Category Archives: News

Inspiration, MSc Computer games and Entertainment, News

Develop lessons for British Museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre

samsung_homepromo

The British Museum want to hear from organisations or individuals who can design and deliver innovative and experimental digital learning sessions that engage visitors with the British Museum’s collections. 

The museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre delivers a programme of digital learning for schools, family and teen audiences – and are seeking new sessions to be developed and delivered by external partners. These sessions will be included in the monthly one-off ‘Innovation Lab’ programme.

Pitch a session
Session proposals should be experimental or scratch-like, and should test out new ideas or technologies, or ways of working with family audiences. British Museum do not expect new software to be developed as part of these sessions, but the Innovation Lab will be a great forum to test out new software or new uses of software with a family audience in a digital learning environment.

“We want our audiences to be excited about using new technologies, engaged with our collections, and experiencing new things. We are also interested in sessions that do not replicate what we already provide in the Samsung Digital Discovery Centre.”

If you would like to pitch an idea, send your idea using the following headings:

  1. Title: (or working title)
  2. Session description: (One paragraph description of your activity. Please include learning outcomes, and any outputs created by visitors.)
  3. Session times: (We deliver drop-in sessions on Saturdays (11-4pm), and workshop sessions on Sundays (11am-1pm and 2pm-4pm). Will your activity be a drop-in or a workshop session? Please feel free to suggest alternative times within the 11am-4pm timeframe if it is more appropriate for you.)
  4. Target audience and age range: (Is this an activity for families or teens?)
  5. Brief session plan: (Please detail a brief session plan.)
  6. Collection: (How does your idea your engage your target audience with the British Museum’s collection? If appropriate, please give examples of objects you will use or reference.)
  7. Technology and resources: (Please include what hardware from the SDDC you will use (see notes below), what additional resources you will need, and if you will be bringing in or require the hire of any additional equipment that is not available in the SDDC.)
  8. Budget: (We expect submissions of between £350-£1,000. Please detail how this money will be spent on development time, delivery time, resources and other expenses. We would expect one day of delivery to be included in this cost.)
  9. You: (Tell us a bit about you or your company, including why are you qualified to develop and lead this activity, or what skills do you hope to develop by doing this project.)

Notes on technology available in the Samsung Digital Discovery Centre

  • 75” eboard with touch screen overlay
  • 46” LCD TV and 55” LED TV
  • 25 High spec laptops with internet access, Adobe CS5 Pro production suite, Blender,
  • Audacity and standard Microsoft Office software
  • 55 Galaxy Note 10.1” android tablets with stylus
  • 40 Galaxy Note II and Note III smartphones
  • 25 digital cameras, 40 Galaxy cameras and 6 digital SLR cameras with standard and wide angle lenses (Samsung NX1 and NX100)
  • Kinect system
  • 6 HD digital camcorders with microphone jack
  • 6 digital USB microscopes
  • 3 scanners
  • 1 Samsung SUR40 multi-touch table
  • Green screen

Please send your completed pitch to Lizzie Edwards and Juno Rae by 12 noon, Monday 13 April 2015.

EAVI, News, Staff profiles and activity

Goldsmiths researcher awarded Marie Curie Fellowship

about_presentation_800x400-783x250We are very pleased to announce that Dr Baptiste Caramiaux, post-doc on Goldsmiths’ MetaGesture Music project team, has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship.

Baptiste’s project, entitled MIM – Enhancing Motion Interaction through Music Performance will be carried out in partnership with McGill University, Montreal with a final phase at IRCAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The project aims to enhance Human Motion–Computer Interaction through a multidisciplinary approach between experimental psychology, music technology and computational modelling.

The project contributes to two main uncharted research areas:

  1. It contributes to the fundamental understanding of sensorimotor learning processes by considering complex human motion, specifically motion in music performance.
  2. It represents an original application of computational modelling by modelling expressive musical gestures and transferring these models to interactive systems.

Congratulations, Baptiste!

This blog post was adapted from a recent post on the EAVI website

computation and culture, EAVI, Inspiration, News, Staff profiles and activity

Major funding for next-generation tech that adapts to human expression

Computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London have been awarded more than £1.6m to lead an international team in accelerating the development of advanced gaming and music technology that adapts to human body language, expression and feelings.

The success of first generation interfaces that capture body movement, such as the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect, has demonstrated a public appetite for technology that allows users to interact with creative multimedia systems in seamless ways.

The Rapid Mix consortium will now use years of research to develop advanced gaming, music and e-health technology that overcomes user frustrations, meets next generation expectations, and allows start-ups to compete with developments from major corporations, such as Apple, Google and Intel.

Rapid Mix will bring cutting-edge knowledge from three leading technology labs to a group of five creative industry SMEs, based in Spain, Portugal, France and the UK, who will use the research to develop prototype products.

Newly developed Application Programming Interfaces (the tools that allow software to interact with another programme) and new hardware designs will also be made available to the Do-It-Yourself community through the open access platform.

Rapid Mix is led by Professor Atau Tanaka from the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, with Dr Rebecca Fiebrink and Dr Mick Grierson.

Professor Tanaka comments: “Humans are highly expressive beings. We communicate verbally but the body is also a major outlet for both conscious and unconscious expression. In this quest for expression we’ve created art, music and technology.

“Technological advances have their greatest impact when they enable us to express ourselves, so it logically follows that new, disruptive innovations need interfaces that take advantage of our expressivity, rather than acting to restrict it”.

“Microsoft has promised a Kinect 2 that detects heart rate to assess gamers’ responses, but small European businesses struggle to compete with the corporations when it comes to getting amazing products from the lab into the public’s hands. Our project aims to overcome this challenge and get new technology directly to users, where it will have true impact.”

Inspiration, News, Staff profiles and activity

Prof Mark Bishop in The Independent

ex-machina
Ex Machina (film still)

Mark Bishop, Professor of Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths features in The Independent with an article about the limits of Artificial Intelligence.

He outlines three arguments that address the question of consciousness and computing. The first, by John Searle, dates from 1980 and is known as the Chinese Room; if a computer convinces a Chinese speaker that it understands Chinese by responding perfectly to their questions, it has passed the Turing Test. But does it really understand Chinese, or does it only simulate understanding? The second is Bishop’s own argument from his 2002 paper, Dancing With Pixies. “If it’s the case that an execution of a computer program instantiates what it feels like to be human,” he says, “experiencing pain, smelling the beautiful perfume of a long-lost lover – then phenomenal consciousness must be everywhere. In a cup of tea, in the chair you’re sitting on.”

This philosophical position – known as “panpsychism” – that all physical entities have mental attributes, is one that Bishop sees as Strong AI’s absurd conclusion. Shadbolt agrees. “Exponentials have delivered remarkable capability,” he says, “but none of that remarkable capability is sitting there reflecting on what very dull creatures we are. Not even slightly.”

The third argument Bishop makes is that there’s something about human creativity that computers just don’t get. While a computer program can compose new scores in the style of JS Bach, that sound plausibly like Bach compositions, it doesn’t design a whole new style of composition. “It might create paintings in the style of Monet,” he says, “but it couldn’t come up with, say, Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t clear to me at all where that degree of computational creativity can come from.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/alex-garlands-film-ex-machina-explores-the-limits-of-artificial-intelligence–but-how-close-are-we-to-machines-outsmarting-man-9996624.html

Mark Bishop’s profile at Goldsmiths:
http://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/staff/m-bishop/

Events, MA/MFA Computational Art, MSc Computer games and Entertainment, News, Staff profiles and activity

Colliding Worlds

william_Latham

Professor Arthur I Miller and William Latham in conversation:

7:00pm, 10th February, 2015

Shoreditch House
Ebor St, London E1 6AW

Professor Arthur I Miller of UCL will be at Shoreditch House to explore exactly how cutting-edge science is redefining contemporary art, the subject of his latest book ‘Colliding Worlds’.

Arthur will explain the new and exciting era of digital contemporary art as artists strive to depict the wonders of our age of information – take a look at huge data sets worked aesthetically, sculpting with sound, folding together concepts of art with physics, using living matter to manipulate inert materials into new and beautiful forms, and artists who are striving to investigate what changes chip implants, gene transplants, and 3D printed organs make to our idea of what it is to be human.

Following his presentation Arthur will be in conversation with the pioneering computer artist Professor William Latham of Goldsmiths College.

If you would like to attend email Professor Arthur I Miller: a.miller@ucl.ac.uk

Digital Journalism, News, Students, Women in Computing

Marta Portocarrero, wins The Guardian’s Student Digital Journalist of the Year

marta_portocarrero

Marta Portocarrero a recent graduate from the Goldsmiths MA in Digital Journalism has just won the Student Digital Journalist of the Year.  We talk to her about her promising plans for the future in multimedia journalism and her upcoming internship at The Guardian.

Firstly many congratulations on winning the award. Can you tell me a bit about the piece you submitted for the award?

For this award I submitted three different pieces, which were all my assignments on Sandbox (a module of my MA). One was a long piece of writing about how it is to live in a hostel for a long time. It’s called “Settling Down in a Hostel“ and, apart from writing, includes photography, video and parallax scrolling. The second one is a data-driven piece on Bike Theft in South East London. I have created a WordPress blog for that and analysed bike theft in different boroughs of South East London. It was useful to understand a bit more of data and play around with visualizations. The last one, is, again, a long piece of writing on a guy who has built his own houseboat and community in Deptford (“Living in a Floating Community“). This one is more “stylish” in what concerns to digital elements. It has a video banner and different pictures displays. I tried to explore my video skills and, as a result, there are two videos which are fundamental in the piece too.

What research did you undertake for the project during your time studying at Goldsmiths?

Since all the projects were part of my work for Sandbox, I worked hard and tried to apply all the skills I’ve learned in class but also to push a bit my boundaries each time, although I was far from thinking I could submit them for any award. For the first project (about the hostel), I interviewed a friend of mine who was living in a hostel for over three years and who had a great life story and allowed me to publish it. The research was basically finding a good topic and a great character to illustrate it. The second one was slightly more technical. I have decided to write about bike theft because there are a lot of people who cycle in London and because my bicycle was also stolen once, so I could somehow relate to the topic. I looked for data and found out that Metropolitan Police have a good database on that, so all I had to do was scraping their website, querying the data, building visualizations and writing a story according to my findings. The third one was similar to the first one and based on a good community story and a strong character. I also researched a bit on data related to houseboats moored on the Thames, but ended up not including it in the project.

Can you talk a little bit about why you chose the MA in Digital Journalism at Goldsmiths?

I did my BA in Journalism in Portugal and, then, I struggled to find a job there. So I went travelling for a while to clear up my mind a bit and decided that I would like to study some more. I quickly understood I wasn’t particularly interested in politics, economics, culture, etc… so the way wouldn’t be necessarily related to the content, but more to the shape. At the same time I was feeling more and more curious about how some digital pieces I could find online were built. When The New York Times published the Snow Fall, I understood that there were people actually doing what I had in mind. So, I emailed some of its journalist and asked for advice. They told me which skills I should aim to achieve and I started researching. I knew that the UK was a country where digital journalism was appreciated and I have found some interesting universities here. In the end, Goldsmiths was the most attractive one and, so far, seemed to have been the best choice.

Where are you currently working now?

I keep looking for a job. I’ve submitted some applications, here and abroad, and I am waiting on their answer, mostly multimedia/digital positions. Meanwhile, I keep doing some freelance projects similar to the ones I have done during the MA or some journalistic videos and short documentaries. I’ve recently done an internship at the interactive desk of The Financial Times. Since I’ve finished the MA the times haven’t been the easiest ones, but they have been essential for me to understand what I really want to do and which areas are not so much of my interest.

Whats on the horizon for the future?

First, I will do the internship at the multimedia desk of The Guardian, which I am really excited about. Then, depending on the results of my job applications, and if everything goes well, I may end up working on a multimedia desk of a media company here or abroad. If nothing goes as planned, I may try to look for some funding to do a web-documentary, which is an area that really fascinates me, given it’s combination of filming and technology (web designing, coding). In any project, I tend to prioritize storytelling, so in either way I think I would be happy.