Past Events

2009-10 Events

HUMAN ACTION ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS (October 16, 2009)
By ZICHENG LIU

This talk consists of two parts: (1) Human action recognition, and (2) linked figure animation.

For the first part of my talk, I'll describe two different approaches that we have worked on. The first approach is the expandable graphical model based on salient postures. We extract silhouetter features from the video sequences and cluster the features into salient postures. A graphcial model is then built by using the salient postures as nodes. One interesting property of this approach is that it allows different actions to share salient postures, so that a graph can be easily extended to include new actions with little training data. One drawback of this approach, though, is its difficulty in handling moving and cluttered background. The second approach we have developed is a feature point based approach and we focus on action detection (spatial-temporal localization). We formulate an action detection problem as a subvolumn search problem and propose a branch-and-bound solution. This approach is calable of handling cluttered and moving background, and even partial occlusions.

For the second part of my talk, I'll give an overview of my earlier work on physically-based linked figure animation. While most of the recent research activities in linked figure animation has been focused on motion capturing and re-synthesis, earlier animation research was focused on synthesizing motions from scratch (i.e., no motion capture data to start with), where the realism was achieved by modeling physics. I'll review the architecture of such a system and discuss its potential application for human motion analysis.

These are join works with Wanqing Li, Junsong Yuan, Zhengyou Zhang, Ying Wu, and Michael Cohen.

Zicheng Liu is a researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He has worked on a variety of topics including combinatorial optimization, linked figure animation, and microphone array signal processing. His current research interests include face modeling and animation, audio/visual scene analysis, and multimedia signal processing. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University, a M.S. in Operational Research from the Institute of Applied Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Science, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Huazhong Normal University, China. Before joining Microsoft Research, he worked at Silicon Graphics as a member of technical staff for two years where he developed a trimmed NURBS tessellator which was shipped in both OpenGL and OpenGL-Optimizer products. He has published over 50 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and conferences, and has over 30 granted patents. He has served in the technical committees for many international conferences. He was the co-chair of the 2003 ICCV Workshop on Multimedia Technologies in E-Learning and Collaboration, the program co-chair of 2006 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, and the media co-chair of 2007 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. He is an associate editor of Machine Vision and Applications journal, and a senior member of IEEE. His home page is at http://research.microsoft.com/~zliu.

2008-09 Events

ON NETWORKS, DANCING AND THE PARALLEL ARCHITECTURES OF EMBODIED COLLABORATION (March 27, 2009)
By MARLON BARRIOS SOLANO

Barrios Solano introduces dance-tech.net and dance-techTV as a sustainable model of production and exchange of knowledge within a community of movement and mew media artits, theorists, technologists and organizations. The new internet or Web 2.0 architectures helps us to see Networks as the materialization of social dynamics, as sites of action, translocal presence and social innovation and sampling. They have become the most important emergent repositories of social and cognitive capital of a given community. dance-tech.net registers conversations, dialogues, performances, ideas and lives using the WWW as a site for a relational intervention on the boundaries of bodies, countries, disciplines and organizations.

Marlon Barrios Solano is a New York City/Geneva based, social media specialist/ consultant, on-line producer and lecturer/researcher focused on the intersection of new media and performance and on the use of on-line platforms for collaborative creativity and social innovation. He is the creator/producer of dance-tech.net (a social networking site), dance-techTV (a collaborative network of internet video channels) and of DANCE TECH Interviews (an on-line program that explores the intersection of dance and digital technology). Currently he is an artist/researcher in residency at Cie Gilles Jobin (Switzerland), STEIM (The Netherlands) and Trans Media Akademie Hellerau (Germany). He holds an MFA in Dance and Technology (independent track on real-time technology, performance of improvisation and cognition) from The Ohio State University (USA).

GKISEDTANAMOOGK KI'CHIT8NUPPA'QIT: NKEKETONSEONQIKOM, MAUCIPIOTAN, WAPANISSISSINUOAUK
CEREMONY, SPIRITUALITY, AND RADIO HEALING: IMPLICATIONS FOR INDIGENIZING APPROPRIATION OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY (March 20, 2009)
By GKISEDTANAMOOGK

A long held regard among my Friends and Relations of the Wampanoag, a Northeastern Coastal Indigenous Nation, is that the Sacred cannot be contained by any thing, purpose, ideology, or intention, nor by any one, group, people, or nation. All throughout human experience, one universal sense echoes throughout all Hearts, the experience with the Sacred is vast, without bounds, limits, territory, species; it is a relationship deep-seated in our Hearts, minds, and Intellect; it fills the enormous regions of expression, dream, thought, and imagination. It is alive, it is un-abating, unending, Source of Life---it manifests much more than creates or destroys. If this posture is remotely true about the nature of the Sacred, then we might be able to image the possibilities for machine-based technology of which the Sacred would channel life, energy, into dimensions not yet thought breachable.

Consider Creation, the ancient Nature and its Laws of Life; in an age of sub-atomic realities Sacred reflects in the minutest form of Being outwards towards the vastness of the universe, the ultimate form of Being. To the Wampanoag, this is the intimacy and the unimpeachable system we know, impeccably, as the Longhouse. As set in the frequency of color, sound, touch, magnetic energy, air, and imagination, Life is a prism of defined particles and variables interconnected, interdependent, inter-sovereign. Exemplified by Light, as demonstrated by the prism, the Sacred is the sum-total of multiple frequencies of color moving from infra-red to ultra-violet and at some point connected to complete the great Circle of Life. Images of the farthest reaches of space to the most dynamic regions of inner space, Life is the Sacred, the variable frequencies of light, sound, touch, smell, feeling, thought, awareness, ultimately connected to complete the great Circle. This reality reflects in all levels, aspects, dimensions--- as with all such examples, we are perfectly reflected in the repeatedness in the Oneness of Being.

Cristobal Martinez and Randy Kemp demonstrated the formality of this Oneness with their work Radio Healer conceptually demonstrating that the Sacred cannot be contained nor restrained but rather revealed in multiples of variants, from nuance to the clearly legible. Healing takes place wherever, whenever, however as long as the prominence of mind is set in experiential knowing and deliberate, pervasive, intention. This is the sitting and power profound, of ceremony, spirituality, and healing. These are the implications for indigenizing digital technology and global cyberspace.

APPLICATIONS OF SKELETAL EMBODIMENT FOR GAIT ANALYSIS (March 6, 2009)
By MARK TAYLOR

This experiential workshop will use an analysis of the movement of lower extremity joints through the sagittal, horizontal, and vertical planes to understand the spatial dynamics of normal walking gait. Each normally functioning human displays some variation from that norm: the experiential analysis of that variation leads equally to therapeutic and artistic applications. When inefficient locomotor patterns have resulted in joint injury or connective tissue strain, somatic awareness provides pathways for rehabilitation of the motor pattern that causes the injury. Each gait variation is also part of an individual's perceptual/motor system, articulating both a world-view and psycho-physical response to the environment; through skeletal embodiment we are able to subtly shift the way we move in the world for personal or artistic purposes, altering our character.

Mark Taylor is a choreographer and certified Body-Mind Centering teacher. He directs the Center for BodyMindMovement, co-directs the Embodied Performing Arts Program in London, UK, and teaches in Mexico City for the Centro de Investigaçion Coregrafica and the Instituto de Psicología Profunda en México. He was the U.S. Program Director and Coordinator for the School for Body-Mind Centering and has taught in the school's programs in Northampton, Massachusetts; Chiemsee, Germany; Paris, France; and Bratislava, Slovakia. He was artistic director and choreographer for Dance Alloy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Mark Taylor & Friends in New York, and served on the dance faculties of Princeton University and the University of Limerick (Ireland). As a choreographer, Taylor's interests include inter-cultural collaborations with musicians and dancers (collaborations completed with Indian, Hawaiian, and Caribbean artists); dances created in contexts of specific communities; and the development of movement generated from techniques of embodied anatomy. Mark maintains a private movement therapy practice in Pittsburgh.

COMPOSER, PERFORMER, LISTENER (February 20, 2009)
By JASON FREEMAN

Even as social networking, multi-player gaming, and collaborative content creation become increasingly important in our lives, concert musical performance continues to follow a few-to-many model in which the audience remains largely passive, with little connection to the composer, to the performers, or to each other. This talk will explore how technology can transform the concert experience by inviting the audience to shape the music as it is performed or by engaging audiences in personalized musical experiences online.

EMBEDDING INFORMATION VISUALIZATION IN VISUAL COMMUNICATION (February 13, 2009)
By ROBERT KOSARA

Information Visualization (InfoVis) is a field that spans many disciplines. While that makes working in InfoVis exciting, it can also lead to misunderstandings. Specifically, if a field is not well enough delimited, it becomes difficult to build a coherent foundation for it. In this talk, I will look at the many different kinds of visual communication and attempt to classify them in a way that provides a meaningful and well-defined place for InfoVis.

Robert Kosara is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. His research in information visualization focuses on its use for visual communication as well as building a foundational theory for the field. Robert also runs the visualization-oriented website EagerEyes.org and writes the Sightings column for American Scientist.

AN ARTIST'S METHOD: EMBODIED MEDIA LITERACY (February 6, 2009)
By TERESA FOLEY

What methods are available to artists wanting to develop a heightened sensitivity as active respondents to media? How might a group process, through which individuals are asked to describe what they see, hear and feel, relate to the application of critical thinking skills and aid in the production of new work? How can the manner in which a group talks about its experiences and perceptions enhance collaboration? Artist and media literacy consultant T. Foley will share her method for talking about and responding to cultural artifacts in order to spur group reflection and discussion as a foundation for collaborative process. During this illustrated presentation, whether we're considering a work of art, a video on YouTube, a "household" collectible, or an object utilized by humans, participants will be invited to respond to artifacts with a sensitivity first informed by an "embodied" subjective response, but also informed by formal and contextual (historical) responses. By sharing examples of her own work in this presentation, the artist will illustrate how the adopted method informs her artistic practice.

T. Foley is a video artist and media literacy consultant who shares strategies and techniques for using digital media consumer tools as a means for creative expression and community reflection. Her motion pictures have screened internationally, and she has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Pittsburgh Foundation. For nearly a decade, Foley developed and directed the Media Literacy program at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. She has served as a consultant to non-profits and institutions, including: The Pennsylvania Department of Education, CCA Santa Fe, the True/False Film Festival, GirlsFilmSchool, and the Chautauqua County Arts Council. She was an invited discussant in the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Online Forum in the area of Race and Ethnicity, and has been the recipient of a fellowship at the IDEAS Institute (a program within the Lifelong Kindergarten Group) at MIT's Media Laboratory. Foley lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. She is presently the director of the Pittsburgh Creativity Project, a pilot initiative housed within the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon Unviersity.

THE FUTURE OF INTERACTIVE MEDIA: WORKSHOP ON MEDIA ARTS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (MAST) (January 29 - 30, 2009)
http://mast.mat.ucsb.edu

The Workshop on Media Arts, Sciences, and Technology (MAST) WAS held in Santa Barbara, CA on January 29-30, 2009. The goal of this workshop was to bring together leading digital media researchers and practitioners who work at the intersection of arts and engineering, in order to explore key challenges and promising directions in digital arts, experiential media systems, creative environments, and emerging media technologies. The two-day workshop consisted of invited keynote presentations, short talks, poster sessions, media installations, demos, and panel discussions. The format provided ample opportunities for participants to interact in an informal setting and explore further collaborations. The workshop was jointly hosted by NSF IGERT programs at Arizona State University (Experiential Media) and UC Santa Barbara (Interactive Digital Multimedia), and sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

ABSOLUT QUARTET AND OTHER RECENT COLLABORATIONS (November 7, 2008)
By DAN PALUSKA

Dan Paluska is an artist and engineer. His work combines science, problemsolving, collaboration, and play in an effort to explore the ideas of art, artist, and artwork. Most recently, Dan collaborated with Jeff Lieberman to create ABSOLUT QUARTET, an interactive robotic musical installation which received a PRIXARS Award of Distinction for Interactive Art. Dan studied mechanical engineering and robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked on walking robots in the Leg Laboratory at the MIT Artifi cial Intelligence Lab and intelligent prosthetic limbs in the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT Media Lab. In 2001, he initiated the Collision series, a bi-annual art show featuring newmedia work from students and local artists. The series has become a catalyst for the technology art community in the Boston Area, showing work from numerous artists including Andrew Nuemann, Steve Hollinger, Casey Reas, Brian Knep, and many others.

Dan's own work has been shown in Boston galleries, as well as in New York and Europe. Current pieces on display include Fotron2000, a robotic photobooth, at the Christopher Henry Gallery in NYC and Absolut Quartet, which will be installed at the ARS Electronica Center in Linz, Austria for all of 2009.

WHY CASUAL GAMES ROCK (October 24, 2008)
By ERIK WAHLBERG

Erik Wahlberg is a Producer in the web games group at Pogo.com. His responsibilities include game design creation, development team management, sales and marketing support, and overall game ownership. He has spent 15 years in the video game industry and produced nearly 50 games across multiple genres and platforms. Career highlights include Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side for SEGA, Knockout Kings 2000 for Electronic Arts, and more recently Pogo Addiction Solitaire for Pogo.com.

TEACHING MACHINES TO LISTEN (October 10, 2008)
By BRYAN PARDO

Music collections comprise one of the most popular categories of online multimedia content, as evidenced by the millions of recordings available in online repositories such as Emusic, Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes. These vast online collections let the average person access and hear more music than was possible for even music scholars only a few years ago. Of course, finding a music document is only the beginning - a step to initiate the task at hand. Bryan Pardo and his students in the Northwestern University Interactive Audio Lab develop key technologies that let composers, researchers, performers and casual listeners retrieve, study, edit and interact with music in new ways. This talk will provide an overview of recent work in the lab. Projects include: a music search engine that fi nds a song from a melody sung to the computer (audio database search); a cell phone based karaoke game (social computing), automated music video creation (digital culture); a system that learns to recognize sounds from an audio mixture and uses its learned knowledge to label new recordings (machine learning and source identifi cation); and a system to automatically personalize the user interface of audio production software (human computer interaction).

Bryan Pardo is an assistant professor in the Northwestern University Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with appointments in Northwestern's Music Cognition program and the Center for Technology and Social Behavior. Prof. Pardo received a M. Mus. in Jazz and Improvisation and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He has been featured on a number of albums and taught as an adjunct professor in the Music Department of Madonna University. He has developed speech software for the Speech and Hearing department of the Ohio State University, statistical software for SPSS and worked as a researcher for General Dynamics. When he's not programming, writing or teaching, he performs throughout the United States on saxophone and clarinet at venues such as Albion College, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Detroit Concert of Colors.

ENGINEERING SCIENCE AND MUSICAL ART (September 12, 2008)
By ELAINE CHEW

This talk advocates for a truly interdisciplinary melding of engineering science and musical art. A goal is to achieve a better understanding of the engineer as artist, and the performing musician as decision scientist, while acknowledging that not all aspects of art are rational, and not all science engages the aesthetic. Another objective is to create alternate paths to discovering knowledge about the intangibles in music, such as artistic choice, style, and taste. The digitization of copious amounts of music and the pervasiveness of computer literacy work to make imminent the widespread adoption of such music science integration. Concrete examples of mathematical and computational research in music analysis, performance, composition/improvisation, and perception/cognition and their underlying musical motivations set the stage for further discussion. In the MuSA.RT example, mathematical (geometric) representation of music serve a functional role in automatic analysis of music, while interactive visualizations of musical analyses as the music unfolds in time provide aesthetic cues to auditory perception of tonality. Employing a commonplace interface in service of artistic choice, ESP enables the user to actively experiment with musical expression through a literalization of the driving (wheel and pedals) metaphor for expressive control in performance. The presentation will also describe a series of special topics courses on Engineering Approaches to Music Cognition, built on the tenets of learning from example, and learning from doing.

Elaine Chew is Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, where she founded and heads the Music Computation and Cognition Lab. She is also currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. In 2007-2008, Prof. Chew was the Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she and Alexandre François formed a cluster on Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualization. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2004 and 2005, respectively, for her research and education initiatives at the intersection of music and engineering. She received her PhD and SM in Operations Research from MIT, BAS in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) and in Music (distinction) from Stanford, and diplomas (Fellowship and Licentiate) in piano performance from Trinity College, London. Prof. Chew has performed widely as soloist and chamber musician, and commissioned, premiered, and recorded compositions by contemporary composers. She founded and directed the Aurelius Ensemble, and served as Affiliated Artist of MIT's Music and Theater Arts Section 1998-2000. Prof. Chew has showcased MuSA.RT in concert-conversations, titled The Mathematics in Music, at venues in North America and Asia. One such concert-conversation at MIT is featured in the September 2008 issue of Technology Review.

2007-08 Events

THE SPACE OF DANCE: MOVEMENT, METAPHOR AND MEDIA (April 18, 2008)
By ELLEN BROMBERG

In recent years innovation in dance has included the integration of media and technology, both on stage and on screen, in a multitude of ways. The use of interactive programs that allow dancers to trigger light, sound and image; the use of the internet as both vehicle for and site of performance, and the layering of two and three dimensional images within the traditional proscenium setting, all allow new ways of experiencing time, space and metaphor in dance. In this talk Bromberg will present a number of performance works in which she has utilized these technologies and she will discuss how they have influenced her creative inquiry as a dance and
media artist.

Ellen Bromberg began her professional career as a dancer in Repertory Dance Theater. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Bromberg is a choreographer, filmmaker, curator and educator, and has received numerous awards for her work including two Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, a Bonnie Bird American Choreographer Award, a Pew National Dance/Media Fellowship, and the Houston International Film Festival. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the George Soros Foundation, and others. A frequent guest artist, her choreography has been performed in the United Kingdom, China, Korea, Japan, and throughout the United States. Ellen's screen works have been broadcast on numerous public television stations, including PBS' Alive From Off Center, and presented at Lincoln Center's Dance on Camera Festival, Body on Screen at the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, Dance Camera West in Los Angeles, Video Danza - Buenos Aires, and other national and international venues. Since 1996 Bromberg has been working at the intersection of live performance and media, creating her own works as well as collaborating with other choreographers including Della Davidson, Vic Marks, Stephen Koester, Brent Schneider, and others. Bromberg is the Founding Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Arts and Technology at the University of Utah, where she is also Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Dance. Bromberg is also the Founding Director of the University of Utah's International Dance for the Camera Festival.

EXTENDING THE MUSICAL EXPERIENCE: FROM THE PHYSICAL TO THE DIGITAL. . . AND BACK (April 4, 2008)
By GIL WEINBERG

It is widely perceived that the computer has enriched and advanced the art form of music. Digital technology brought new palettes of sounds, composition techniques, and production methods. Innovations in digital compression and distribution changed music consumption and listening practices; for performers, novel musical instruments and controllers have been developed based on a variety of sensing, interaction, and mapping approaches. But after more than two decades of research in computer music, a fundamental question must be asked - has digital technology truly innovated and enriched the expressive, emotional, and creative core of the musical experience? It is not clear that the answer to this question is as positive as most music technologists would like to think.

During the last ten years, inspired and motivated by the prospect of innovating the core of the musical experience, Weinberg has explored a number of research directions in which digital technology bears the promise of revolutionizing the medium. The research directions identified - gestural expression, collaborative networks, and constructionist learning - bear the promise of leading to expressive musical experiences that cannot be facilitated by traditional means. The first direction builds on the notion that through novel sensing and mapping techniques, new expressive musical gestures can be discovered that are not supported by current acoustic instruments. Such gestures, unconstrained by the physical limitation of acoustic sound production, can provide infinite possibilities for expressive and creative musical experiences for novice as well as trained musicians. The second research direction utilizes the digital network in an effort to create new collaborative experiences, allowing players to take an active role in determining and influencing not only their own musical output but also that of their co-performers. By using the network to interdependently share and control musical materials in a group, musicians can combine their musical ideas into a constantly evolving collaborative musical activity that is novel and inspiring. The third research direction utilizes constructionist learning, which bears the promise of revolutionizing music education by providing hands-on access to programmable music making. Through interaction with physical computational objects, learners can construct personally meaningful musical artifacts that enhance and deepen their learning.

While facilitating novel musical experiences that cannot be achieved by traditional means, the digital nature of these research directions often led to flat and inanimate speaker-generated sound, hampering the physical richness and visual expression of acoustic music. In his current work, therefore, Weinberg attempts to combine the benefits of digital computation and acoustic richness, by exploring the concept of "robotic musicianship". He defines this concept as a combination of musical, perceptual, and social skills with the capacity to produce rich acoustic responses in a physical and visual manner. The robotic musicianship project aims to combine human creativity, emotion, and aesthetic judgment with algorithmic computational capabilities, allowing human and robotic players to cooperate and build off one another's ideas. A perceptual and improvisatory robot can best facilitate such interactions by bringing the computer into the physical world both acoustically and visually. In this talk Weinberg will present a number of projects, including the Musical Playpen, Shapers, the Beatbugs, and Haile - the perceptual robotic percussionists, which represent this journey that started by extending acoustic music with digital technology and ended by enhancing digital music through acoustical means.

Gil Weinberg is the Director of Music Technology at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he founded the Master of Science in Music Technology program and is currently in the music technology research center. He holds professorship positions both in the Music Department and the College of Computation. Dr. Weinberg received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after co-founding and holding a number of positions in music and media software industry in his home country of Israel. In his academic work Weinberg attempts to expand musical expression, creativity, and learning through meaningful applications of technology. His research interests include new instruments for musical expression, musical networks, machine and robotic musicianship, sonifi-cation, and music education.

PLAYING (WITH) MUSIC (March 28, 2008)
By SUMIT BASU

In this talk, Basu will present a series of projects that are intended to help you play with your music, whether it came from your heart or from your MP3 collection. It will start with some simple explorations that show how you can reach into a pop song and pull out grooves with a minimum of processing: so simple, in fact, that you could code it up by the time the talk is over. Basu will then move on to a method for mixing together music from arbitrary genres that lets DJ's mix deep beats with pop divas in real-time. Next, he will describe a means for sound synthesis that can take your MIDI input and let you play Dave Brubeck"s piano, or better yet play the piano a bit more like Dave Brubeck. Finally, he will show you some of his most recent work, which helps novices and songwriters alike come up with and manipulate chords for new melodies, a problem which he has found particularly vexing as a songwriter. Though critics have sometimes misunderstood this work as an attempt to automate music creation, the goal is quite the opposite: to help artists extend our creative reach by leveraging the knowledge and structure that can be extracted from musical data.

Sumit Basu is a researcher in the Knowledge Tools group at Microsoft Research. His focus is on the applications of machine learning to data-rich problems, but the applications themselves cover a wide range. He has a formal background in machine learning, signal processing, speech, and audio analysis, as well as a persistent and inextinguishable love of playing and creating music. As such, his research has led to as varied a set of topics as analyzing the music of conversations (Conversational Scene Analysis), summarizing speech, recognizing auditory environments, and finding rogue packets in network stream data, as well as the music-oriented topics in this talk.

WHO WILL TURN THE KNOBS WHEN I DIE? (March 21, 2008)
By BRUCE PENNYCOOK

Prof. Pennycook will present a guided tour of selected compositions, software and devices he has created over the past twenty years. He will discuss how these efforts have influenced composing and, more importantly, performance. The talk will also examine questions of preservation and archiving of "transient" media such as interactive music.

Professor Bruce Pennycook (Doctor of Musical Arts, Stanford, '78) is a composer, new media developer and media technology specialist. He taught at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, then McGill University in Montreal, Quebec where he developed undergraduate and graduate degree programs in Music Technology and held the position of Vice-Principal for Information Systems and Technology. Pennycook moved to Austin in 2002 and was appointed Senior Lecturer at UT Austin in 2004. He teaches in the Department of Composition, School of Music and in the Radio-Television-Film Department, College of Communication.

MANY EYES: DEMOCRATIZING VISUALIZATION (March 7, 2008)
By FERNANDA B. VIÉGAS

Data visualization has historically been accessible only to the elite in academia, business, and government. But in recent years web-based visualizations--ranging from political art projects to news stories--have reached audiences of millions. Unfortunately, while lay users can view many sophisticated visualizations, they have few ways to create them. In order to "democratize" visualization, we have built Many Eyes, a web site where people may upload their own data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. The goal is to foster a social style of data analysis in which visualizations serve not only as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a means to spur discussion and collaboration. In this talk, I will provide an overview of Many Eyes, patterns of usage on the site, and what those patterns suggest about the future of visualization.

Fernanda B. Viégas is a designer whose research focuses on the social side of visualization, exploring storytelling, collective sensemaking, and online identity. Viégas is known for her pioneering work on visualizing chat histories (Chat Circles), personal email archives (PostHistory and Themail) and Wikipedia activity (History Flow, with Martin Wattenberg). In 2007, Viégas and Wattenberg created Many Eyes, a web site where anyone can upload data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. Her visualization-based artwork has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC, the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, and in galleries in Los Angeles and São Paulo. Fernanda received her Ph.D. and master's degrees from the Media Lab at MIT, and her bachelor's degree in Graphic Design and Art History from the University of Kansas. She is Brazilian and misses the year-round warm weather in Rio de Janeiro where she grew up.

SHARED REALITY: EFFECTIVE INTERACTION FOR (DEMANDING) DISTRIBUTED TASKS (February 29, 2008)
By JEREMY COOPERSTOCK

Telepresence and teleimmersion are concerned with providing users the sensory experience of being in another location. However, this says nothing about the technological demands for effective, distributed interaction, in particular, with other human participants. Despite the hype, such systems generally fail to deliver a convincing level of co-presence (the feeling of "being together") between users and come nowhere close to supporting any of the expressive cues and manipulation capabilities we take for granted with objects in the physical world. Several research efforts have made significant progress in overcoming these problems in isolation, leading to technologies for immersive visualization, high-definition videoconferencing, and two-handed gestural interaction. However, combining these technologies into a unified framework that allows distributed participants to work or play together with the same naturalness as being in the same space still seems far in the horizon. "Shared Reality" was coined as a metaphor for the ideal, in which distributed users could experience the sensations of a remote environment, but also collaborate with each other as if physically sharing the same space. Achieving this goal presents challenges along the entire signal path, including sensory acquisition, signal processing, data transmission, and display technologies. This talk describes several aspects of our research in these areas, including super-resolution video, dynamic video mosaicing, shadow removal in multi-projector displays, acousto-haptic synthesis of ground surfaces, and the low-latency media transport at the heart of our Ultra-Videoconferencing system. Several videos will be presented, illustrating early successes, as well as some of the interesting behavioral results we have observed involving distributed music teaching and performance.

Jeremy Cooperstock (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 1996) is an associate professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a member of the Centre for Intelligent Machines, and a founding member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology at McGill University. He directs the Shared Reality Lab and leads the technical development of the Ultra-Videoconferencing system, for which he was recognized by an award for Most Innovative Use of New Technology from ACM/IEEE Supercomputing and a Distinction Award from the Audio Engineering Society. His research interests focus on computer mediation to facilitate high-fidelity human communication and the underlying technologies that support this goal. Cooperstock's accomplishments include the development of a computer-controlled videoconference environment that reacts intelligently to the activity of users, the Intelligent Classroom, the world's first Internet streaming demonstrations of Dolby Digital 5.1, uncompressed 12-channel 96kHz/24bit, multichannel DSD audio, and multiple simultaenous streams of uncompressed high-definition video. Cooperstock has worked with IBM at the Haifa Research Center, Israel, and the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He was a visiting researcher at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan, where he developed a prototype VCR interface that responds to speech and pointing commands, in addition to a visual "program database" that has now become common on DVD recorders. He chairs the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Technical Committee on Network Audio Systems and is an associate editor of the Journal of the AES.

COMPUTATIONAL TEXTILES AS HANDCRAFTED PERSONAL COMPUTERS (February 15, 2008)
By LEAH BUECHLEY

This talk will explore the intersection of computation, craft, and design. Focusing on computational textiles or "e-textiles", it will examine how computation, in conjunction with new materials and output devices, can transform traditional crafts--and conversely, how an emphasis on design, aesthetics, and working with one's hands can enrich computational disciplines by attracting new audiences to these fields and also by suggesting novel applications, activities, and engineering methods. It will introduce advancements in engineering and design that have stemmed from this "crafty" approach to computing, including: fabric printed circuit boards, wearable displays, and the LilyPad Arduino (a system for experimenting with embedded computation that enables novices to build their own soft wearable computers). The talk will also detail the results of user studies--a series of "Electronic Fashion" classes--and will conclude with a look at the future of computational textiles and, more broadly, computational craft and design.

Leah Buechley is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she works with the Craft Technology group. Her research explores the intersection of computational and physical media, focusing on computational textiles or electronic textiles (e-textiles)--soft, flexible, fabric-based computers. Her research was the recipient of the best paper award at the 2006 International Symposium on Wearable Computers and has been featured in Popular Science, CRAFT Magazine, the Journal of Architectural Design, the Denver Post, and the Taipei Times. She holds PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA in Physics from Skidmore College.

PERFORMATIVE ENVIRONMENTS: ARCHITECTURE FACILITATING CHANGE (February 8, 2008)
By BO STJERNE THOMSEN

In recent years the influence of pervasive computing, mobile communication and digital networks have become increasingly noticeable in the urban environment at the same time as the fields of architecture and design are exploring new design methods and tools to comprehend an increasingly complex and interdisciplinary field. The research project, Performative Environments, focuses on the emergent effects of crossing social and technological networks as a basis for an architecture that stands out as dynamic and open, facilitating self-organizing communicative environments for an organized complexity between flows of local interactions and network behaviour. Architectureand design enhanced with interactive capabilities and network relationships are explored as 'quasy-objects', which can retain both variation and recognisability in changing social constellations at same time as acknowledging space as the product of interrelations and always under construction. Presenting current research experiments and reflections upon these, the project is currently going into its next phases of evaluating the effect of crossing information technologies and architecture into new socio-spatial relationships. Finally the research project drives an experimental research agenda realizing that the complexity and multi-cultural aspects of the scientific problems of today calls for a new way to discuss the architectural science of tomorrow, and far more relieving results might be achieved by proclaiming a performative design agenda.

Bo Stjerne Thomsen has an M.Sc. Engineering in Architecture and Design with a specialization in Urban Design and is a PhD candidate at the Department of Architecture & Design, Aalborg University, Denmark. Through an Elite Research Scholarship he is currently a research fellow at the Media Lab at MIT, Boston, looking into new types of performative technologies facilitating interactive collective urban environments. Employed for 5 years at the Austrian architects Coop Himmelb(l)au and with his own design practice since 2001, he works with an interdisciplinary approach to architectural design, urban development and open interactive environments. He teaches advanced architectural design, interactive urban design and intelligent models and acts as consultant within urban design, architecture and interactive design. His current research interests are on new types of Performative Environments, investigating the emergent effects of networked environments interacting with the local citizens illustrated through the design development of interactive architecture and urban experiments. The research has a special focus on investigating how pervasive computing and modern communication technology can be used to improve local interaction between humans and environment as part of community-making and in specific the development of new design methods and technology to be integrated in interactive urban design, landscape and architecture.

CURRENTS: A MUSIC AND POLITICS OF WATER (November 2, 2007)
By STEVEN FELD

Using images, video, audio and text, Feld will present four documentary sound-art compositions related to his research into the water environments of four continents. The first piece focuses on waterways in the rainforests of New Guinea, where industrial logging is linked to increased water-borne disease and lack of access to clean water. The second piece examines Japanese underground water sculpture installations and the importance of water in Japanese rituals and culture. The third piece, from the Arctic Circle in Finland, concerns rapid warming, diagnostic of sea level and temperature change. Other connected transformations of the sound world, such as the loss of reindeer bells and sleigh bells, are also explored. The final piece explores the shorelines of West Africa at the sites of slave forts, and the presence of water in the historical memory of slavery and diasporic mythology of "Mami Wata" spirits. Each piece addresses how water is part of the creative imagination and at the heart of major global environmental issues.

Steven Feld is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico, and Professor of World Music at the Institute of Musicology, University of Oslo, Norway. Feld's academic research principally concerns the anthropology of sound and voice, incorporating studies in linguistics and poetics, music and aesthetics, acoustics and ecology. His research on sound, ecology and senses of place has taken him to the rainforests of New Guinea, Europe, Japan and Africa. A MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, he has published award-winning books as well as 15 CDs with documentary sound art from New Guinea, Greece, Italy, Finland, Denmark, Norway, France, Japan and Ghana.

EMBODIED MEDIA: DANCE FILM AND TELEMATIC PERFORMANCE (October 26, 2007)
By JOHN CRAWFORD

This talk describes a range of embodied media projects, including hybrid media/dance works that combine live performance of contemporary dance with projected imagery derived from dance. These can be regarded as "dance film in performance" and are developed with the intention of connecting choreography for stage with choreography for camera. Other works, conceived as "dance film for the screen," work with filmed choreography to create a screen experience independent of the performance experience it is derived from. Our multi-site networked media/dance performance events are structured as inquiry into embodied telematic interactions. Using a process-oriented approach, we are exploring how a shared space constructed through media and computer technology can become a site for entering into "temporary physical interaction" across a distance, considering how the performative act becomes transformed by such interaction. In parallel with rehearsals and performances, we are reworking and extending the software and hardware components of the Active Space interactive performance system, drawing on lessons learned from each event. Active Space is an interactive media system incorporating video-based motion tracking, motion capture, real-time video and audio synthesis, high bandwidth networking, and multichannel visuals and sound. As dancers and media artists interact with the Active Space environment, its responses and behaviors become construed as mechanisms for communication. The media system itself becomes a message, or a series of messages, an embodied sequence of codes, exchanged among performers and between performers and audience.

John Crawford is a media artist, interactive performance director, technology developer and interaction designer. Intersecting software with digital media and theatrical performance, he creates imagistic animations closely integrated with dance. His projects explore embodied interaction, combining processed video, computer-generated animation, motion capture and real-time motion tracking. In the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine, he teaches dance film, motion capture, telematic performance and digital arts. His projects been performed and exhibited across North America and in Europe, Asia and South America.

A TREATISE ON TREADING WATER (October 19, 2007)
By AARON CUTHBERTSON

New media public artist Aaron Cuthbertson presents an artist's talk on his thesis work in Intermedia: Treading Water. Topics that will be examined include public art, funding for art, new media, the roles of art and artists in society and new models for art-making practice.

Aaron Cuthbertson is a transdisciplinary artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. He works with a broad range of media, including interactive sound, light, kinetic sculpture and web-based works. His recent work has focused on interactive works sited in public places. Cuthbertson is currently finishing an MFA in Intermedia from Arizona State University. He holds undergraduate degrees in Art and Geology.

MEDIA ADAPTATION FRAMEWORK IN A BIOFEEDBACK SYSTEM FOR STROKE PATIENT REHABILITATION (October 5, 2007)
By YINPENG CHEN

We present a media adaptation framework for an immersive biofeedback system for stroke patient rehabilitation. In our biofeedback system, media adaptation refers to changes in audio/visual feedback as well as changes in the physical environment. Effective media adaptation frameworks help patients recover generative plans for arm movement with potential for significantly shortened therapeutic time. The media adaptation problem has significant challenges - (a) high dimensionality of adaptation parameter space (b) variability in the patient performance across and within sessions (c) the actual rehabilitation plan is typically a non first-order Markov process, making the learning task hard.

Our key insight is to understand media adaptation as a real-time feedback control problem. We use a mixture-of-experts based Dynamic Decision Network (DDN) for online media adaptation. We train DDN mixtures per patient, per session. The mixture models address two basic questions - (a) given a specific adaptation suggested by the domain expert, predict patient performance and (b) given an expected performance, determine optimal adaptation decision. The questions are answered through an optimality criterion based search on DDN models trained in previous sessions. We have also developed new validation metrics and have very good results for both questions on actual stroke rehabilitation data.

Yinpeng Chen is a PhD student in the Electrical Engineering department at ASU with an AME concentration. He works with Prof. Hari Sundaram on adaptive computation frameworks. He is in AME's biofeedback research group and his current research focuses on the problem of media adaptation in biofeedback system for stroke patient rehabilitation.

ANGELS VS. DEMONS OR HOW STUDENTS LEARN TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE COLLABORATING IN THE SMALLAB (September 28, 2007)
By SARAH HATTON

Collaborative, mediated, multimodal, and interactive are all words that could be used to describe the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab or SMALLab. Although they are important in describing the SMALLab environment, the understanding of a true SMALLab experience must be enlightened with specific examples of student authored work within the system. Although SMALLab is not only an authoring system, Sarah Hatton will focus on two specific examples where students created multimodal environments or games based on specific curriculum. These two examples focus on a summer gaming camp held in June 2007 and a current on-going project at Scottsdale's Coronado High School where a full-fledged SMALLab system is housed. While elaborating on these two examples, Sarah will provide discourse on how students engaged with each other as well as the technology in order to create new media and new knowledge. Sarah will additionally describe the SMALLab system and provide live, multimodal examples for participants to try and comment on.

Sarah Hatton currently researches and develops visual feedback for the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab, a mediated and experiential education project facilitated by the Arts, Media and Engineering Program (AME) at ASU. She is pursuing her MFA in Digital Technology with a concentration in AME. Sarah's background includes a BFA in Electronic Media from Carnegie Mellon as well as two years abroad teaching English as Second Language in Hong Kong. Working on the SMALLab has provided her the opportunity to continue exploring education and technology in the context of her conceptual fine arts training. Her most recent efforts include developing language scenarios for the SMALLab program at Coronado High School.

INTERDISCIPLINARY GRADUATE EDUCATION (September 14, 2007)
By MAURA BORREGO

Interdisciplinary approaches are necessary for solving our most critical technological and socio-technological research challenges. To date, $385 million has been invested in graduate training through NSF's IGERT program, but surprisingly few of the innovative practices used in IGERT have been studied or archived in journal publications. In this talk, interdisciplinary graduate education is framed as an assessment problem - before we can assess interdisciplinarity, we must better define what we are trying to cultivate in graduate students. The author will use theory and preliminary data to facilitate a discussion of interdisciplinarity within ASU's AME program. This session will be the culmination of a site visit to collect data on the AME program for the author's NSF CAREER research. AME was selected as a study site for its unique integration of diverse disciplines at an institution known for innovative, interdisciplinary research. Details of the overall study design and expected outcomes will also be discussed.

Maura Borrego is an assistant professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech and the recent recipient of an NSF CAREER award to study interdisciplinary graduate programs in engineering. Dr. Borrego holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Her prior research focused specifically on interdisciplinary collaboration in engineering education, including studies of the collaborative relationships between engineers and education researchers. Now, she is expanding to studies of graduate students and faculty researchers in interdisciplinary research (as opposed to teaching) settings.

EXAMPLES OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS APPLICATIONS IN PERFORMING ARTS RESEARCH (August 24, 2007)
By MARCO GRIBAUDO

Computer generated images are now widely used in feature film productions, both in entirely animated works (like in feature films such as "Cars", "Shrek", and "Happy Feet") and in live action movies to create special effects (such as "Fantastic Four", "Harry Potter", and "Pirates of the Caribbean"). However, CGI can also be used as a tool in various research domains to obtain results with limited costs. In this talk several small, low-budget projects, concerning the application of CGI in research of performing arts will be presented. In particular the talk will present the "MultiDAMS" curriculum of the Fine Arts, Music and Drama Faculty of the University of Torino and will focus on the 3D reconstruction of a middle age theater, the analysis of lighting in an important Italian Movie, the visualization of a fourth-century dance, and on the use of motion capture in spring diving dynamics.

Marco Gribaudo was born in Torino and obtained his PhD from the University of Torino in February 2002. Now he is a full time researcher and an Assistant Professor at the University of Torino, where he teaches the course of "Computer Graphics Applied to Arts" at the Fine Arts, Music and Drama Faculty. He is also the supervisor of the 3D courses at the "Virtual Reality and Multimedia Park" of Torino, where he teaches courses on of the fundamentals of computer graphics, 3D animation, and motion-capture. His current research interests include performance evaluation of computer systems, application of virtual reality to e-learning, application of computer generated images to fine arts, and use of motion capture based animations in psychology.