Workshop on Pervasive Computing and Interactive Art

May 14th, 2009, 13:30 – 18:00

Organizers: Philippe Codognet1, Ryohei Nakatsu2, Naoko Tosa3

 

1 CNRS, France / JFLI – University of Tokyo, Japan, philippe.Codognet@lip6.fr 

2 National University of Singapore, Singapore, idmdir@nus.edu.sg

3 Kyoto University, Japan, tosa@media.kyoto-u.ac.jp



Digital and interactive art has been developing rapidly in the last twenty years and has now become a mature field. Artists are now experimenting with the latest technologies and are sometimes developing works together with researchers in order to explore new types of interaction and novel use of digital technologies, including mobile technology, context-aware devices, sensor networks, etc. The key point is that artworks are aimed to be in direct contact with the general public and therefore provide an excellent test-bed to experiment new ideas and their acceptance by the mainstream public. Many digital artworks can thus also be seen as innovative devices engaging the public in new types of interactions with new media and envisioning thus usages and social impact. The objective of the workshop is to bring together artists, researchers and media designers in order to explore innovative use of pervasive and ubiquitous technologies for cultural applications. Artists are now exploring new horizons beyond the “white box” or the “black box” inside museum exhibitions, e.g. digital artworks installed in public space which require minimal and intuitive interaction that can take advantage of today’s pervasive technologies. We believe that such a domain can be explored only through an inter-disciplinary dialogue between science, technology, art and the humanities.

 

Proceedings of the workshop are here.

 

 

1.      Schedule

 

13:30 – 15:30 Papers and Demos

 

(1)     Kazushige Murata "The Importance of University-related Informal Networks for the Contents/IT Industry Creation"

 

(2)     Philippe Codognet and Gilbert Nouno "From Landscape to Soundscape

 

(3)     Ryohei Nakatsu "Dance Robot for Physical Entertainment"

 

(4) Naoko Tosa " Hitch Haiku: An Interactive Supporting System for Composing Haiku Poem"

 

15:30 – 16:00 Break

 

16:30 – 18:00 Panel Discussion

 

Interactive Cultural Experience - Interactions with Asian Cultures

Chair:                   Ryohei Nakatsu (National University of Singapore)

Panelists:             Ryohei Nakatsu (National University of Singapore)

Naoko Tosa (Kyoto University, Japan)

Michihiko Minoh (Kyoto University, Japan)

Kazuyuki Konagaya (Osaka City University, Japan)

Haruo Takemura (Osaka University, Japan)

Philippe Codognet (CNRS/JFLI, Japan)

 

 

 

2.       Papers and Demos

 

Kazushige Murata, "The Importance of University-related Informal Networks for the Contents/IT Industry Creation"

When new industry emerges, especially in the area of IT and contents, the key issue is collaboration among several companies that supplement each other by exchanging ideas and supporting other companies. Basically the policy of achieving business for companies is to choose internal business rather than external business as the former is more profitable and secure. However in the case of a business focusing new market/industry, it is risky for one company to try to realize this. Therefore it is important for companies to collaborate each other and to create intermediate organization that would focus the new market/industry. Based on the case studies, this paper will state that this methodology well works in the case of collaboration among universities utilizing informal networks among them.

 

Philippe Codognet, Gilbert Nouno "Red Light Spotters: Images-driven sound and rhythm landscape"

Red Light Spotters is a multi-contextual interactive project which aims to create an open and real-time musical environment sharing relations with and extending a natural ambient environment, namely an urban landscape. This interactive sound installation is intended to be exhibited in a "City View" observatory that are becoming more and more frequent in top oors of skyscrapers buildings, and to be an auditory complement to the visual stimulus from the elevated point of view over the city. In a first step, this project is speciacally developed for Tokyo, as there the blinking red lights on top of buildings are creating a mesmerizing dynamic virtual landscape and can be used to create rhythms and music. But it can be further adapted for other cities. It encompass artistic creation process embedding image tracking, artificial intelligence with inductive original tempo tracking and beat prediction algorithms. We perform pertinent image and symbolic descriptors extractions, as pulsation and rhythm features, in order to synchronize both musical and control worlds with the natural visual environment. We end up with emergent rhythmic process for musical creation interpreted and performed to a certain extent

by sound artists.

 

Ryohei Nakatsu, "Dance Robot for Physical Entertainment"

Dance is one form of entertainment where physical movement is the key factor. The main reason why robots are experiencing a kind of “boom” is that they have a physical body. We propose a robot dance system that combines these two elements. First, various factors concerning entertainment and dance are studied. Then we propose the dance system by robot using motion unit and the synthetic rule referring the speech synthesis. Also we describe the details of the system by focusing on its software functions. Finally we show the evaluation results of robot dance performances.

 

Naoko Tosa, " Hitch Haiku: An Interactive Supporting System for Composing Haiku Poem"

Human communication is fostered in environments of regional communities and cultures and in different languages. Cultures are rooted in their unique histories. Communication media have been developed to circulate these cultural characteristics. The theme of our research is “Cultural Computing”, which means the translation of cultures using scientific methods representing essential aspects of Japanese culture. We study the reproduction of a traditional Japanese Haiku by computer. Our system can abstract an essence of human emotions and thoughts into a Haiku, a Japanese minimal poem form. A user chooses arbitrary phrases from a chapter of the essay “1000 Books and 1000 Nights.”  Using the phrases chosen by the user, our system generates the Haiku which includes the essence of these words.

 

 

3.      Panel discussion:  Interactive Cultural Experience - Interactions with Asian Cultures

 

Asia is a vast treasure trove of cultures based on its long history. Its culture includes historical heritages, religions, various forms of arts, life styles in different countries, etc. At the same time Asian cultures have a lot of variations as they cover various kinds human races, regions, climates, etc. For Westerners Asian cultures have been a kind of mystery as they look so different from Western cultures.

However, the integration of interaction technologies and Asian cultural contents would make it possible for Westerners to approach Asian cultures more easily and to have a better understanding for them. In this panel first we want to discuss how we could develop various kinds of interactive exhibits for museums and other places so that through the interactive experiences with these exhibits Westerners would have better understanding of Asian cultures.

At the same time the advance of communication and network technologies has made it clearer that Westerners and Asians share a lot of basic characteristics as well as cultures. Therefore in this panel also we want discuss the basic nature of Asian and Western cultures and hope to reach a consensus that at the bottom these two cultures share a lot.

 

Chair:         Ryohei Nakatsu (National University of Singapore)

 

Panelist:     Ryohei Nakatsu (National University of Singapore, Singapore)

                    Naoko Tosa (Kyoto University, Japan)

                    Michihiko Minoh (Kyoto University, Japan)

                    Kazuyuki Konagaya (Osaka City University, Japan)

                    Haruo Takemura (Osaka University, Japan)

                    Philippe Codognet (CNRS/Japanese-French Laboratory for Informatics, Japan)

 

 

       

Short Biography of Ryohei Nakatsu :

Ryohei Nakatsu received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from Kyoto University in 1969, 1971 and 1982 respectively.  After joining NTT in 1971, he mainly worked on speech recognition technology.  In 1994, he joined ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute) as the president of ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories.  In 2002 he became a professor at School of Science and Technology, Kwansei Gakuin University.  Since March of 2008 he is a professor at National University of Singapore (NUS) and a director of Interactive & Digital Media Institute (IDMI) at NUS.

His research interests include interactive media, entertainment technologies and communication robot/agent.

In 1978, he received Young Engineer Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers Japan (IEICE-J).  In 1996, the best paper award from the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia.   In 1999, 2000 and 2001, Telecom System Award from Telecommunication System Foundation and the best paper award from Virtual Reality Society of Japan.  In 2000, the best paper award from Artificial Intelligence Society of Japan.

He is a fellow of the IEEE and the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers Japan (IEICE-J).  He is a member of various academic societies such as IEEE, ACM, IEICE-J, the Acoustical Society of Japan, Information Processing Society of Japan, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence., and so on.  Also he is a chair of IFIP Technical Committee on Entertainment Computing.

 

Short Biography of Naoko Tosa:

Naoko Tosa is Japanese media artist and Professor. She received a Ph.D. in engineering for Art and Technology research from the University of Tokyo. She is professor at Kyoto University from 2005. She was Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) 2002-2004. She was a researcher at the ATR (Advanced Technology Research Labs) Media Integration & Communication Lab. 1995-2001. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the New York Metropolitan Art Museum, ACM SIGGRAPH, ARS ELECTRONICA, the Long Beach Museum, International Berlin Film Festival New media Division and other locations worldwide. Her works are also part of the collections at the Japan Foundation, the American Film Association, the Japan Film Culture Center, The National Museum of Art, Osaka and the Toyama Prefecture Museum of Modern Art. In 1996, she received the best paper award from the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia. In 1997, the L'Oreal Grand Prix for research combining art and science awarded her First prize. In 2000, she received prizes from the Interactive Art section in ARS Electronica, as well as a 2nd Prize for Nabi Digital Storytelling Competition of Intangible Heritage, Organized by UNESCO 2004. She received a research funding from the agency for cultural affairs in Japan 2000, from Japan Science and Technology Agency 2001-2004, from France Telecom R & D 2003-2005, from one of the biggest game company, Taito Corp. (they built "Space Invaders") 2005-2008, from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) 2005-2008.

 

Short Biography of Philippe Codognet:

Philippe Codognet is currently professor at Keio University (Tokyo, Japan), at the Research Institute for Digital Media and Content, where he is developing researches on “Intelligent Public Spaces” combining artificial intelligence and interactive sound installations. He is full professor in computer science at University Pierre et marie Curie (Paris 6), currently on leave at CNRS. He is the co-director of the Japanese-French Laboratory for Informatics, a joint laboratory between CNRS, UPMC, University of Tokyo, Keio University and National Institute for Informatics in Japan. From 2003 to 2007, he was Attache for Science and Technology at the French Embassy in Japan (Tokyo). Following mathematics and computer science studies at the University of Bordeaux, he received a Ph.D. from this University in 1989 and then joined the French National Institute for Computer Science (INRIA) as senior researcher in 1990. After a sabbatical leave at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris in 1997/8, he joined University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6) in September 1998, as full professor. His researches focused on programming languages, artificial intelligence, logic, multi-agent systems and virtual reality. He participated in many national and European projects and over 80 publications in international journals and conferences are detailing his researches.

In addition to his purely scientific activities, he worked on the relationships between art and new technologies as theoretician/art critic , workshop organiser and curator.  He was member of the Scientific Council for research and innovation of the Visual Arts Department of the French Ministry of Culture from 2000 to 2003.