ubcrobsonsquare.jpgI am fortunate to be invited to participate in a workshop organised by the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) which is my home department. Both David Vogt and Sid Fels are knowledgeable and great to listen to, so it should be a useful session to attend if tagging interests you.

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MAGIC Workshop - Media Annotation and Tagging
June 6th, UBC Robson Square (downtown), 3-5:30pm

Directions are here.

Please distribute!

The 7th quarterly MAGIC workshop will explore the exploding area of media annotation and tagging. Please join us for 3 exciting talks:
Attendance is free but please RSVP to Lavana Lea (lavana@cs.ubc.ca)

David Vogt, CEO, CrowdTrust Technologies: Tagging technologies to make sense of everything that matters
Sid Fels, UBC: Perspectives on Human Communication Technologies, Smart Homes and Media annotation
Phillip Jeffrey, UBC: Playing tag in user-generated spaces

David Vogt, CEO, CrowdTrust Technologies ( http://www.crowdtrust.net)

“How often every day do you encounter things you know are meaningful and might need some day, yet inevitably get lost or forgotten? Think of CrowdTrust as your secure external memory drive and personal creative commons. We enable you to easily tag, keep and make sense of everything that matters in the digital blizzard of your life. Ideas, emails, places, people, images, etc, etc, - you can capture and automatically organize anything on the fly. Best of all, these ’semantic investments’ quickly become an invaluable identity asset, allowing you to create and manage actionable representations of “you” to yourself, your networks and the general public.

CrowdTrust approaches media tagging and annotation from a social/semantic perspective. All of our personal accounts are free; we offer identity, marketing and collective intelligence services for organizations.”
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Sid Fels: Perspectives on Human Communication Technologies, Smart Homes and Media annotation

Recent trends in human communication technologies focus on people’s relationships with each other, with computational artifacts and various environments people encounter in their daily lives. Research at MAGIC and the Human Communication Technologies laboratory are pushing this trend from the perspective of relationship aesthetics and design of experience and expresssion. Design for human experience and expression using information technology requires attention to how and why people form relationships with entities beyond themselves. An awareness of people’s different cognitive, physical and emotional capabilities provides a foundation for acquiring, analyzing, representing, storing, retrieving, transmitting, communicating and ultimately synthesizing human experience. In this presentation, I will discuss some of our current work on a context-aware multimedia project for the Winter Olympics and other related activities. This project sets the foundation to proceed to speculate on some new perspectives on how these technologies may develop in the future as we look at people’s relationship to their digital environment in the home and the new opportunities this uncovers.

Bio:

Sidney has been in the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia since 1998. Sidney received his Ph. D. and M.Sc . in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1994 and 1990 respectively supervised by Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and Bill Buxton. He received his B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the
University of Waterloo in 1988. He was recognized as a Distinguished University Scholar at UBC from 2004. He was a visiting researcher at ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan from 1996 to 1997. He also worked at Virtual Technologies Inc. in Palo Alto, CA. He is internationally known for his work in human-computer interaction, biomechanical modeling, neural networks, intelligent
agents, new interfaces for musical expression and interactive arts with over 100 scholarly publications and exhibitions. Sidney is one of the principal investigators of the Institute of Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems through his authoring a grant to create a new $22.1M facility to house interdisciplinary research using advanced technologies. He has been the Director of MAGIC since 2001.

Sidney is currently a visiting professor at NTT Cyber Solutions laboratory at Yokosuka Research Laboratories.
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Phillip Jeffrey: Playing tag in user-generated spaces.

In today’s Web 2.0 environment, tools exist to classify and organize digital content that has been uploaded – in a sense providing users with control over information they are sharing. These technologies have value in enabling both consumers and producers of the content to easily find media such as pictures, webpages, or blog posts that have been tagged. User generated sites such as Flickr and Facebook which enable tagging attach additional information or descriptions to content. These online environments provide powerful social tools for creative expression, networking, and feedback from their audience. In this presentation, I will discuss how tagging differs within these shared spaces, how the dynamics of culture manifests itself, and shed light on how the design of these environments facilitate forms of creative expression.

Bio

Phillip Jeffrey is a Masters of Science student in the Interdisciplinary Studies program. His home department is the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre. His thesis research investigates how user-generated digital spaces are being used in social and personal ways. His broader research explores social and cultural issues that emerge within the areas of pervasive games and ubiquitous computing in everyday life. His research blog is fadetoplay.com.

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Relevance: It will be good preparation for my town hall presentation later in June.