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Friday Afternoon Club Events
Digital Culture Showcase
Friday, April 20
noon–5 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
ASU Tempe Campus
Featuring projects and performances from students in the ASU School of Arts, Media and Engineering's Digital Culture program, the Digital Culture Showcase will be a lively, entertaining day of interactive digital media. Come see the cutting edge projects that students are creating from interactive performances to sound installations and web-based projects
The installations will be available throughout the day and performances will be held from 3-3:30 p.m., followed by a project pitch contest from 3:30-4:30 p.m.
High Five: AME Graduate Presentations
Friday, April 13
3–4 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
ASU Tempe Campus
Come hear AME graduate students share their work with faculty, students, and community members in a series of lightweight but rapid-fire presentations. With a format inspired by Pecha Kucha, Ignite, and similar styles, the event will be lively and fast-paced way to find out about AME research.
KARLAX: Real time absolute control
Philippe Geiss, Superior School of Arts in Strasbourg, France
Friday, March 16
4–5 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
ASU Tempe Campus
Philippe Geiss was one of the first musicians to work on Karlax developpement with Remi Dury, the inventor. He has performed with the Karlax throughout Europe, Japan & South America.
This new multimedia controller is a great link between sound, gesture and visual art. Philippe Geiss works on how to integrate the Karlax in performances, compositions and teaching. There is a quickly growing research community around this new instrument. Geiss will share his experience and talk about amazing Karlax possibilities.
Philippe Geiss is a saxophonist, Karlist, composer and Professor at the Superior School of Arts in Strasbourg, France. He is a research and development member of Selmer saxophones, Rico reeds & Da Fact instruments and a beta tester for Karlax. Geiss is one of the first musicians from the French saxophone school who has built his own “crossover” style between classical and improvised music and plays the entire saxophone family from sopranino to bass saxophone. As an active musician worldwide, Philippe has given concerts and master classes all over the world.
For many years, Geiss has been very involved in instrument research & development. He develops reeds with Rico, saxophones with Selmer Paris and electronic instruments with Da Fact. He just started to work on the Karlax, a new electronic instrument that can control sound, light and video by keys, switches and gestures.
As a composer, his music has been performed by renowned musicians and ensembles including the U.S. Navy Band, Brandford Marsalis, Nederland Wind Ensemble, Slovenian Police Orchestra, Trombonissimo and leading saxophone quartets including Habanera, Alliage Diastema, Ellipsos and more. Philippe’s own musical style lies somewhere between contemporary classical, jazz and world music. His compositions include works for beginners to high level performers and he is published by Robert Martin, Billaudot and Leduc. For more about Geiss, visit his website.
Making it LIVE! Collaborative Performance-Based Video Installations
Carole Kim
Friday, March 9
3–4:30 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
ASU Tempe Campus
For nearly 15 years I’ve been intent on pulling the moving image off the big screen, out of the monitor, removed from a fixed timeline and into space. At every juncture of its delivery, I’ve pushed the medium in all kinds of ways in an attempt to make it as LIVE, and expressive–in–the–moment as possible. Through the use of translucent scrims, I am intrigued by the insertion of actual space between the layers of projected image–compositing with the eye through physical space. There is a different quality to this three–dimensional compositing that can appear more atmospheric and allows for the space to navigate between. Immersion has been an important keyword in the circles of media artists working with installation. The immersion I am seeking has less to do with an “augmented reality” or “virtual reality” than a hybrid space in which both illusory and actual merge together in an “other worldly” environment. The use of live–feed cameras amplifies the concept of instantaneity to the work. That which is “live” and “mediated” are presented in an integrated manner.
The kind of collaboration that interests me most stems from establishing a group dynamic that places equal weight on what each person contributes—no medium is serving another. Such initiatives yield a generative hybrid that defies categorical definition. I am also more interested in performance as discovery rather than a presentation of an idealized outcome. When all disciplines are riding the edge equally, it creates an arena for heightened exchange in the moment.
I am invested in emergent technologies in so far as their potential for metaphorical and experiential impact—how the technology helps create situations entirely unlike anything one would encounter in the every day and what that means. Projects have ranged from the use of a live laptop mix to working with streaming media feedback loops, audio–visual interfaces, multi–site network–based performance, and live multi–channel spatialized installation/performances. Although the projects I mount can be fairly complex, I seek to handle technology with subtlety and consideration towards a distilled form of poetic expression and phenomenology.
Carole Kim is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on live video performance and performance–based video installation. She explores video for its most tactile, expressive and responsive potential as a live medium. Kim is interested in the experiential impact of emergent technologies and their metaphorical potential. She seeks an integration of media where moving image, sound, dance and space are on equal planes engaging in a dynamic reciprocating and mutually supportive dialogue. Kim’s installations are hybrid spaces in which the illusory and actual (i.e. mediated and live) merge together in an “other worldly” environment. (MFA – California Institute of the Arts, Film/Video/Integrated Media; MFA – Cranbrook Academy of Art, Printmaking; BA – Brown University)
'Style-Based Robotic Motion' And 'Choreographic Abstractions in Robotics'
Amy LaViers and Magnus Egerstedt
Georgia Tech
Friday, January 27
3–4:30 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
ASU Tempe Campus
How do you get a robot to do the disco? Or perform a cheerleading routine? These acts involve understanding two distinct movement styles. In this talk, we posit that “style of motion” can be taken into account in a principled manner: through discrete motion sequencing followed by trajectory generation for each motion. The talk explains how formal methods such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) and existing dance theory, namely that of Rudolf Laban, can be used to generate stylistic behavior. Distinct stylized motion sequences built from the same underlying building blocks animated on the NAO humanoid robot and in simulation will demonstrate the overarching objective of the research: to facilitate subtle degrees of control over systems through a useful parameterization for stylistic human movement.
Amy LaViers is a third year graduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. She studies movement and dance through the lens of robotics and control theory with Prof. Magnus Egerstedt. With her PhD, she hopes to push our understanding of dance and develop tools for artists using quantitative methods from engineering. This exploration began with her senior thesis, Learning the Primary Colors of Dance, at Princeton University where she earned a certificate in dance and degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The thesis won top honors in her both of her academic departments and the School of Applied Science and Engineering. In Atlanta she dances every chance she gets. This past fall she was lucky to be a part of Emily Christianson’s Shaken and is currently working on a piece with Susan Eldridge’s company, DENSE.
When programming robots to perform tasks, one is inevitably forced to make abstractions at different levels in order to answer questions such as “What should the robot be doing?” and “How should it be doing it?” In this talk, we draw inspiration from choreography in order to produce these abstractions in a systematic manner. Manifestations of this idea will include robotic marionettes and humanoid, dancing robots that execute complex motions and we will develop a formal framework for specifying and executing such motions by combining tools and techniques from control theory and choreography.
Magnus B. Egerstedt is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Division of Interactive and Intelligent Computing with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Magnus Egerstedt received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology in 1996 and 2000 respectively, and he received the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University in 1996. Dr. Egerstedt’s research interests include hybrid and networked control, with applications in motion planning, control, and coordination of mobile robots, and he serves as Editor for Electronic Publications for the IEEE Control Systems Society and Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. Magnus Egerstedt is the director of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (GRITS Lab), is a Fellow of the IEEE, received the ECE/GT Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2005, and the CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2003.
Leveraging Intelligent Tutoring, Natural Language Processing, and Games to Improve Education
Danielle S. McNamara
Learning Sciences Institute
Psychology Department
Arizona State University
Friday, January 20
3–4 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
ASU Tempe Campus
Dr. Danielle S. McNamara recently joined ASU as a Professor in the Psychology Department and Senior Scientist in the Learning Sciences Institute. Her academic background includes a Linguistics B.A. (1982), a Clinical Psychology M.S. (1989), and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology (1992; UC–Boulder). Her research involves the development and assessment of game–based intelligent tutoring systems, natural language processing, and the use of interactive dialog in automated tutoring systems. She and her team of researchers have developed a number of educational technologies (e.g., iSTART–ME, Coh–Metrix, and the Writing–Pal) with a particular focus on providing students with training and practice to use strategies to improve comprehension and writing. Their research examines how the benefits of these automated tutoring systems depend on individual differences and can be optimized for individual learners. One particular focus of their work is on developing methods to improve success for struggling high school students. Dr. McNamara will describe these technologies, the foundational research that led to the development of these systems, and their recent work showing their effectiveness. She will also discuss the relative benefits of game–based learning — when it may be beneficial, and when it may not be.
Deborah Aschheim
Friday, January 13
3–4 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
ASU Tempe Campus
Deborah Aschheim makes installations based on invisible networks of memory and perception. For the past five years, she has been trying to understand and visualize memory, a subject that has led her to collaborate with musicians and neuroscientists. Aschheim will present recent work: sprawling and delicate webs of video and light that map her memories across the gallery spaces, and sound–sculptures from her collaboration with San Francisco musician/composer Lisa Mezzacappa that translate Aschheim’s memory for language into music, as well as a new series that considers the interrelationship of memory and place.
Deborah Aschheim has had solo and group exhibitions at across the United States, including the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA; the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC; Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MO; the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, PA; Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA; Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA. She recently exhibited a five year survey of her work about memory at San Diego State University Art Gallery. She is a 2011–2012 California Community Foundation Fellow, and from 2009–11 she was the Hellman Visiting Artist at the Memory and Aging Center in the Neurology Department at the University of California, San Francisco medical school.
Digital Culture Showcase
Friday, December 2
Noon–5 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
ASU Tempe Campus
Featuring projects and performances from students in ASU School of Arts, Media and Engineering's Digital Culture program, the Digital Culture Show will be a lively, entertaining day of interactive digital media. Come see the cutting edge projects that students are creating from interactive performances to sound installations and web–based projects.
The installations will be available throughout the day and performances will be held from 3–4 p.m.
An information session about the newly approved BA in Digital Culture will be held by the School of Arts, Media and Engineering Director Thanassis Rikakis from 1–2 p.m. in Stauffer B125. Anyone who is interested in learning about the new degree is welcome to attend.
Body/Machine vs. Brain/Machine interfaces
Sandro Mussa–Ivaldi
Friday, November 18
3–4 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
Tempe Campus
The current frontier in brain–machine interface concerns the establishment of effective bi–directional, closed loop interactions. This, in practice, means connecting the decoding problem with the problem of encoding state information in patterns of stimuli. The body–machine interface is based on the idea of redirecting the available mobility to control external devices. Many of the encoding/decoding issues are analogous to the brain/machine communication. But the body–machine interface aims not only at controlling devices, but also at empowering paralyzed people to use their intact body skills and to develop new forms of motor dexterity. My goal is to have a discussion about challenges and directions in these two related fields.
Sandro Mussa–Ivaldi was born in Torino (Italy). He graduated in physics from the University of Torino with a thesis on the oculo–motor system. In 1987 he obtained a PhD in biomedical engineering from the Politecnico of Milano. In 1982 he moved to the United States, to work at MIT in the laboratory of Emilio Bizzi in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Although he planned to stay there for a brief training period, he left 11 years later to take a faculty position in Chicago at Northwestern University, where he is currently Professor of Physiology, Physical medicine and Rehabilitation and Biomedical Engineering. He joined the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and founded the Robotics Laboratory, dedicated to the study of human motor learning and to the rehabilitation after stroke and spinal cord injury through the interaction with intelligent machines. His areas of interest and expertise include robotics, neurobiology of the sensory–motor system, motor learning and computational neuroscience.
Career Advice for Digital Creators
Patrick Koppula
Friday, October 21
3–4 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
Tempe Campus
Zynga and Facebook are desperate to hire more people, but they reject most applicants. Come hear the surprising truth of what makes a candidate stand out in the current digital culture job market.
Speaker: Patrick Koppula is co–founder of three digital culture startups: ffwd, iLike and GarageBand; a mentor to seed funds, incubators, and venture capital portfolios; and an advocate for making entrepreneurship more accessible.
Daragh Byrne
Assistant Research Professor, School of Arts, Media and Engineering
Friday, September 30
3–4 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
Tempe Campus
Our life stories enable us to reflect upon and share our personal histories. Through emerging digital technologies the possibility of collecting life experiences digitally is increasingly feasible; consequently so is the potential to create a digital counterpart to our personal narratives. Lifelogging tools can be used to collect digital artifacts continuously and passively throughout our day. These include images, documents, emails and webpages accessed; texts messages and mobile activity. This range of data when brought together is known as a lifelog. Given the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections, it is clear that there are significant challenges to be addressed in order to achieve coherent and meaningful digital narratives of our events from our life histories.
This presentation will explore the construction of personal digital narratives from lifelog collections. It describes the organization and transformation of data sampled from an individual's day–to–day activities into a coherent narrative account. Inspired by probative studies conducted into current practices of curation, from which a set of fundamental requirements were established, a 2–dimensional spatial framework will be motivated as a suitable platform for storytelling. The talk will also discuss the development of tool support to support this storytelling endeavour and the provision of computational support for the the structuring of lifelog content and its distillation into storyform through information retrieval approaches. It will also discuss qualitative and quantitative insights into such digital narratives and their generation, composition and construction yielded from this investigation. Finally, in a novel investigation with motivated third parties we demonstrate the opportunities such narrative accounts may have beyond the scope of the collection owner in: personal, societal and cultural explorations, artistic endeavours and as a generational heirloom.
Daragh Byrne is an Assistant Research Professor with the School of Arts Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. He defended his PhD at Dublin City University (DCU) in August 2011, and also holds a M.Res. degree in Design and Evaluation of Advanced Interactive Systems from Lancaster University and a BSc in Computer Applications from DCU. He has additionally published over 30 scientific papers and the majority of his work is situated within the lifelogging domain, or the capture of personal experience through digital means. His doctoral work focused on the creation of personal digital stories from long–term multimodal lifelog content.
Technological Advances in Stroke Rehabilitation: Opportunities and Challenges
Friday, September 23
3–4:30 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
Tempe Campus
PANEL THEME:
Stroke is the leading cause of serious, long–term disability in the United States. Four of every five American families will be touched by stroke during their lifetime. Advancements in technology are exposing new avenues for diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of stroke survivors. These technological advancements range from improved brain scanning techniques, to rehabilitation robotics, interactive media therapy, tele–rehabilitation and computerized databases and registries. Emerging research findings, in conjunction with better technological tools, also foster a better understanding of the complex network of influences that impact the health condition of stroke survivors. However, while technology and research in stroke therapy are advancing , increasing costs and continuously reduced resources are limiting the treatment duration and long term care for stroke survivors. This decline in services continues to escalate despite current research findings showing that long–term therapy can positively impact functional recovery. This panel will discuss the opportunities offered by new technologies, research questions that still demand exploration about the impact of new technologies in stroke rehabilitation and the clarification of challenges to provide long–term, individualized, evidence–based care for stroke survivors.
PANELISTS:
Steve L. Wolf is professor in the departments of Rehab Medicine, Medicine, and Cell Biology at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. He has defined the selection criteria for the application of EMG biofeedback to restore upper extremity function among chronic patients with stroke. He recently completed his role as Principal Investigator for the NIH nationally funded EXCITE Trial, the first multi–center Phase III non–surgical, non–pharmacological, upper extremity stroke rehabilitation study ever funded by the NIH. He has many publications and has given frequent national and international presentations on these topics. He is the recipient of numerous rehabilitation research awards.
W. Zev Rymer serves as the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) John G. Searle Chair in Rehabilitation Research and is director of the Sensory Motor Performance Program, a position he has held since 1987. He oversees all research endeavors throughout the RIC system of care. He is the RIC's most senior scientist and the founder of many of its current research programs. Dr. Rymer holds appointments as professor of physiology and biomedical engineering at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and at the Hines VA Hospital in Hines, Ill.
Claude P. Ghez is professor of Neuroscience and Neurology at Columbia University. He investigates the neural mechanisms underlying the control of voluntary movements in normal human subjects and patients with motor disorders. In particular he studies the execution of aimed movements and examine the implicit and explicit aspects of learning necessary for movement accuracy. Important goals are to determine how neural mechanisms break down the computational task of controlling the moving limb and the roles of sensory processing in motor learning.
Jeffrey Kleim is associate professor in the ASU School of Biological & Health Systems Engineering. He studies how neural plasticity supports learning in the intact brain and “relearning” in the damaged or diseased brain. His research is directed at developing therapies that optimize plasticity in order to enhance recovery after stroke and Parkinson's Disease.
Pavan Turaga, Assistant Professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University
Friday, September 9
3–4 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
Tempe Campus
Large collections of rich visual data have become ubiquitous and are now extremely interwoven into our daily life. How can mathematics and technology help in guiding a person to find his needle in this visual haystack? Some of the challenges that need to be tackled are the multitude of meanings one can attach to the same image, and the fact that often the meaning we extract from an image is tied strongly to the task we want to accomplish. While there seems to be no general solution to this problem, we discuss a particular paradigm of qualitative sifting that is intended as a first step in exploratory data analysis. This paradigm is intended for an analyst to gather a ground-level understanding of the data he/she faces, before committing oneself to seeking the answer to a specific question. For example, if you wish to show 5 spots in the ASU campus to a visitor, with no pressing task except to maximize the breadth and diversity of experiences, which 5 places would you visit? We believe the answer to such questions will provide tools that will help users in quickly gaining an understanding of their problem domains in more complex situations such as security analysis, managing medical anatomical databases, and organizing YouTube videos.
We model the problem as an optimization problem with specific well–motivated metrics, and show its application in organizing actions, describing scenes, and shape sampling. Some of the mathematical challenges that we tackle include dealing with the complex non–Euclidean geometry of visual patterns, and providing fast algorithms for the same. We hope that this line of inquiry will be relevant with some of the applications being pursued here at ASU.
Pavan Turaga is an Assistant Professor in Arts, Media and Engineering, and Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. He received the B.Tech. degree in Electronics and communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, in 2004, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008 and 2009 respectively. He then spent 2 years as a Research Associate at the Center for Automation Research, UMD. His research interests are in statistics and machine learning with applications to computer vision and pattern analysis. His research work includes human activity analysis from videos, video summarization, dynamic scene analysis, and statistical inference on manifolds for these applications. He was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship by UMD in 2009, and was selected to participate in the Emerging Leaders in Multimedia Workshop by IBM, New York, in 2008.
Garth Paine, Visiting Faculty in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering,
Arizona State University
Friday, August 26
3–5 p.m., Stauffer B, Room 125
Tempe Campus
Garth Paine is joining the faculty of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering for the coming academic year. In this presentation he will give an overview of several projects he has been working on in Australia that may be of interest to colleagues at ASU. These include a bio–sensor driven dance work with dancer/choreographer Hellen Sky. This work uses bio–sensors on the dancers to create all of the music for the performance in real–time. Garth will discuss the challenges of making a choreographic work that is entirely interactive and is seeking interest in also bringing the visual domain of the piece into the real–time domain. He will also talk about another project called Thinking Through the Body and his real–time MoCAP sonification of breathing patterns for an exhibition work. He will also play an acousmatic music work that is the result of ambisonic field recordings in the Shoalhaven river area of New South Wales in Australia – a work he made whilst in residence at the Arthur Boyd residency, Bundanon. Whilst at ASU, Garth intends to make ambisonic recordings of the deserts of Arizona – seeking ‘ empty space’ – a space in which one might be aware of ones own presence as a kind of negative space.
Dr. Garth Paine is Senior Lecturer in Music Technology, a researcher at MARCS Auditory Research labs and director of the Virtual, Interactive, Performance Research environment (VIPRe). He is particularly fascinated with sound as an exhibitable object. This passion has led to several interactive responsive environments where the inhabitant generates the sonic landscape through their presence and behavior. It has also led to several music scores for dance works, generated through real–time video tracking and or bio–sensing of the dancers. His work has been shown throughout Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, Hong Kong and New Zealand.
Dr. Pain's ensemble SynC acts as a platform for research into new interfaces for electronic music performance. SynC has performed in, Paris (2006), New York (2007), Liquid Architecture (2007), Aurora festival (2006, 2008), and The Australian New Music Network concert series (2008). He is a member of the advisory panel for the Electronic Music Foundation, New York and an advisor to the UNESCO funded Symposium on the Future. Dr Paine is a Chief Investigator on several current Australian Research Council grants. His work can be found at www.activatedspace.com