Keynote Speakers

Kentaro Toyama
Shared Use of Technology in Developing Countries
9.9.2009, 9:00-10:30 (ÖAW)

Abstract

The commoditization of electronic hardware has brought PCs, mobile phones, and other digital devices to some of the world’s poorest environments. Local communities, however, invariably adapt technology to fit their unique constraints, and this is no less true for digital technology. One adaptation that is strikingly consistent is the sharing of technology, whether it is a mobile phone shared by an entire family or a classroom PC simultaneously shared by ten students.

In this talk, I’ll highlight some of the interesting cases of technology sharing, discuss the social, economic, and cultural factors that contribute to it, and point to open areas for further research. Along the way, I’ll present research results – both observational and interventionist – from the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. The group’s goal is to understand potential technology users in economically poor communities and to devise technologies and systems that could support their needs and aspirations.

Bio

Kentaro Toyama is co-founder and assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, in Bangalore, where he supports the lab’s daily operation and contributes to strategy and overall management. He also leads the “Technology for Emerging Markets” group, which conducts multidisciplinary research to identify applications of computing and electronic technology for socio-economic development. In 2006, he co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), as a global platform for rigorous scholarship in this area. Prior to his work in India, Kentaro did research in computer vision, multimedia, and digital graphics in Redmond and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Ghana. Kentaro graduated with a PhD in computer science from Yale and a bachelors degree in physics from Harvard.

http://research.microsoft.com/~toyama

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Thecla Schiphorst
Exquisite Sensing: Exploring Empathy and Sensual Technologies in Collaborative Spaces
11.9.2009, 14:00-15:30 (ÖAW)

Abstract

I have selected the title exquisite sensing to suggest the use of awareness and embodied perception in light of our interaction with collaborative technologies. An exquisite sensing is finely tuned, discriminating, intense and yet also technically astute and accurate, not so much in the clinical sense, but in the lived and common sense.

As we continue to broaden our technological horizons through interdisciplinary values, co-experience, shared technologies, social-networks, group negotiation, and networked affect, there is an opportunity to articulate a greater clarity in the exquisite connection within and between our selves in designing for collaboration.

Exploring empathy and sensual technologies in collaborative spaces can support such exquisite sensing, through balancing inter-subjective research alongside technical analytic paradigms.

I present examples from my own research focusing on creative first-person methodologies from somatic and performance disciplines that can be applied to the interdisciplinary design of technology. The research goal is to cultivate attention that can be shared or co-experienced through touch, breath, movement and other kinaesethic or bodily forms that support expressive networked technology. These concepts are illustrated by design examples from applications that focus on shared experience in mobile, tangible and wearable technologies in the context of interactive art.

Bio

Thecla Schiphorst is a Media Artist/Designer and Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her background in dance performance and computing forms the basis for her research which focuses on embodied interaction, sense-making, and the aesthetics of interaction. She is particularly interested in the poetic forms that cultivate affect, materiality and experience-modeling within human computer interaction. She is a member of the original design team that developed Life Forms, the computer compositional tool for choreography and has worked with Merce Cunningham since 1990 supporting his creation of new dance with the computer.

She is the recipient of the 1998 PetroCanada award in New Media awarded biennially to a Canadian artist, by the Canada Council for the Arts, and 3 IDMA (International Digital Media Awards) in 1995 for immerce including best interface, best visual design and people's choice. Her media art installations have been exhibited internationally in Europe, Canada, the United States and Asia in many venues including Ars Electronica, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF), Future Physical, Siggraph, the Wexner Centre for the Arts, the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, and the London ICA. Thecla Schiphorst leads the whisper[s] research group an acronym for: wearable, handheld, intimate, sensory, personal, expressive, responsive systems.

thecla@sfu.ca
www.sfu.ca/~tschipho
http://whisper.iat.sfu.ca

News

Podcast of the discussion paper by Kjeld Schmidt and the open debate

Workshops: September 7-8, 2009

Welcome Reception: September 8, 2009
Strandbar Herrmann

Conference: September 9-11, 2009

Supplementary Proceedings of Workshops and Master Classes

Supplementary Proceedings of Demos, Videos and Posters

Supplementary Proceedings of Doctoral Colloquium


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The conference is affiliated with the European Society of Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET).




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