You can see our schedule here:

http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldclasses/

Today and tomorrow I’ll be running the computing masterclasses and will be looking at some of the exciting new web technologies that have been developed in recent years. The main focus will be on HTML5. We will be using some of the HTML5 example developed at Goldsmiths that you can access here:

http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~mus02mg/HTML5/

We will also introduce Processing, a great programming environment for rich media interactive web sites, and the main teaching language we use in first year at Goldsmiths. You can download Processing here:

http://processing.org/download/

and the documentation is here:

http://processing.org/reference/

If you are interested you can look at some examples.  I will be showing this today:

http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~mus02mg/HTML5/sonicPainter/

http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~mus02mg/SonicPainter.zip

and this is a great resource of processing examples:

http://www.openprocessing.org/

Before I talk about the challenges, I should try to describe his central theme. He was arguing against the division of sociology into two scales the unconnected individual and the unindividualised collective. He instead argues that we should think in terms of overlapping and interconnecting “monads” (I won’t try to explain the term). He thinks that digital technology can help to analyse data without going to the two poles of individual qualitative datum or collective, aggregate statistics.

This kind of aligns with my thoughts that interactive machine learning could help to bridge this divide by having human interaction that focuses on the detail of different aspects and items of data within the statistical analysis of machine learning (this is still very vague on my part, but I think there is something there and maybe Bruno Latour does too).

Overall, Latour wants the CHI community to help break down the individual/collective polarity, but in particular he issued four challenges:

Getting rid of data

His first challenge was to help get rid of data from large data sets (presumably so you are only left with “interesting” data in some sense). Given the rest of this talk I interpret this not as wanting to focus on individual items but to pick up connected elements that are important without either aggregating all of the data or removing them from their connections with the rest of the dataset. I can imagine that there could be powerful tool that allows researchers to investigating small snippets of data while a statistical engine runs in the background, clustering or otherwise picking out connections between those snippets and the rest of the dataset.

Capturing the inner narrativity of overlapping monads

I will have to think about this one, but it is something about bridging the gap between human narrative and statistical analysis. He referred to data journalism and how data is used in both interactive and narrative contexts in things like the guardian coverage of the london riots.

Visualizing heritage, process and genealogy

How to visualise these temporal qualities without relying in static structure or loosing connectedness. While answering questions he stressed the importance of not falling back on unchanging structures but acknowledging the changing nature of monads and their connections. This seems to me to relate to another theme that came up quite a lot in CHI (from Bill Buxton to the NIME SIG), the need to have time as a first class concept. This would make it possible to model the evolution of data without relying on static structures (maybe).

Replacing model building and emergent structure by highlighting differently overlapping monads. 

I guess that this would require a very dynamic analysis that made it possible to apply many different and changing models to data. I think that interactive machine learning could help a lot here by using the human element to navigate different interpretations, learnt models and views of the data.

Here is a list of our presentations:

Caramiaux, Tanaka  – Beyond Recognition (Alt.CHI)  Wed 01/5 9:00am

http://chi2013.acm.org/program/by-day/wednesday/

Hazelden, Yee King, D’Inverno – WeCurate (Work in Progress) Wed 01/5?

http://chi2013.acm.org/program/by-venues/works-in-progress/

Kiefer, Grierson  - Squeezable interface (Interactivity Explorations)

http://chi2013.acm.org/program/by-venues/interactivity/

Seipp, Devlin – One-handed Website (Interactivity Research)

http://chi2013.acm.org/program/by-venues/interactivity/

Pachet, Roy, d’Inverno – Reflexive Loopers (Note) Wed 01/5 9:00am

http://chi2013.acm.org/program/best-of-chi/

Bevilacqua, Tanaka, et al – SIG NIME (SIG)  Wed 01/5 2pm

http://chi2013.acm.org/program/by-venues/special-interest-groups/

(Also featuring Steph Horak from Goldsmiths)

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/15/goldsmiths-motion-behaviour

http://www.develop-online.net/news/41644/Actors-help-university-create-body-recognition-technology

Creative Computing in Brazil.

My colleague Edison Puig Maldonado has been running workshops in Creative Computing at FAAP in Sao Paolo:

http://www.faappress.com.br//campus/computacao+criativa+atrai+estudantes+e+profissionais+.html

This video shows a new approach to designing video game characters that can respond to our body movements and body language. Rather than trying to program explicit rules for behavior, which would make it hard to capture the subtleties of body language, our software allows people to design movements directly by moving and interacting.

Two people can play the roles of the video game character and the player, showing how the character should respond by acting out the movements themselves. This allows them to design movements in a natural way, by moving, rather than having to think about mathematical rules. The motion of both participants are recorded and synchronized. This data is then used as input to a machine learning algorithm which learns an algorithm for automatically controlling a video game character so that is responds in the same way as the people designing it.

This style of design is particularly well suited to actors and performers who have a deep understanding of movement and body language. We did an in depth case study with physical theatre performer Emanuele Nargi, who used our software to design an interactive character based on his interactions with a number of members of the public.

Thank you to our colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London, Emanuele Nargi of the MA Performance Making, the Embodied Audio-Visual Interaction research group at Goldsmiths Digital Studio, the Department of Computing and to Anna Furse of the Department of Theatre and Performance.

Filmed and edited by Cristina Picchi

http://www.gold.ac.uk/gleu/futuretense/

Here are my slides from the talk.

The talk will be about the teaching methods that Matthew Yee-King and I have been using in our Audio-visual Computing course, and I will be showing some student work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cY9XrAss95k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wTv0ff-lKL8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=12QaL5TjuFc