The 8th International Conference on Intelligent Environments IE'12

The 8th International Conference on Intelligent Environments IE'12
26-29 of June 2012 (workshops on 26-27 of June 2012)
Guanajuato Mexico
www.intenv.org

**** Conference paper submission: 14 January 2012


Intelligent Environments (IE) refer to physical spaces in which IT and other pervasive computing technology are woven and used to achieve specific goals for the user, the environment or both. IE enriches user experience, better manages the environment's resources, and increases user awareness of that environment.
The 8th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE'12) will be held at the beautiful and historic World Heritage UNESCO city of Guanajuato (Mexico) famous for its subterranean streets, ancient churches, the Callejon del Beso (Alley of the Kiss), and owing its fame and fortune to rich veins of silver and gold discovered in the 18th century.

This edition continues a series of highly successful conferences that were organized in Colchester (UK), Athens (Greece), Ulm (Germany), Seattle (USA), Barcelona (Spain) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), and Nottingham (UK) in the past seven years. The conference provides a multidisciplinary collaborative forum for researchers and practitioners to present theoretical and practical results of Intelligent Environments work. This conference program will include workshops, invited lectures and special sessions of full and posters. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Ambient Intelligence
* Urban Intelligence
* Ubiquitous/Pervasive Computing
* Context Awareness
* End-User Programming
* Human-Computer Interaction
* Affective Systems & Wearables
* Virtual & Mixed-Reality
* Middleware & Networking
* Hardware & Software for AmI
* Embedded Computing
* Theoretical Foundations
* Building Architecture
* Arts & Design
* Social Sciences
* Government and Law
* Green & Sustainable Design
* Tele-care and eHealth
* Educational Technology
* Smart Automobiles
* Industrial Automation
* Avionics and Space
* Robotics
* Evaluation Methodologies

Conference Program: The conference provides a multidisciplinary collaborative forum for researchers and practitioners from disciplines such as Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Building Architecture Art & Design, Sociology, Government and Education to present theoretical and practical results of Intelligent Environments.

Authors are invited to submit regular full papers as well as contributions to the Doctoral Colloquium, Posters Session or Demos & Videos Session.  Papers accepted in any of these tracks will also be included in the Conference Proceedings (see more details in Publications section below). The deadline for submitting to these tracks is the same than for main conference paper submission.   Contact details are offered further down in this document.

Awards: as in previous editions there will be a number of awards to reward quality and innovation. There will be prizes for Best Full Paper, Best Demo, Best Video and for the Intelligent Environments Application Challenge.

Workshops Program: A number of workshops will complement the main conference program.  Papers accepted in any of the workshops sponsored by this conference will be included in one proceedings volume that will collect the contributions in all workshops, see more details in the publications section.

Organising an IE12 Workshop: We invite people who would like to submit a proposal for organising an IE12 workshop to contact the programme chairs (pc@intenv.org) or download a Workshop-Proposal CFP from our website. IE workshops benefit from the support of the IE organisation and include a profit share arrangement with the organisers.

Important Dates:
* Workshop Proposals: 5th December 2011
* Conference paper submission: 14 January 2012
* Conference paper notification: 14 March 2012
* Workshop paper submission: 30 March 2012
* Conference Papers (Final Version): 16 April 2012
* Workshops Papers (Final Version): 14 May 2012

Publications:  all papers accepted in the main conference will be electronically available through IEEE Explore.  All papers accepted in the Workshops program will be published as a volume of the Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments Series (ISI indexed) of IOS Press and electronically available through ACM Digital Library.

Invited Speakers: as in previous editions, IE'12 will invite distinguished professionals through a number of Keynotes.  They will be announced through the website of the event in the near future.

Special Issues:  a number of journal issues will be published encompassing core areas of the event.

For enquiries contact:

General Chair

Victor Zamudio
Instituto Tecnológico de Leon, Mexico
gc@intenv.org

Program Chairs

Vic Callaghan
University of Essex, UK
pc@intenv.org

Juan Carlos Augusto
University of Ulster, UK
pc@intenv.org

Future Cities

Future Cities is an exciting conference that will be held in London on the 15^th and 16^th December 2011.  There are currently over 120 speakers registered at the event and a further 130 delegates in attendance over 2 days.  We have 10 speaker slots available and can accommodate a further 40 delegates.  The speaker and registration fees are £180 plus VAT.  To register as a speaker of delegate please click here.  Papers that are submitted for the Conference need to cover one of the following topics:

The City of Neighbourhoods.

The City of Enterprise.

The Connected City.

The Healthy City.

The City of Culture.

The Sporting City.

Deprivation and the City.

The Green City.

Display spaces are available at a cost of £499 plus VAT with delegate inserts at £199 plus VAT and to book one of these packages please click here.

Details of the event can be found here.  A selection of the current contributors include:

University College London Environment Institute

University of Michigan

University of Edinburgh

Bartlett School of Planning

Technion Institute of Technology

University of Cardiff

London South Bank University

Witts University

Strathclyde University

Santa Fe International New Media Festival
June 22 – July 8, 2012
Call for New Media Submissions
currents 2012, the 3rd annual Santa Fe International New Media Festival will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA – June 22 – July 8, 2012.  The Festival explores the role of technology and the diverse applications of New Media in the arts.
This year submission categories include single channel video, video and sound installation, interactive new media, animation, computer/software modulated sculpture, multimedia performance, experimental and interactive documentary video, Digital Dome projection, art gaming and web art.
The Festival will be held in several venues throughout the city: El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, the Center for Contemporary Arts, the Santa Fe Complex and the Digital Dome facility at the Institute for American Indian Arts. In addition to exhibitions currents 2012 will offer panel discussions and workshops, and two nights of multimedia performance. Festival events are free to the public.
Application Deadlines (via online submission or postmarked):
February 1, 2012 (most festival submissions)
March 1, 2012 for Digital Dome Submissions
For Application Guidelines and Submission Forms:
http://www.currentsnewmedia.org/submissionguidel.html
To view archives of previous festival exhibitions:
http://www.currentsnewmedia.org/currents2012.html

Major Blog posting on Third Woman Project

The Creators Project has published a substantial critique of the Third Woman project which was originated with the IOCT as a major partner under the emobilart European workshop.

The Creators Project cites it on  a Blog exploring new ideas in Media

The Creators Project was born from a partnership between Intel and Vice. Together the two companies met over a shared passion for art and creativity, and a common belief that there was a better way of elevating artists and supporting new work with them.They say of The Third Woman:

 

" What is important about The Third Woman‘s interactive component is that it engages its audience morally and intellectually. It goes further than asking them to guide the narrative, but to actually consider the decisions they are making in a larger context of the themes of the film. The film is not only aware of its audience as present, but also aware of them as opinionated, sentient, intelligent individuals. Many times when artists use the word ’interactive’ to describe their work they only mean it to be responsive or performative. It does not take into consideration that the complexity of human behavior offers only a very limited set of options for people to merely choose from. Although The Third Woman still only offers a limited set of choices, what sets it apart is how they seek to generate thought among their audience."

 

http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/interactive-digital-noir-piece-combines-cinema-fashion-and-gaming

Sean Clark and Fabrika Arts Centre: Interact Gallery

Digital artist and IOCT PhD student Sean Clark launched the Interact Gallery on 5th September  at the Fabrika Arts Centre. Leicester's newest gallery for interactive and digital arts opened today on the first floor of Fabrika, in Humberstone Gate. It will act as a showcase for the best art works in the East Midlands and will be curated jointly by Sean Clark, De Montfort University and Adam Kirk of Fabrika. 

The show  runs until late October and the organisers hope that would-be artists will offer their works to the rolling programme, during which exhibits will be changed regularly.

Speaking at the opening, Sean Clark said "The transformation of the upstairs space is still underway but it is hoped to be completed in two weeks time. Over the next two months we plan to show the work of up and coming digital artists."

On show at present are a number of works by Sean Clark, such as his Memory Mirror, which captures video images of people walking in front of it and plays them back as ghostly images.

His work Drop Sketch is a wall of graphical images provided by people from their mobile phones, to which they have downloaded a special app. that allows them to make a sketch and upload it to the central gallery. 

Another panel shows a group of moving circles that nteracts with the viewer.

Also speaking the Launch event was Professor Ernest Edmonds, from IOCT De Montfort University, who told the meeting "innovations in interactive arts have often involved small and select groups of people. This gallery is ideal for interactive work. Leicester has had a strong tradition in this area over a long period of time. It was one of the first cities to mount an early exhibition of interactive art back in 1970/71, in what was then Leicester Polytechnic.

It was Albert Einstein who said that 'inventing the problem is more important than solving it.' This very much sums up what this exhibition is about.Leicester has for a long time been noted for its adventurous and experimental artists. Buckminster Fuller came here in 1971",  he said recounting some of the early approaches to interactive art experiments. Fuller was an engineer, designer, inventor and systems theorist. He invented the architecture of the geodesic dome. 

A book is due out in November which Ernest Edmonds has edited with Linda Candy: Interacting: art, research and the creative practitioner, to be published by Libri. In it, contributors will consider the many forms of interaction involved in the arts and in creative processes.

"I look forward to seeing the gallery playing its part in innovation and risk-taking as part of the artistic process, " Prof. Edmonds said. 

More information is available from the Interact Gallery web site.

GoGreen Week and IOCT

Online totaliser day view for GoGreen week

Well...inspite of our major contribution to the new Greenview App,  the University GoGreen week ( http://gogreenweek.dmu.ac.uk/) passed unevenly, with IOCT down in the energy league tables because of its relatively small size-where any small discrepancy in use was magnified disproportionately-hence the turning off of a few items on standby leading to a 28% saving for the day. Hence this tweet!

"@greenviewdmu Greenview

Also huge congratulations to @ioct_dmu who, after a visit by dmu energy team, reduced consumption by 28%!! @ahugill #dmugogreen"

The Vice Chancellor writes as follows:

Staff and students cut electricity use by 12.3 per cent in one week.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at DMU for doing their bit to make Go Green Week such a success.

The final figure shows we managed to reduce our electricity consumption by 12.3 per cent across the campus, which was a huge saving of 30,871kWh – all in the space of seven days.

To put it into context, the energy saved would be enough to power nine homes for a year, or toast more than a million slices of bread! We also saved more than 16 tonnes of carbon dioxide!

It was a fantastic effort which shows the big savings that can be achieved by following a few simple steps to make sure computers, lighting and other electrical equipment are switched off when we are not using them.

I don’t think any institution of our size has ever attempted such a campaign and it reflects the importance DMU puts on environmental issues and sustainability.

It was also a fitting tribute to our 14 Japanese students from Tohoku University, who were visiting De Montfort University (DMU) for a week’s holiday as they continued to rebuild their lives following the earthquake and tsunami in March this year.

When I invited them to stay at DMU I wanted to do something to show our solidarity with the Japanese victims of the earthquake. Reducing electricity consumption seemed a simple but effective thing to do and help us remember how they are  having to cope with drastically cutting energy use after major power plants were destroyed.

We have learned a lot from Go Green Week – but please remember our drive to save energy does not stop here.

We all have a part to play in reducing electricity consumption and cutting carbon emissions on campus.

There are lots of opportunities to do this, including taking part in the Green Impact project which is a competition between departments and teams to see who can be the greenest. For more information on Green Impact please contact me  kletten@dmu.ac.uk

For more information about the green initiatives happening at DMU please visit www.dmu.ac.uk/sustainability

Thank you again - and let’s keep saving energy.

Professor Dominic Shellard

Vice-Chancellor of DMU

The Future of Locative Media

Mark Tuters at ISEA 2011in Istanbul spoke of the spectrum of media art practice in the mobile arena as ranging from the personal and local to the relational and transposable. He acknowledged the fetishisation of the local, but held open the medium’s potential for challenging the exploitative effects of globalisation on hidden labour by tracking all product components. Site-specific thus becomes ‘tracing the elsewhere”. 

For me this data as power proposition still fell within the realm radical individualism and so was still inside the framework of the neo-liberal project. Mark Shephard on the same panel spoke of ubiquitous conditions and the new possibilities for new media détournment 45 years after the Situationists. He suggested artists should abandon the locative as the dominant frame and add on the concepts of time and identity to enlarge the artistic possibilities of the medium. Ludic Being might be the new mode for Situationist media. The visual examples he juxtaposed were parcours runners in a Russian estate (as modern examples of détourment) with a clip from Cliff Oakley’s dystopian film The Catalogue where consumer profiling and surveillance meet in grim harmony. I think what we could postulate is rather that there are two domains-the “digital tame” of social media, online consumer culture and even radical digital arts and the “wild” of critical conditions in the world where poverty and disempowerment have yet to find a political voice in pervasive digital art.

I believe both speakers are still working within the paradigm that existed before the demise of the neo-liberal economic project and that collective and focused action through pervasive media art , which has some idea of where it would like to move the dominant ideas, is an altogether more difficult and painful proposition, but one where Mark Shephard’s extension of the frame could be the most readily applied and move beyond individual détournment to something more coherent in terms of collective ideas and commitment.