Keynote Speakers
 

"FRAGMENTS OF PLAY Inter-connected, Co-Created Social Media Entertainment" By Dr. Gary Hayes, Director of Laboratory for Advanced Media Production (LAMP) and Head of Virtual Worlds, Australia

Abstract

There are many media revolutions taking place the most powerful of which is still the transition from passive to participatory media. This is exemplified by the collision/mashup of games, TV and films as a new dominant immersive form and part of the on-going transformation of one way story-telling to co-created and distributed. This talk will investigate the nature of the playful, networked audience across online worlds & games, participatory film & TV and location based stories all helping to define social media entertainment. How are new audiences being classified, by their age, behaviours or how they themselves tell their new stories across multi-platform, multi-sensory environments. Some key paradigms and enabling services and technologies to be explored will include mixed reality, personalization, inhabited TV, emotional intelligence, machinima, cross-media identity and distributed play.

Bio

Gary is the Director of LAMP and the Chief Creative Officer of 'MUVEDesign'. He has led the Laboratory for Advanced Media Production at AFTRS since 2005 which has helped develop 61 Australian emerging media projects and run hundreds of workshops and industry seminars. At MUVEDesign and (previously Head of Virtual Worlds at the Project Factory) he has personally produced, designed and built Social Virtual World presences for Australian & US brands, including BigPond, ABC TV, Tourism Victoria, Physical TV, AFTRS and Deakin University. He is currently developing 'experience' worlds for other fortune 100 companies. Gary runs a Power150 top Media and Marketing blog Personalizemedia.com and recently e co-authored a UK Department Trade and Industry Paper on Personalised TV, one on Interactive Advertising in USA and has been an International Interactive Emmy Awards juror for the past three years.

Before coming to Australia Gary was Senior Producer at BBC Broadcast and New Media for 8 years devising and producing many of the BBC's digital interactive "firsts" - the first 24/7 Interactive TV service, the first global, live internet documentary and the first interactive programme on Broadband TV. He also devised and/or created over 20 other enhanced TV shows including Top of the Pops, Walking with Dinosaurs, Travel Show, several future BBC cross-platform navigators and was part of BBC Imagineering developing early "inhabited TV", Virtual World and TV Mixed Reality formats. He also ran external and internal hothouse development workshops and residential labs as part of BBC Multimedia center and then BBC New Media helping landmark linear programme teams create 360 projects.

He was a driving force behind New Media training and strategy and became BBC Senior Development Manager in New Media and simultaneously chaired the Business Models Group for TV-Anytime (the global personalized TV standard for on-demand personal TV). He moved to the US in 2004 to develop on-demand formats with broadcasters such as NBC and CBS and also line produced the Showtime's enhanced L-Word, PVR service as part of the AFI eTV labs.

Gary has or will be keynoting and panelling on Social Virtual Worlds & Cross-Media at Milia 08 (Cannes), ACMA, SPAA (main and fringe), Dept. Foreign Affairs & Trade, ad:tech, CeBit, AIMIA, 8th National Public Affairs, Cross-Media Storytelling 07, Monash, ABC and has presented on education and brands in virtual worlds on radio, podcasts and many seminars. He produces dramatic and corporate machinima and runs workshops in virtual worlds for corporates, designers, cinematographers and script writers - exploring the potential of shared, social online virtual worlds for collaborative production, creativity and education. He runs several popular blogs including media personalisation, digital brands, new media forms (personalizemedia), Second Life POV (justvirtual.com) and many others found on his Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Garyphayes

"HCI through the ‘HC Eye’ (Human-Centred Eye): Can Computer Vision Interfaces  Extract the Meaning of Human Interactive Behaviour?" By Dr. Claude C. Chibelushi, Faculty of Computing, Engineering & Technology, Staffordshire University, UK

Abstract

Some researchers advocating a human-centred computing perspective have been investigating new methods for interacting with computer systems. A goal of these methods is to achieve natural, intuitive and effortless interaction between humans and computers, by going beyond traditional interaction devices such as the keyboard and the mouse. In particular, significant technical advances have been made in the development of the next generation of human computer interfaces which are based on processing visual information captured by a computer. For example, existing image analysis techniques can detect, track and recognise humans or specific parts of their body such as faces and hands, and they can also recognise facial expressions and body gestures.

 This talk will explore technical developments and highlight directions for future research in digital image and video analysis which can enhance the intelligence of computers by giving them, for example, the ability to understand the meaning of communicative gestures made by humans and recognise context-relevant human emotion. The talk will review research efforts towards enabling a computer vision interface to answer the what, when, where, who, why, and how aspects of human interactive behaviour. The talk will also discuss the potential impacts and implications of technical solutions to problems arising in the context of human computer interaction. Moreover, it will suggest how the power of the tools built onto these solutions can be harnessed in many realms of human endeavour.

Bio

Dr. Claude C. Chibelushi is Reader in Digital Media Processing in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Technology, at Staffordshire University. He is Co‑Director of the Centre for Information Intelligence and Security Systems, and the Faculty Head of Postgraduate Research Studies. Prior to joining Staffordshire University, he was Senior Research Assistant at the University of Wales Swansea, after being Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Zambia. He holds a Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Wales Swansea, an M.Sc. in Microelectronics and Computer Engineering from the University of Surrey, and a B.Eng. in Electronics and Telecommunications with distinction from the University of Zambia. He was awarded a Beit Fellowship to undertake his Ph.D. studies. He is a Chartered Engineer, and a Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

 His research interests include multimodal recognition, robust pattern recognition, medical image analysis, and image synthesis and animation. He is one of the pioneers of research on audio-visual speaker recognition targeted at applications such as human computer interfaces and biometrics.

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