P R E S E N C C I A
Presenccia header

Joint PRESENCCIA and SKILLS PhD Symposium

Pisa, 26/27 May 2009

PRESENCCIA and SKILLS are two integrated projects that both aim to advance Virtual Reality technology. These projects are highly interdisciplinary encompassing, among others, computer science, robotics, engineering, interaction design, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. All these fields, however diverse their interests, come together in the goal of integrating human interaction in mixed and virtual reality environments in order to enhance the user’s experience and enabling him to act and interact in a natural and familiar way by means of enactive paradigms. The most interesting, challenging and useful digital environments are social, focussing on supporting (group) interaction between real people and other remote people or real people and virtual people. The aim is to understand, track and give appropriate feedback in verbal, non-verbal and implicit interactions while also making digital content more believable and intelligent. Likewise, a number of methods need to be developed allowing users of virtual environments to not only perform actions effectively in a variety of different scenarios but also be able to choose from a repertoire of suitable actions. This requires adequate digital representations of human skills and also techniques to capture, interpret and deliver them by means of multimodal interfaces, robotics and virtual environments within enactive interaction paradigms. At the low-level end of the spectrum we also aim to understand the neural basis of presence and its response. Its enhancement and its application is the fundamental object of study from many different points of view, and including visual, haptic and auditory modalities.

Call for Contributions

This PhD symposium invites proposals for oral presentations and posters relating to any of the areas mentioned above. Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words for oral presentations and 250 words for posters, respectively.

Any PhD or postgraduate student carrying out research activities in the above topics is encouraged to participate.

Important Dates

  • Abstract deadline: March 30, 2009
  • Acceptance notification: April 16, 2009
  • Symposium Dates: 26-27 May 2009

Paper Submission and Participation

Participation to the Workshop is free and open to everyone. If you would like to submit an abstract or receive more information, you can get in touch with the organisers Christoph Groenegress (Event Lab/UB) and Paolo Tripicchio (PERCRO) at the following e-mail address: phdsymposium@sssup.it

Keynote Speakers

Salvatore Maria Aglioti, Psychology Department , Università di Roma "La Sapienza” and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma
Jan Peters, Dept. Empirical Inference ,Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany

Location

The symposium will be jointly held with the 4th XVR Workshop, an event dedicated to VR programming organized every year by PERCRO at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Piazza Martiri della Libertà 33 - Pisa .

Symposium Website : http://www.percro.org/index.php?pageId=4thXVRWorksho

PRESENCCIA Website:http://presenccia.org

SKILLS Website: http://www.skills-ip.eu/

Copyright 2006 Presenccia Project