
Prof. Michael Rosemann (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Dr. Rainer Ruggaber (SAP Research Karlsruhe, Germany)
Dr. Sharad Singhal (HP Labs Palo Alto, USA)
Dr. Julien Vayssière (Smart Services CRC, Australia)
A/Prof. Wayne Wobcke (University of New South Wales, Australia)

* LOCAL CHAIR
Dr. Julien Vayssière (Smart Services CRC, Australia)

* WORKSHOP WEBSITE
htp://www.ss4sw.org/