CHI 2011 Workshop – Opening Talk and Session 1 “Input Control” Videos Online

While CHI2011 maybe over we’re still a while away before the bbiCHI2011 workshop can officially wrap-up. For the next four weeks we’ll be releasing the videos we took of the presentated papers (see here for the full list). This week see’s the release of the opening talk Introducing Meaningful Interaction presented by Stephen Fairclough and the three talks presented during the Input Control session.

To view all four talks please click here. For guidance about session 1 talks please consult the abstracts listed below.
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Moodscope, subjective ratings and body blogging

Admin: Please welcome to the site our new Physiological Computing blogger.

My name is Ute Kreplin and I am a new PhD student at Liverpool John Moores University under the supervision of Dr Steven Fairclough. My PhD research topic is on Neuroaesthetics with a focus on “interest” in the aesthetic experience and its psychophysiological underpinnings. I am also very interested in positive psychology, which I am pursuing through studies at the University of East London. I am combining my interest in positive psychology and physiological computing in this blog, which will hopefully be my first of many.
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CFP – Special Session at ICMI 2011 “BCI and Multimodality”

The deadline for submissions to this special session has been extended to May 20th

Anton Nijholt from University of Twente and Rob Jacob from Tufts University are organizing a special session at ICMI 2011 on “BCI and Multimodality”. All ICMI sessions, including the special sessions, are plenary. Hence, having a special session during the ICMI conference means that there is the opportunity to address a broad audience and make them aware of new developments and special topics.  Clearly, if we look at BCI for non-medical applications a multimodal approach is natural. We can make use of knowledge about user, task, and context. Part of this information is available in advance, part of the information becomes available on-line in addition to EEG or fNIRS measured brain activity. The intended user is not disabled, he or she can use other modalities to pass commands and preferences to the system, and the system may also have information obtained from monitoring the mental state of the user. Moreover, it may be the case that different BCI paradigms can be employed in parallel or sequentially in multimodal (or hybrid) BCI applications.
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CFP – 2nd Workshop on Affective Brain-Computer Interfaces (aBCI)

Workshop at ACII 2011

http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/abci2011

http://www.acii2011.org

The second workshop on affective brain-computer interfaces will explore the advantages and limitations of using neuro-physiological signals as a modality for the automatic recognition of affective and cognitive states, and the possibilities of using this information about the user state in innovative and adaptive applications. The goal is to bring researchers from the communities of brain computer interfacing, affective computing, neuro-ergonomics, affective and cognitive neuroscience together to present state-of-the-art progress and visions on the various overlaps between those disciplines.

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CFP – 1st Workshop on Augmenting Social Interaction through Affective Computing

Just a quick note, I’ll be doing an update on the workshop later on the week (i.e. after I recover from my upcoming jetlag which I’m hestiantly waiting for as I board my flight home). In the meantime check out the following workshop on augmented social interaction.

Workshop at ACII 2011

http://www.augmenting-social-interaction.org

http://www.acii2011.org

Augmenting Social Interaction through Affective Computing is the first workshop on affective computing that specifically aims to improve or enhance social interaction among humans. Social interactions, whether mediated or face-to-face, can benefit significantly from advances in affective computing and social signal processing. Example application areas include mental healthcare, training and coaching, negotiation, and close intimate interactions. To address this topic, we invite submissions on the relation between social interaction between humans and affective computing technologies.

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REFLECT: Biocybernetic control with multiple loops

It has been said that every cloud has a silver lining and the only positive from chronic jet lag (Kiel and I arrived in Vancouver yesterday for the CHI workshop) is that it does give you a chance to catch up with overdue tasks.  This is a post I’d been meaning to write for several weeks about my involvement in the REFLECT project.

For the last three years, our group at LJMU have been working on a collaborative project called REFLECT funded by the EU Commission under the Future and Emerging Technology Initiative.  This project was centred around the concept of “reflective software” that responds implicitly to changes in user needs and in real-time.  A variety of physiological sensors are applied to the user in order to inform this kind of reflective adaptation.  So far, this is regular fare for anyone who’s read this blog before, being a standard set-up for a biocybernetic adaptation system.

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Will the Wii Vitality every reach 99% of all customers?

At a recent investor conference, Nintendo was rumoured to of stated that the reason the Wii Vitality has not been released was because it only works for 80% of players and before they release it they want it to work for 99%. If this issue concerns the physiological game mechanic (i.e. only 80% of players can control their physiology according to the requirements of the game mechanic), then the product will be on hold for a very long time.

Note: For the purposes of this post I’m going to assume Nintendo are experimenting with a heartbeat (HR) rate based biofeedback relaxation game which they’ve alluded to previously at E3 2009. However what I’m going to say applies equally to all physiological game mechanics I know of and should be borne in mind when developing your own physiological game.
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Time Keeps on a Slippin

Most people I know who work in the field of physiological computing purchase off-the-shelf sensors for their research. There’s nothing specifically wrong with this, most of us are not engineers and nor do we have the time to become one as our interests lie elsewhere. At LJMU all our equipment is off-the-shelf and we have some damn fine devices which we’ve used in our work (e.g. see my review of the BM CS-5 cheststrap). However I’ve noticed we place a lot of faith (and money) in these devices to do what they say on the tin (e.g. see the issue I raised last year about the software bundled with BioHarness). Personally I like to know the limitations of any equipment I’m using, and if I find anything outside the spec I’ll try to figure out why (sometimes to my detriment as you’ll see below). Its not that I’m particularly troubled if a sensor has any defects as I don’t expect them to be perfect, the problem I have is with defects I don’t know about as they can make things, problematic to say the least. For example the first off-the-shelf sensor I ever worked with was the WaveRider Pro a 4 channel biofeedback device which had a slight problem with counting time.

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