KEYNOTE speakers
Vibeke Sorensen
Vibeke Sorensen is Professor and Chair of the School of Art, Design and Media, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her creative work and research in experimental digital multimedia, computer animation, interactive architectural installation, and visual-music performance spans more than four decades and has been published and exhibited worldwide. From 1984-1994, she was Founding Director of the Computer Animation Laboratory (CAL) in the School of Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts, and from 1994-2005 she was Professor and Founding Chair of the Division of Animation and Digital Arts (DADA) in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). She has a long history of collaboration with scientists and engineers on the development of new technologies, including at California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Sorensen is a 2001 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Film/Video/Multimedia, and holds a Catedra at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, Intel Corporation, the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and Zumberge Fund for Innovation in Research, as well as Nanyang Technological University. She was also Chair of the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery: Global Eyes. Her recent 12-screen real-time interactive visual music installation Illuminations featured real-time 3D animation, embedded systems, Tibetan Singing Bowls and plant biofeedback.
Lars Andersen
Lars Louis Andersen, is a professor of Musculoskeletal Disorders at National Research Centre for the Working Environment in Copenhagen, Denmark. His educational background is on Exercise Physiology (specialized in strength training) and his main research areas involve 1) Musculoskeletal disorders (e.g. back pain, neck pain) – causes, consequences and possibilities for action, 2) Reduction of risk factors in the physical work environment, 3) Maintaining workers with reduced resources at the labor market (e.g. senior workers and workers with chronic disorders). Currently he leads a research group to cover these areas through a combination of 1) epidemiological studies, e.g. where they follow Danish workers in registries to investigate risk factors for sickness absence, 2) workplace intervention studies with physical exercise programs or participatory ergonomics to prevent and reduce back or neck pain and to improve workers wellbeing, 3) laboratory studies, where they combine several physiological measurement (EMG, EEG, pressure pain threshold, strength measurements, force plate measurements, 3D video analysis) to study responses to office work as well as heavy and fatiguing work. Finally he is editorial board member: BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, Journal of Aging and Health, ISRN Pain, Health Informatics, Journal of Environmental Medicine, and BioMed Research International.
Jun Rekimoto
Jun Rekimoto received his B.A.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in Information Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1984, 1986, and 1996, respectively. Since 1994 he has worked for Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL). In 1999 he formed and directed the Interaction Laboratory within Sony CSL. Since 2007 he has been a professor in the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at The University of Tokyo. Since 2011 he also has been Deputy Director of Sony CSL
Rekimoto’s research interests include human-computer interaction, computer augmented environments and computer augmented human (human-computer integration). He invented various innovative interactive systems and sensing technologies, including NaviCam (a hand-held AR system), Pick-and-Drop (a direct-manipulation technique for inter-appliance computing), CyberCode (the world’s first marker-based AR system), Augmented Surfaces, HoloWall, and SmartSkin (two earliest representations of multi-touch systems). He has published more than a hundreds articles in the area of human-computer interactions, including ACM SIGCHI, and UIST. He received the Multi-Media Grand Prix Technology Award from the Multi-Media Contents Association Japan in 1998, iF Interaction Design Award in 2000, the Japan Inter-Design Award in 2003, iF Communication Design Award in 2005, Good Design Best 100 Award in 2012, Japan Society for Software Science and Technology Fundamental Research Award in 2012, and ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award in 2013. In 2007, He also elected to ACM SIGCHI Academy.
PLENARY speakers
David Levy
David Neil Laurence Levy, is a British International Master of chess, a businessman noted for his involvement with computer chess and artificial intelligence, and the founder of the Computer Olympiads and the Mind Sports Olympiads. He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers. Levy became a professional chess writer in 1971, and has been prolific. Several of his books were co-written with English Grandmaster and prolific chess author Raymond Keene. He has functioned as literary agent for the escaped Great Train robber, Ronald Biggs. In the late 1970s, Levy consulted with Texas Instruments on the development of the Chess module for the TI-99/4A Home Computer Project. In 1997, he led the team that won the Loebner Prize for the program called "CONVERSE". The prize competition rewards the program that is best able to simulate human communication. Levy entered the contest again in 2009, and won. Since 1999, he has been the president of the International Computer Games Association. He was Chairman of the Rules and Arbitration Committee for the Kasparov vs Deep Junior chess match in New York City in 2003. Levy once started a business called Tiger Computer Security with a famous computer hacker, Mathew Bevan. Now he is the chief executive officer of Intelligent Toys Ltd, a London-based company that develops toys that incorporate AI. Levy also wrote Love and Sex with Robots, published in the United States in 2007 by HarperCollins, and forthcoming from Duckworth in the UK. It is the commercial edition of his PhD thesis. In September 2009, Levy predicted that sex robots would hit the market within a couple of years.
Charles Spence
Charles Spence is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. He is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. His research focuses on how a better understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces, and environments in the future. His research calls for a radical new way of examining and understanding the senses that has major implications for the way in which we design everything from household products to mobile phones, and from the food we eat to the places in which we work and live.
Charles has published over 500 articles in top-flight scientific journals over the last 15 years. Charles has been awarded the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and, most recently, the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, not to mention the 2008 IG Nobel prize for nutrition, for his groundbreaking work on the ‘sonic crisp’!
Charles Spence
Charles Spence is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. He is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. His research focuses on how a better understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces, and environments in the future. His research calls for a radical new way of examining and understanding the senses that has major implications for the way in which we design everything from household products to mobile phones, and from the food we eat to the places in which we work and live.Charles has published over 500 articles in top-flight scientific journals over the last 15 years. Charles has been awarded the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and, most recently, the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, not to mention the 2008 IG Nobel prize for nutrition, for his groundbreaking work on the ‘sonic crisp’!
