CfP: 4th International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'11)

Stories and story-telling (narration and storytelling systems) represent long-standing cultural achievements of significant relevance even in modern times. Nowadays, story-telling is being enhanced with the convergence of sociology, pedagogy, and technology. In recent times, computer gaming is also deployed for serious and educational purposes and has proved to be an effective approach to cognitive stimulation and development. Many conceptual and procedural similarities and inter-dependences exist between story-telling and educational gaming. For instance, a good story lays the foundation for immersion and emotional involvement in games. Therefore these two areas can be integrated for research on web-based learning. Digital stories are an ideal starting point for the creation of educational games, since each story addresses particular problems, so that the story recipient can benefit from other users' experiences. This leads to the development of more realistic stories providing the kernel for non-trivial educational games involving various types of media. These stories cover the instructional part of an educational game, while the game adds the motivation and engagement part.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers, experts and practitioners from the domains of digital story-telling and educational and serious gaming to share ideas and generate new knowledge in the context of web-based learning. There is a great amount of disparate research in these fields and this workshop will allow the participants to discover and leverage potential synergies.

Workshop topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Theories in story-telling, learning and games
• Story-telling and its role in digital educational games
• Story and game design paradigms for Web-based Learning
• Augmented story-telling and gaming
• Story-telling and educational gaming with social software
• Mobile story-telling and educational gaming
• Cross-media/transmedia story-telling and gaming
• Computer gaming for story-telling (Game design for narrative architectures)
• Multimedia story and game authoring
• Story-telling and educational gaming applications
• Storytelling and pedagogy
• Storytelling mechanics in serious games
• Narratology and story-telling

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research papers (max. 10 pages) according to Springer LNCS format. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed for originality, significance, clarity and quality. Accepted papers will be published as part of ICWL workshop proceedings in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

To submit your paper please use the STEG submission website hosted at easychair: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=steg2011 (will be open soon)

Important Dates

• Paper Submission: 31 August 2011
• Notification of acceptance: 26 September 2011
• Camera Ready Submission: 15 October 2011
• Author Registration: 15 October 2011
• Workshop date: 8-10 December 2011

Organisers

• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Michael Derntl, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Stefan Göbel, TU Darmstadt, Germany
• Sandy Louchart, Heriot-Watt University, UK

CfP: MTAP Special Issue on "Multimedia on the Web"

URL: http://mtap-mmweb.fim.uni-passau.de/

Streaming video has recently surpassed peer-to-peer networks in terms of network capacity hunger. Reports estimate a share of 40% of peak network capacity dedicated to entertainment, mostly streaming video. A large share of this traffic originates from web based services. YouTube alone takes up to 8% of the prime time internet traffic. So multimedia on the web is currently a big issue. While transmission currently works in a best effort system, multimedia information systems on the web are far from being perfect. Retrieval, annotation, validated and useful metadata, reliable and trusted services, and user interaction and context-based adaptation are still under discussion and allow improvement. Currently, the Web itself faces dramatic changes, looking for example at the spread of social networks, Linked Data or the impact of HTML5 or WebM. These activities also have a deep effect on multimedia data and content provider. This special issue shall collect high quality papers from applied and basic research as well as applications for multimedia on the web.

Submissions have to relate to multimedia on the web, or more specifically on the following topics:

• Annotation of multimedia for the Web
• Multimedia databases and metadata models
• Multimedia & metadata adaptation
• Multimedia in the social Web
• Multimedia user communities
• Multimedia semantics & ontologies for the Web
• Proactive delivery and recommender systems
• Semantic multimedia information services
• User interaction & context
• Web based emergence and self-organization
• Web based multimedia search and retrieval

UMIC Workshop on Future Mobile Applications - Program

The workshop program is also downloadable in PDF from the Workshop Web site.

09:00
Welcome to UMIC Workshop on Future Mobile Applications
Yiwei Cao and Wolfgang Gräther, RWTH Aachen and Fraunhofer FIT
09:15
Mobile Device as a Smart Metering Display (with Demo)
Oleksandr Lobunets, Fraunhofer FIT
09:45
ideaPitch - A Spatial Tool for Notes (with Demo)
Nils Jeners, Fraunhofer FIT
10:15
Mobile Cloud Computing
Dejan Kovachev, RWTH Aachen
10:40
Coffee Break
11:00
Mobile Informal Learning
Christian Glahn and Dirk Börner, Open University Netherlands
11:30
Augmented Reality for Mobile Learning: information feeds
versus designing scenarios
Stefaan Ternier, Open University Netherlands
12:00
Resource Annotation and Delivery for
Mobile Augmented Reality Services
Martin Memmel, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz
12:30
Lunch Break
13:30
Open API Platform (with Demo)
Johannes Willig, Ericsson Eurolab
14:00
Service Composition (with Demo)
Konstantinos Vandikas, Ericsson Eurolab
14:30
Virtual Campfire iNMV – Storytelling on the iPhone (with Demo)
Yiwei Cao and Xi Chen, RWTH Aachen
15:00
iBSCW - BSCW applications on the iPhone (with Demo)
Wolfgang Gräther, Fraunhofer FIT
15:30
Coffee Break & Demos
16:15
Discovery and Interaction in Ubiquitous Environments
Marc Jentsch and René Reiners, Fraunhofer FIT
16:45
Supporting Mobile Maintenance in Construction Industry
Anne-Kathrin Braun, Fraunhofer FIT
17:15
Discussion and Further Steps
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen

Call For Paper: U-Media 2010

Call for Paper to the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Ubi-media computing is available online. The conference will be held in Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China, July 5-6, 2010.

Topics include

• Ubi-media Infrastructure
• Heterogeneous Ubi-media Infrastructure
• Ubiquitous Sensor Networks / RFID
• New Ubi-media Devices
• Multimedia Embedded Systems
• Ubi-media Storage and Indexing
• 3G and Advanced Communication Techniques
• Cross-Network Communication Techniques
• Ubi-media Middleware
• Context-Aware Multimedia
• Cross-Network Media Server
• Computational Intelligences in Ubi-media
• Semantic Web and Knowledge Grid
• Ubi-media Content Protection and Security
• Privacy and Security in Ubiquitous Environments
• Ubi-media Human-Computer Interaction
• Plasticity of User Interfaces
• Dynamic composition of User Interfaces
• Multimodal interaction
• Social networks
• Ubi-media Applications
• Ubi-media for Education
• Ubi-media for Commerce
• Ubi-media for Games
• Ubi-media for Health Care
• Ubi-media for Smart Home
• Ubi-media for Citizens and E-Government

Call For Paper: SeMuDaTe2009

10th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community will be held in conjuction with the 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT2009), December 2-4, 2009 in Graz Austria. The series of workshops have been held regularly to bring international researchers and application developers to share knowledge of multimedia semantics, multimedia processing, multimedia metadata standards such as MPEG-7 and MPEG-21, and multimedia applications. They have been organized by members of the Multimedia Metadata Community. I attended the 9th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community (WMM2009) in Toulouse, France in March 2009. The proceedings are published in the CEUR Workshop site with a special focus on context-aware mobile multimedia services.

Topics of interest are how multimedia metadata standards and multimedia ontologies are mapped or integrated into databases, how multimedia query languages are built, and how semantic queries are optimized and processed. Moreover, we are interested how multimedia data services are conceived to ensure interoperability, how to improve security and reliability of access and storage of multimedia data and metadata. Adaptation of multimedia, semantic enrichment of multimedia and bridging of media breaks are typical examples of advanced multimedia database services.

Important dates: submission deadline will be September 22, 2009.

Gandhara – Das buddhistische Erbe Pakistans

The exhibition Gandhara - the buddhist heritage of Pakistan (legends, monastaries and paradises) has been opened in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn since last Thursday evening. Anna and I with our FIT colleagues enjoyed having attended the opening event and visiting the exponents on Gandhara cultural heritage from worldwide on November 20. Our group worked together with RWTH Aachen Center for Documentation and Conservation (ACDC) led by Prof. Dr. Michael Jansen as well as Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technologies FIT led by Prof. Dr. Matthias Jarke, both of which support this exhibition together with Gerda Henkel Stiftung and Cultural Ministry of Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Gandhara was an important area connecting the west and the east in ancient times. It had a much lager geographic coverage beyond its current borders in Pakistan. Its buddhist culture had been influnced or started in the age of Alexander the Great and boomed from 1st to 5th centruries A.D. The Bamiyan Great Buddhas which were devastatingly exploded by the Taliban Regime are representive artefacts of the Gandhara heritage. A 3D reconstruction film of the Great Buddha in Bamiyan is played in the exhibition hall, technically supported by the Augmented Reality Group at FIT and by the CAVE project at RWTH Aachen University. In addition, we have hosted a community portal for Bamiyan Development since years.



Around 300 fine artefacts are on exhibition from November 21, 2008 to March 15, 2009, before they move on to Berlin and Zurich after then in 2009.

CfP: STEG '08

First International Workshop on Storytelling and Educational Games (STEG '08) will be held in conjuction with the 3rd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL '08) in September 17-19 in Maastricht, the Netherlands. EC-TEL brings international communities in the research area of Technology Enhanced Learning together. STEG'08 aims to bring researchers together to present the achieved or on-going research as well as to discuss the development trends in the areas of both multimedia storytelling and computer games with regard to Technology Enhanced Learning.
Some random thoughts or questions about the topics are:
On the one hand, stories are told in kindergarten, schools, colleges, companies, in the circle of families, friends, and neighborhoods, by reporters, by actors and actresses. In the Internet, the term story has even more meaning, can also be used as a verb. What kind of media do you define as a story? How does storytelling help learning?
On the other hand, does computer games support learning? Is a classroom in Second Life more attractive and effective than the real world?
Innovative ideas, novel applications and interesting discussions in the TEL domain will be expected. If anyone that is interested in submitting a paper, the deadline of June 30.