Apr 2011: Applications open for Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism

Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism

SICSA Summer School

St Andrews, Scotland, June 27th - July 1, 2011

Summer School Website: www.sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt

The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation.

We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are providing a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.

In addition, Ben Arent a leading interaction designer based in Dublin has agreed to host (subject to sufficient interest) a day long Arduino workshop for interested participants on Sunday June 26th.

Seminar Topics

Multimodal Interaction for Digital Tourism
Multimodal Interaction with the Android platform
Creating Engaging Visitor Experiences in Museums and Heritage sites
Multimodal Interaction with spatial data
Speech-driven, hands-free, eyes-free navigation
Haptic Tabletop Interaction for Digital Tourism
Natural language generation for Multimodal Interaction
Mobility as a challenge for interaction design, Tourism as a special case
Multimodal Augmented-Reality Interaction for Digital Tourism
Designing context aware-systems

Speakers

Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow
Tristan Henderson, University of St Andrews
Eva Hornecker, University of Strathclyde
Antonio Krüger, Saarland University
William Mackaness, University of Edinburgh
Miguel Nacenta, University of Calgary
Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
Antti Oulasvirta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews
Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart

The deadline for applications to attend is May 3rd, with notifications by May 9th. Participation is limited to 30 and we expect a mix of both national and international participants. The registration fee is £450, which covers four nights of accommodation (Mon - Fri) in St Andrews, breakfast, lunch, dinner and summer school materials. Also included is a welcome reception and farewell dinner. An optional Arduino workshop (with Sunday night accommodation) is an additional £70.

The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) is providing 16 grants to cover the £450 registration fee for PhD students from most Scottish Universities. See SICSA website for details: http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/

See the summer school website for a full programme, biographies of speakers and full details for applications: http://sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt

The school is directed by Aaron Quigley (University of St Andrews), Eva Hornecker (University of Strathclyde), Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh) and Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow).

Labels: SACHI, SICSA, summer school