At IMD we have recently had the opportunity to host seminars featuring guest speakers from the architecture and engineering schools at USC. Although the content of the lectures given by professors Tambe and Leach stimulated a lot of interesting discussion about the projects they had come to discuss, these sessions had a fringe benefit that may be even more valuable, a window into the world of life in other university schools.

Speaker: Simon Penny, Professor of Arts and Engineering, UCI

Time: Wednesday, February 10, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)


Designing Embodied Interaction: Aesthetic, Technical and Theoretical Issues

Please join us for a talk by Professor Simon Penny, who is an artist, engineer, and designer of mixed reality installations. For more than two decades, Penny has pursued the simultaneous development of Interactive Artworks and the design and construction of technologies for Embodied Interaction, utilising Machine Vision and Robotics technologies. This work involves fundamental technical R+D directed by a radically Interdisciplinary negotiation of Artistic goals and sensibilities with Engineering realities, informed by emerging Cognitive Science research and a Phenomenological critique. The talk will take video documentation of three major works (Petit Mal, 1993-5, Traces, 1997-9, and Fugitive II, 2000-2004) as starting points for the discussion.

BodyTech Symposium on Embodied Media and Interactive Performance
February 22 and 23, 2010
University of California, Irvine
http://bodytech.embodied.net

Participants in the BodyTech Symposium at UC Irvine will demonstrate, experience and discuss recent developments in the theory and practice of embodied media and performance technologies. Rather than restricting human-computer interaction to a screen on a desktop with keyboard and mouse, this research envisions real-world performative environments that foster real-time interactions between people and computing technology, incorporating digital media with movement, voice and other forms of dynamic expression.

The BodyTech Symposium will bring together technology researchers and performing artists from across the US, Canada and Britain to consider interactive environments for dance, theatre, music and visual arts. Presentations, discussions and demonstrations will facilitate developing communication channels between participants and sharing of information and ideas. Participants will include performing artists, theorists, researchers and technology developers.

Registration & Fees
Full Program $50
One Day Only $35
Full Program (Students) $25
One Day Only (Students) $15

with just a 50 cents piezo sensor and an arduino... it is now possible to play and stop your music by a single wind blow~~

Last Chance to PreOrder a copy of this board game. - The South Sandwiche Islands is a game at the intersection of art, logic and literature.

Order here in the next 3 days

On Tuesday, February 9th the IML welcomes Peter Arvai, CEO of Prezi.com. The lecture will take place in the Leavey Library Auditorium beginning at 6:30 p.m.

Peter is CEO of Prezi, a zooming story telling and presentation tool that helps you create outstanding visuals for your thoughts. Prezi goes beyond the reach of linear presentation software to create more dynamic visual experiences. Peter has helped several start-ups launch on an international scale with business experience in Sweden, Japan, US and Hungary. He recently published the book Developing the Business Case for a New Mobile Service: An Exercise in Business Model Designing.

Peter is coming to speak about the importance of interactive presentations in the world of business and marketing. He will also be showing how his software can be used to develop exciting and innovative presentations and pitches.

WHAT: Explore, interpret, and transform Lewis Carroll and win prizes
WHO: All undergraduate and graduate students at USC are eligible
WHEN: The deadline for entries is April 1, 2010
AWARD: First prize, $2,000; Second prize, $1,500

"The format for Wonderland Award entries is limited only by the imagination. We accept a broad range of submissions, including scholarly essays, poems, performance pieces, videogames, animation, visual artworks, music, digital compositions, and films. "

More About the Contest

Speaker: Professor Milind Tambe

Time: Wednesday, February 3, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Multiagent systems: Lessons learned from putting theory into practice

Milind Tambe
Teamcore research group
http://teamcore.usc.edu/tambe
http://teamcore.usc.edu

How do we build multiagent systems? Today, within the agents and multiagent systems community, we see four main approaches: logic-based belief-desire-intention (BDI), decision- theory and its incarnation in distributed markov decision problems (distributed MDPs or POMDPs), distributed constraint optimization (DCOPs) and finally, auctions or game-theoretic approaches. I will begin my presentation by providing some historical context of the field of agents and multiagent systems and an overview of these approaches.

In general, while there is exciting progress in this research, we still lack sufficient testing of our theories in complex multiagent domains, to evaluate their promised strengths and uncover unanticipated limitations. In this context, I will outline lessons learned in the Teamcore group's recent efforts to transition theory into practice. I will focus in particular on research based on game-theory for randomizing plans for security applications and to avoid predictability that may be exploited by an opponent. Our algorithms are at the heart of ARMOR, a software scheduler that randomizes police checkpoints and canine patrols, deployed at the Los Angeles International Airport since August 2007. Our algorithms are also in use by the Federal Air Marshal Service for scheduling air marshals on limited sectors of international flights; and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is evaluating these algorithms for maintaining airport security at Pittsburgh and LAX airports towards possible large-scale deployments. I will also briefly discuss our research on DCOPs and their application to mobile sensor nets, and outline some recent research thrusts including multiagent-based evacuation simulation.

This weekend saw the both the Global Game Jam and the deadline for the Gamma 4 1-Button Game competition. As a participant in both, I'd like to share the fruits of our labor.

"Uniscorn" is a game about social anxiety and a donkey pretending to be a unicorn. Match the unicorns' outfits to sneak by them without getting "uniscorned," and find the truth behind their secret schemes. This game was made for the Global Game Jam over the course of 48 hours by myself (Kyla Gorman), Mike Sennott, Greg Nishikawa, Samantha Vick, Dai Yun, Juli Griffo, and Aurora Wang.
Uniscorn can be found here: http://globalgamejam.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2010/4291/Uniscorn_0.swf

"Dear Moon" is a one-button game where you play as the moon. A young tree, eagerly growing in the daylight, has come under attack from evil herbivorous gremlins. Luckily, moonlight summons the tree's guardians, little tree sprites, who will use the night time to collect stars and make cannons to hold off the gremlins. You win by surviving to the full moon with at least 4 star cannons. Hold down your button (clicking, in this case) to bring out the moon. The game is meant to be peaceful and relaxing, and was made by myself (Kyla Gorman), Mike Sennott, Teddy Diefenbach, and Joe Osborn.
Dear Moon can be found here: http://god-bear.com/DearMoon.html

Speaker: Neil Leach, USC, School of Architecture

Time: Wednesday, January 27, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)


Please join us for a presentation by Professor Neil Leach titled: "Swarm Urbanism."

In his book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Cities and Software, Steven Johnson presents the city as a manifestation of emergence. The city operates as a dynamic, adaptive system, based on interactions with neighbours, informational feedback loops, pattern recognition and indirect control. "Like any emergent system’, notes Johnson, ‘the city is a pattern in time." Moreover, like any other population composed of a large number of smaller discrete elements, such as colonies of ants, flocks of birds, networks of neurons or even the global economy, it displays a bottom-up collective intelligence that is more sophisticated than the behavior of its parts. In short, the city operates through a form of "swarm intelligence. . . . Importantly, Johnson extends the principle of emergence to the operations of certain software programmes. If cities and software programmes display a similar emergent logic, how might we make use of digital technologies to model a city?"

For some years now we have been using digital technologies to design buildings, from the use of standard drafting packages to more experimental use of generative design tools and parametric modeling. But how can we use digital technologies to design urbanism? This lecture explores the logic of ‘swarm intelligence’. This is the theory that multi-agent systems of various kinds - from flocks of birds and shoals of fish to neural networks, software programmes and even cities themselves - all begin to display similar forms of behaviour. How then can we use software programmes to generate urban design proposals according to the logic of ‘swarm intelligence’?

This week's Digital Studies Symposium presents Ramesh Srinivasan and Mark H. Hansen. Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, and his research interests center on the interactions among new media technologies and global cultures and communities. Hansen is Professor of Statistics at UCLA, and Co-PI on the project titled Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. They will discuss emerging modes of “data practice” as media technologies become increasingly pervasive, mobile and flexible.

The symposium is coordinated by Anne Bray and takes place Thursdays 6-9PM in the Ron Howard Theater of the Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. More information about the Digital Studies Symposium can be found here.

Yet another Downfall detournement with Hitler holding the line against digital humanities and fair use.

This coming Thursday night, from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m., the new IML Digital Studies Symposium will present a conversation between Johanna Drucker and Anne Burdick, moderated by Anne Bray. Drucker is a book artist, designer and cultural critic whose books include the recently published SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. Anne Burdick’s practice mixes graphic design, writing, editing and design research. She is the Chair of the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. Both Drucker and Burdick are involved with reimagining writing, research and scholarly practice through digital spaces.

The Digital Studies Symposium is both a weekly conversation on new media and scholarship, as well as a four-unit course titled IML 466. Students are invited to enroll for credit; however, the sessions are open to the public, and free. Come join the conversation in the Ron Howard Theater in the Zemeckis Center.

It seems that Din, a short experimental game I made at last year's Global Game Jam with composer Mansa Gory and artist Brian Lee, has resurfaced on Indiegames.com as one of their Best Experimental Games of 2009! I made the game to explore our sense of hearing and the extent to which it can process complex information, and am utterly flattered that they thought it warranted recognition.

Click here to download Din and see my thoughts on the game!
Click here for the full list of experimental games!

Two IMD games were selected as IGF Student Showcase Winners and one got honorable mention. Amazing.

Spectre
Paper Cakes
Runesinger

http://tigsource.com/articles/2010/01/18/igf-2010-student-showcase-winners

Speaker: Mark Allen, Machine Project

Time: Wednesday, January 20, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Mark Allen is an artist, educator and curator based in Los Angeles. He
is the founder and executive director of Machine Project, a non-profit performance and installation space investigating art, technology,
natural history, science, music, literature, and food. Machine
presents events, workshops, and site-specific installations using
hands-on engagement to make rarefied knowledge accessible. Beyond
their storefront space, Machine Project operates as a loose
confederacy of artists producing shows at locations ranging from the
Santa Monica beach to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Wanted to drop a quick note saying that mobzombies, a game with multiple lives and numerous imd collaborators, is actually available as a real thing, a game you can play on your iPhone. As you can see here, the game started life at imd as a weird idea w/ very custom hardware. It's since changed a lot since then.

The new version still uses motion controls, allowing you to control your character by physically walking around. The iPhone version also introduces *lazy mode* touch controls, in case you don't feel like looking a bit silly, or are in a subway or whatever.

The game also introduces a mission mode, with tight integration with the mobile/social/network/game foursquare. Using the place data from foursquare, players can scan for nearby zombie hordes. The more foursquare checkins at a place, the more zombies in the horde. If there are foursquare users at a place at the same time you are playing, they get represented as special rainbow zombies that bleed unicorns. You know, that kind of thing. These interactions are available without needing a foursquare account, but if you have one, you can sync it with the game for extra stuff (like checking in via the game, etc.).

Anyway, I'd love to hear what you guys think of this. drop a note to will@mobzombies.com if you want more info -- I also have a couple of promo codes available, send me an email.

Speaker: Jesper Juul, New York Game Center

Time: Wednesday, January 13, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

The Rise of Casual Games

It seems like only yesterday that video games were considered the province of males between 12 and 35. Yet with the launch of the Nintendo Wii, with the proliferation of casual games in browsers, with music games and cell phone games, video games seem to have broken out of their cultural niche. In this talk I will present a short history of the rise of casual games, and discuss its implications for game developers, player, and for the future of video games.
 

Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990's. He is a visiting arts professor at the NYU Game Center, but has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT and at the IT University of Copenhagen. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His recently published book, A Casual Revolution, examines how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii are bringing video games to a new audience. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on "game research and other important things".