USC IMD:

The Hazard of Trends

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.

IMD Forum for 2/10/10: Simon Penny, University of California, Irvine

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

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

544 HW 3

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~~

Taylor&Gray Board Game - Last 3 Days

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

Peter Arvai of Prezi.com Tuesday Feb 9 at 6:30

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.

The Sixth-Annual Wonderland Award

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

IMD Forum for 2/3/10: Professor Milind Tambe, USC, Computer Science

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.

Some Products of this Weekend

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

Neil Gaiman to speak on February 4th

Some of you may be interested in this - writer Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Coraline, many others) will be speaking next Thursday at UCLA on imagination and creativity. More information can be found here