Presentations by Invited Speakers

Hiroshi Ishii (MIT, Media Lab., USA)

"Tangible Bits: Beyond Ubiquitous GUIs"

People have developed sophisticated skills for sensing and manipulating our physical environments. However, most of these skills are not employed by traditional Graphical User Interface (GUI). Tangible Bits, our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), seeks to build upon these skills by giving physical form to digital information, seamlessly coupling the dual worlds of bits and atoms.

Guided by the Tangible Bits vision, we are designing "tangible user interfaces" which employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information. These involve foreground interactions with graspable objects and augmented surfaces, exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. We are also exploring background information displays which use "ambient media" -- ambient light, sound, airflow, and water movement. Here, we seek to communicate digitally-mediated senses of activity and presence at the periphery of human awareness.

Our goal is to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment taking advantage of the richness of multimodal human senses and skills developed through our lifetime of interaction with the physical world. In this talk, I will present a variety of tangible user interfaces the Tangible Media Group has designed and presented within the CHI, SIGGRAPH, IDSA, and media arts communities in the past several years.

Endre E. Kadar (Dept. of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, UK)

"Field Theoretical Principles in Perceptual Control of Action and Interface Design"

In modern societies, we live in a predominantly artificial environment. Most artifacts can be regarded as interfaces designed to facilitate our interaction with our environment. They are designed to improve the quality of our life, but often they fail to do so because the design principles are not well understood. Although design principles can be quite complex (e.g., utility, cost, safety, aesthetics), some of the basic principles of the use of interfaces should be simple and compatible with the principles of perceptual control of action for any other tasks in natural settings. The present paper outlines a field theoretical approach for perceptual control of action with an emphasis on diffuse control processes typical of exploratory behavior such as exploratory learning of using interfaces.

John Krumm (Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, USA)

Knowledge of a person's physical location will be important for future computing. Knowing where you are means computers can do a better job giving you the information you need, like the route to your destination or a list of nearby resources. Knowing where other people are means computers can help find friends, colleagues, family, and lost people when it is necessary. Although GPS works well in most outdoor locations, it fails wherever line-of-sight to the satellites is lost, such as indoors or in urban canyons. In addition, GPS requires a special device. Our research has focused on methods to measure location without GPS, using existing infrastructure and existing devices, like Wi-Fi (with a system we call "Locadio") and FM radio (with a system we call "RightSPOT"). In addition, we have a new system ("NearMe") that uses existing Wi-Fi access points to compute proximity between devices as opposed to their absolute locations, eliminating much of the setup involved in traditional Wi-Fi-based location systems. By computing location with a user's existing devices and with existing infrastructure, we can enable many useful applications for mobile users of the future.

Rolf Pfeifer (Univ. of Zurich, Switzerland)

"The Frame-of-Reference Problem in Agent-Environment Interaction: Design Principles for Intelligent Systems"

One the most obvious but also most neglected problems in designing intelligent systems is the notorious frame-of-reference problem which (a) makes a clear distinction between an agent perspective, a designer's perspective, and an observer's perspective, and (b) separates behavior from underlying mechanism. Failures to designing proper human-machine interaction can often be traced back to a neglect of the frame-of-reference problem. This problem is discussed in the context of a set of principles for designing intelligent systems. We will present a number of case studies to illustrate how these principles can inform the design process. In this paper we provide an overview of a set of principles but focus on the principle of "ecological balance", which concerns the relation between environment, morphology, materials, and control, and we introduce the closely related concept of "morphological computation". We will also show that artificial evolution together with morphogenesis can be applied to designing embodied agents.

Jun Tani (Riken, Japan)

"Interacting with NeuroCognitive Robots: A Dynamical Systems View"

In this paper, we will explore possibilities of dynamic interactions between human and neurocognitive robots especially focusing on the psychological problems of joint attentions and turn-taking. Firstly, we will show that movement patterns of a joystick-type haptic device which are driven by a simple attractor-based memory dynamics of recurrent neural network (RNN) can introduce novel interactive experiences to human subjects based on their force and proprioceptional sensations. Secondly, we will show experiments of joint attention game between human and a humanoid robot based on imitation learning. In the experiments, an extended scheme of RNNs is utilized for constructing a mirror system by which recognition of other’s movements and generation of owns can be naturally synchronized in the realtime imitation. These experiments suggest that spontaneous shifts in joint attentions as well as turn taking have resulted from so-called the open-dynamic structures where stable and unstable manifold coexist in the coupling between the robots and human cognitive
processes.