IEEE CIG Special Session: Emotion in Games - Sensing and inducing player experience and affect, in conjunction with the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) (http://game.itu.dk/cig2010/), August 18-21, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Organized by the IEEE CIS Task Force on Player Satisfaction Modeling and the Humaine Association SIG on Games and Entertainment
21 August 2010 - 21 August 2010 Copenhagen, Denmark

The Tachi Lab is a laboratory specialized in Virtual reality and Telexistence, located in the University of Tokyo.

The Haptics project presents us a way to reinforce and reproduce  emotions experienced through virtual worlds, especially Second Life.

The system is able to recognize nine different emotions in the senteces written by avatars and reinforces own feelings through haptic devices connected to individuals, that for example allow to feel hugs by pressuring on the chest and on the back.

Difficult to imagine?  Watch the following video !

Fresh and good news: the SEMAINE consortium has presented the first full implementation of their virtual affective agent and at the moment is available for download here.

This Sensitive Artifial Listener (SAL) intends to engage users in a conversation by paying attention to unverbal communication and affective states of users. The objective of these SALs are to foster their own emotions within users’ affective states.

You can see a demo in the following video:

More information in the website of the SEMAINE project.

LREC 2010 Workshop on Multimodal Corpora: Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality

*** 18 May 2010, Malta ***

This LREC 2010 workshop on multimodal corpora will feature a special
session on databases of motion capture, trackers, inertial sensors,
biometric devices and image processing.

http://www.multimodal-corpora.org

The IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing is a new journal intended to be a cross disciplinary and international archive journal aimed at disseminating results of research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena.

Link to the journal

Social learning in Facebook: an experience at UOC was presented in the 6th Chair of UNESCO in e-learning

The experience aimed to test an open learning model, understood as a virtual learning environment open to the Internet community, based on the use of open resources and on a methodology focused on the participation and collaboration of users in the construction of knowledge.

The subject of the course ‘Journeys 2.0′ lasted 5 weeks, was launched through Facebook and used a specifically designed open methodology. This methodology of the course is based on the creation of a learning community able to self-manage their learning process. For that a facilitator was needed and also a central activity was established for people to participate and contribute in the community.

The main hypothesis was that students join the course because of personal motivation, interests and desire to learn in a collaborative experience with others. From the point of view of engagement, one of the keywords of the course, results will be presented soon.

The HCI in Emotion workshop will take place on the 1st of September in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

This year’s workshop is focusing on the development of affective technologies for real-world applications and the issues that this orientation brings to our research.

The workshop is adressed for individuals working in the different fields affected by emotion, giving them a podium to raise their questions and work with like-minded people of various disciplines on common subjects.

The Joy of Learning team will present a paper called ‘Case study on the integration of the affective dimension in the design of virtual learning environments: evaluating emotions, supporting design and experimenting new methodologies‘.

This paper presents a proposal for fully online or blended learning universities to introduce the affective dimension in online learning design.

The proposal is supported on three bases: a system for affective assessment (based on the combination of FACS, pupilometry and self-assessment), a set of principles to integrate affective elements within course design and some further steps for innovation and experimentation with new technologies and methodologies.

Online Educa 2008 - We will be presenting the Enjoy Guidelines, as well as some other work and projects in which the Office of Learning Technologies has participated. Magí Almirall will be presenting the work we are doing in using standards to integrate e-Learning systems, and José Mora will be presenting the work done with ePortfolios. We look forward to meeting people with similar experiences and interests.

E-LEARN 2008 - We are presenting the Enjoy Guidelines (see pdf) as part of our Joy of Learning framework at E-Learn 2008 conference in Las Vegas (Nov. 17-21). We are looking forward to meeting people with similar work and interests.

NMC Summer Conference 2008 - Eva de Lera will be participating at this year’s Summer conference which will be held June 11-14 in Princeton, New Jersey.

She will be presenting the ENJOY Guidelines and also joining other Horizon Report 2008 Advisory Board members. UOC has also collaborated with NMC and Educause in translating the world renowned report into Spanish and Catalan.

Please contact her if you plan on attending this event.