27. November 2008 by admin.

The EMAF is one of the most influential forums of international Media
Art. As an international meeting point for artists, curators, lenders,
gallery owners and an audience of specialists, the festival has had a
profound impact on the topic and aesthetics of Media Art for more than
two decades. The festival offers its visitors a current overview of
new experimental films, installations, performances, digital formats
and hybrid forms, ranging from personal and political subjects to
formal experiments and
provocative statements. In 2009, the festival will explore the areas
of long-term archival storage and the public options for use of Media
Art. The exhibition entitled Image Battles refers to the connection
between technological progress and the transformation of the images of
war using current Media Art and historical exhibits.

Cinema
We include experimental short and feature films, music videos, new
forms of narration and documentation as well as specials and
retrospectives. At the festival an international jury will present the
»EMAF Award« for trend-setting work in Media Art and the »Dialog
Award« of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the promotion of
intercultural exchange. Furthermore, the jury of the German Federal
Association of Film Journalists will award the prize for the best
German experimental film.

Exhibition
In collaboration with the Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche (Art
Hall/Dominican Church), the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Centre and the
Museum Industriekultur (Museum for Industrial Heritage), the EMAF will
present the exhibition »Image Battles ? 2000 years of news from the
war« from 22 April to 4 October 2009. You are warmly invited to submit
installations or media-sculptural works related to the theme of the
exhibition.

Expanded Media
Artistic projects of digital media, performances, music and sound
projects, as well as the latest concepts from expanded media.

International Student Forum
This forum acts as a meeting point and market where trends and
training concepts from the media universities, academies of art and
design colleges of Europe are presented.

Congress
The pilot project mediaartbase.de, funded by the German Federal
Cultura Foundation and Cultural Foundation of the German States, is in
the process of developing a digital platform which can be used by
institutions, universities and schools for research purposes. The
project focuses on the question: »What is the significance of media
archives for the public (art) sphere, in particular against the
backdrop of the new digital distribution channels?« Furthermore,
artistic positions from the various fields of
the festival will be discussed.

Concept and directors board: Hermann Noering, Alfred Rotert, Ralf Sausmikat

// SPONSORS
nordmedia - Die Mediengesellschaft Niedersachsen/Bremen mbH Stadt
Osnabrueck Auswaertiges Amt, Berlin Bundesministerium für Bildung und
Forschung, Berlin EU Commission - MEDIA Programme as well as donations
from further sponsors.

Contact/Address/Postal:

European Media Art Festival
Lohstrasse 45 a,
D-49074 Osnabrueck

phone +49 (0) 5 41 - 2 16 58
fax   +49 (0) 5 41 - 2 83 27
mail: info(at)emaf.de
www.emaf.de

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25. November 2008 by admin.

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
Proposal Submission Deadline: January 15, 2009
Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play
A book edited by Karen Schrier, Teachers College, Columbia University,
USA, and Dr. David Gibson, University of Vermont, USA
http://www.columbia.edu/~kls2108/callforchapters.htm

Submission Procedure
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before
January 15, 2009, a 2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the
mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of
accepted proposals will be notified by February 1, 2009 about the
status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters
are expected to be submitted by April 1, 2009. All submitted chapters
will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. This book is
scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.),
publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group
Reference) and “Medical Information Science Reference” imprints. For
additional information regarding the publisher, please visit
www.igi-global.com.

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25. November 2008 by admin.

       >> Call for Participation Deadline: December 19th <<

Contact:
AACE–Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education
P.O. Box 1545
Chesapeake, Virginia 23327  USA
Phone: 757-366-5606 * Fax: 703-997-8760
E-mail: conf@aace.org  *  http://www.AACE.org

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25. November 2008 by admin.

I’m working on a docugame about the Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verdean War of Independence. It is a first-person shooter designed to explore concepts in propaganda, emotion and perspective.  I have many other things I should be working on, but the idea just grabbed me. These prototypes screenshots demonstrate my weekend’s work:

I thought it would be interesting to create a game where the player is fighting the anti-democratic colonial force.  Here’s the situation:

The player is a Cape Verdean recruit in the PAIGC, the organization that gained freedom for Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau in 1974.  The player’s missions are centered on the tactics of the PAIGC, and the environment matches the Guinea Bissau environment. The player fights the Portuguese, in the 1970s

It is an attempt at creating an educational game with more traditional appeal.   I also really liked the parallel to current “terrorist” campaigns and flipping the protagonist to someone with whom we did not clearly ally ourselves then, but in hindsight may have.  Interestingly, China, Russia, and to a lesser extent Cuba did.  I witnessed China’s strong consumer base in Cape Verde first hand – they are still very much “profiting from this investment.” Although that’s honestly conjecture, as I’ve never seen what the profit margin is on a Chinese Loja.  

There are plenty of anaologies to be made, but one of the interesting claims made by people reporting about the war is that Portuguese effectively lost to the PAIGC because the incumbent Portuguese party was going bankrupt. I’m still doing the research, but I’m finding some really interesting info here.

Project Activities:

I completed the following so far (this took about 24 hours of this weekend – I let it consume the weekend)

·         Create 3D Models of environment (Portuguese Colonia Barracks, Portuguese Colonia Soldier, PAIGC Solider, Guinea Bissau Village Hut, Chinese weapons’ box)

·         Create Game Environment (trees, grass system, artificial intelligence, etc)

·         Create Game Missions (Mission 1 is to sabotage, mission 2 is to fight, mission 3 is a surprise J )

I have the first two missions completed, and if I have time I’ll move on to the next. 

The AI is pretty basic:  a way point system with incidental logic. The players have individual attack logic (or greet logic for friendlies), group attack, etc. I put together a subtitle system for giving missions, and I slapped together the rough models you see in the screenshots.  

Resources:

·         Military Photos.net: I could only find a few reference images of the war, which is listed as one of the worlds atrocities (15K died during the 10 year “war for independence”).   
Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cape Verde: Lobban and Lopes

·         A couple of websites via Stanford’s library, that offer 1960-1974 era pictures of Africa (Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Cape Verde)

·         A few records of Mar Verde, one of the big offensives from the war.

I can share the rest when I pull them all back together.  I’ll need to do this for the website I’ll create anyway.

Oh, and I might have just coined the term docugame, but who knows, someone must have used it before me.

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25. November 2008 by admin.

IEEE Potentials and IEEE Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) are dedicated
to serving the needs of undergraduate and graduate students as well as
engineers who have graduated within the last ten years. To this end, IEEE
Potentials is seeking articles of relevance to young engineers that will be
published in a special GOLD-themed edition in March 2009. Article subjects
are explored through timely manuscripts with a goal of assisting readers on
a technical, professional, and personal level. If you’re an engineer who
has cutting-edge technical ideas, formulated concepts about what will work,
advice about professional/career development, or opinions about the forces
that influence the problem-solving process, IEEE Potentials would like to
hear from you. IEEE Potentials is interested in manuscripts that deal with
theory, practical applications, or new research. They can be tutorial in
nature. Submissions may consist of either full articles or shorter,
opinion-oriented essays. When submitting an article, please remember:

All manuscripts should be written at the level of the audience who are
students and engineers who have graduated within the last ten years.

• Articles without equations are preferred; however, a minimum of
equations is acceptable.

• List no more than 12 references at the end of your manuscript. No
embedded reference numbers should be included in the text. If you need to
attribute the source of key points or quotes, state names in the text and
give the full reference at the end.

• Limit figures to 10 or less.

• Articles should be approximately 2,000-4,000 words in length; essays
should be 900-1,000 words.

• Include a brief biography of four to six lines for each author.

• Please state your IEEE membership number(s) and membership level,
including whether you are a GOLD member.

Submit your articles on or before 1 December, 2008 to:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pot-ieee
For inquiries please e-mail Adrian Pais at a.pais@ieee.org.

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19. November 2008 by admin.

Call for Papers/Abstracts and Invited Sessions Proposals for The 3rd
International Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication and
Management: KGCM 2009 (http://www.2009iiisconferences.org/kgcm). It
will take place in Orlando, Florida, USA, on July 10th - 13th, 2009.

Deadlines:
Papers/Abstracts Submissions and Invited Sessions Proposals: December 19th, 2008
Authors Notifications: January 14th, 2009
Camera-ready, full papers: February 11th, 2009
——————————————————-

MainTopics:

Knowledge Communication
Knowledge Generation
Knowledge Management
Knowledge Engineering
Knowledge Representation
Knowledge Communication and Conferences
Knowledge Verification and Validation
Peer Reviewing
Scientific and Technical Publishing
Electronic Publishing
Electronic Libraries

All Submitted papers/abstracts will go through three reviewing
processes: (1) double-blind (at least three reviewers), (2) non-blind,
and (3) participative peer reviews. All accepted papers of registered
authors will be included in both the printed and the CD versions of
the proceedings.

Awards will be granted to the best paper of those presented at each
session. From these session’s best papers, the best 10%-20% of the
papers presented at the conference will be invited to adapt their
papers for their publication in the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics
and Informatics, with no additional cost for their authors.

For Invited Sessions Proposals, please go to the conference web site
or, directly, to http://www.2009iiisconferences.org/KGCM/organizer.asp

KGCM 2009 Organizing Committee

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17. November 2008 by admin.

My quick little game for a politics seminar made it on you tube.  A few hours worth of work at best. Basically, you help Clinton evade scandals and collect support. You can shoot the bad guys with your saxaphone music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwt0q7SdEt4

The game is here:

http://gamefiction.com/games/

Just to clarify, I liked Clinton.  His record was strong, and items like FMLA seem essential to me.

Posted in Idea Junkyard | Print | No Comments »

17. November 2008 by admin.

WIN VR09 is co-organized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
and the French Society of Mechanical Engineering (AFM).

The main topics of WIN VR’09 include but not limited to the following areas:

-          Trends in Virtual Reality: Towards low-cost approaches
-          Innovative Virtual Reality for SME’s: Development & Application
-          Virtual Reality Technologies, Methods and Applications
-          Advanced Interfaces
-          Virtual reality in Industrial Systems Design
-          Virtual Reality Applications: Human Factors Issues
-          Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality
-          Collaborative Virtual Reality
-          Virtual Reality in Education and Training

Additional information are available in the conference website:
http://www.asmeconferences.org/WINVR09/.

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16. November 2008 by admin.

2nd Call for Artworks and Art Projects,
Papers, Exhibitions, curated shows, Workshops, Open Spaces and more
ACROSS EIGHT SUB-THEMES
Deadline 17th of November 2008

Descriptors of Artworks and Art Projects, Papers, Exhibitions, curated
shows, Workshops, Open Spaces and abstracts for papers are sought for ISEA
2009 that will illuminate both the near and long term Future of Digital
Media Culture. Papers which present research outcomes, track trends or
developments, describe case studies or works in progress, are speculative
projection, challenge existing paradigms or record a history, are all
welcome. Submissions are encouraged from any professional, craft or
scholarly field that relates to communications art/design, cultural
expression, practice and aesthetics, and the technical means by which they
are enabled.

The sub-themes:
Citizenship and contested spaces
Interactive storytelling and memory building in post-conflict society
Interactive textiles
Tracking emotions
Posthumanism: New technologies and creative strategies
Positionings: local and global transactions
Transformative creativity - participatory practices
Entertainment and Mobility

GO TO www.isea2009.org to make your proposal online NOW!

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15. November 2008 by admin.

( http://3dor.ge.imati.cnr.it/ <http://3dor.ge.imati.cnr.it/>  )

March 29, 2009
Munich, Germany

3D content is now widely recognized as the upcoming wave of digital media. Inexperience and professional users are becoming more and more actively involved in the content creation pipeline and ask for intuitive and effective tools for creating, sharing, retrieving and re-using 3D content. Search and retrieval of 3D objects is therefore rapidly become a key issue in the upcoming panorama of multimedia content, both in general usage scenarios, such as online gaming or 3D social networks, and in scientific domains, such as molecular biology and medicine. The development of efficient search mechanisms is required for the effective retrieval of 3D objects from large repositories, both of a single class (such as human faces) and across classes.

The aim of this workshop is to stimulate researchers from different fields (computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning, human-computer interaction, semantic web) who work on the common goal of 3D object retrieval, to present state-of-the-art work in the field and thus provide a cross-fertilization ground that will stimulate discussions on the next steps in this important research area.  

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to :

- 3D object similarity and matching
- 3D Object classification, indexing, and mining
- Feature extraction, model decomposition and segmentation
- Partial and many-to-many matching
- Matching under uncertainty and noise
- Query interfaces and search modalities
- Multi-level representations for matching and retrieval
- Semantics-driven 3D object retrieval and classification
- Sketch-based retrieval
- Benchmarking issues
- Relevance feedback methods
- Active learning
- Generative / Discriminative approaches in 3D object categorisation
- Applications in Multimedia industry
- Applications in CAD industry
- Applications in Games industry
- Applications in Biometrics
- Applications in e-Science
- Applications in e-Learning
- Applications in Medicine and Biology
- Applications in Cultural Heritage

Important Dates

Submission deadline: Friday, January 9, 2009 (24:00 GMT)
Notification of acceptance: Friday, February 20, 2009
Camera-ready papers deadline: Thursday, February 26, 2009
Workshop: Sunday, March 29, 2009 (one full day)

Organisation

Workshop Chairs

Ioannis Pratikakis  ( IIT / NCSR ‘Demokritos’, Greece )
Michela Spagnuolo ( IMATI / CNR, Italy )

Programme Chairs

Theoharis Theoharis ( Department of Informatics, University of Athens, Greece )
Remco Veltkamp, ( Utrecht University, NL )

International Programme Committee

Yiannis Aloimonos (UMIACS, USA)
Philipos Azariadis (University of the Aegean, Greece)
Alberto Del Bimbo (University of Florence, Italy)
Petros Daras (Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece)
Bianca Falcidieno (IMATI-CNR, Italy)
Dieter W. Fellner (Fraunhofer IGD, Germany)
Daniela Giorgi (IMATI-CNR, Italy)
Frank Ter Haar (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Simone Marini (IMATI-CNR, Italy)
Ron Kimmel (Technion, Israel)
Georgios Papaioannou (AUEB, Greece)
Nicholas Patrikalakis (MIT, USA)
Stavros Perantonis (IIT / NCSR Demokritos, Greece)
Karthik Ramani (Purdue University, USA)
William Regli (Drexel University, USA)
Marcos Rodrigues (University of Sheffield, UK)
Nikolaos Sapidis (University of the Aegean, Greece)
Dietmar Saupe (University of Konstanz, Germany)
Francis Schmitt (TELECOM ParisTech, France)
Ariel Shamir (Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, Israel)
Daniel Thalmann (EPFL, Switzerland)
Theodore Trafalis (University of Oklahoma, USA)
Titus Zaharia (Institut National des Telecommunications, France)

Contact Information

Ioannis PRATIKAKIS
Computational Intelligence Laboratory
Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications
National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”
15310 Athens, Greece
Tel:     +30-210-650 3183
E-mail: ipratika@iit.demokritos.gr

Michela SPAGNUOLO
Istituto per la Matematica Applicata e le Tecnologie Informatiche
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Via De Marini, 6 - 16149 Genova
Phone: +39-0106475677 Fax: +39-0106475660
Email: spagnuolo@ge.imati.cnr.it

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