Showing posts with label NUS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NUS. Show all posts
Monday, January 15, 2007
Hiroshi Ishii talk @ NUS 01/10/07
Update on my previous post on the Hiroshi Ishii talk. Kevin has finally gotten the video of the talk up on Google video and it's embedded on this post for your viewing pleasure. There's much in this talk to think and talk about. Feel free to post a comment or start a discussion here :)
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
The places you will go, the people you will see 2: how I managed to meet Hiroshi Ishii
This post will detail how you too can meet Hiroshi Ishii serendipitously.
One: Make contact with the director of the National University's Center for the Arts (who also happens to be your mate's mum)
Two: Casually state your areas of focus to said director.
Three: Said director happens to have a meeting with the director of the Interactive Digital Media Lab (Adrian Cheok) and a Visiting Professor from MIT so she asks for your advice on digital media.
Four: State desire to meet with director of Interactive Digital Media and inquire who said Visiting Professor might be.
Five: Find out that professor is Hiroshi Ishii!
Six: Mention that you are familiar with Ishii's work and suggest some ways of approaching upcoming meeting. Coyly decline sitting in on meeting but nonetheless allow yourself to be persuaded to come along anyway.
Seven: Have a wife who will grudgingly help you edit the University Arts Festival press release thrust upon you by above-mentioned mate's mom so that you can attend said meeting with little knowledge of its agenda.
Eight: Smile alot at first meeting with Hiroshi Ishii, nod knowingly at all he says, and remember to ask someone to take a photo of you together so you can tell yourself at a later date that this serendipitous meeting was not a figment of your hyperactive imagination.
Nine: Accompany Ishii's entourage around the University and before you know it, you'll find yourself in several meetings where deans and faculty members of various departments will wonder what you are doing there ;)
On a more serious note, getting the chance to talk to Ishii has been great. I also attended his talk today, which is the first of a Distinguished Lecture series that the faculty of engineering @ NUS has launched. Ishii's talk was highly inspiring as he detailed his prior work in tangible user interfaces (think I/O brush). But more than that, Ishii's talk was also a call for a more interdisciplinary approach towards technology development. Specifically, Ishii is calling for more high-level vision and concepts rather than reinventing the wheel with technology. During the talk he revealed that Nicholas Negroponte had asked Ishii to abandon his research on augmented tables and to think about new and original ways in which people can interact with technology. This message seemed to not have gone down well with the engineering students as during the question and answer session, they seemed to be overly focussed on the technical details of Ishii's prior work during the Q&A segment of the talk. This seemed to disconcert him somewhat. Kevin has captured the talk on video and when he puts it up on his blog, I will be sure to link it to this post.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Hiroshi Ishii talk @ NUS tomorrow
I agreed to advertise this talk tomorrow. I know it's last minute but I think that Ishii is an interesting person for many Singaporean readers of this blog. Details of the talk below:
The Inaugural Distinguished Lecture Series Faculty of Engineering, NUS
The Distinguished Lecture Series, Faculty of Engineering, NUS is an initiative of the Faculty to bring in foreign experts and academics who could help to enhance th learning environment for innovation an entrepreneurship as well as the capabilities to teach and do research in cross-disciplinary areas which are relevant to all engineering disciplines.
Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels
Prof Hiroshi Ishii
Tangible Media Group
MIT Media Laboratory
10 January 2007- 3.30pm to 4.30pm
Engineering Auditorium
NUS Faculty of Engineering
9 Engineering Drive 1
Singapore 117576
http://www.eng.nus.edu.sg/PACentre/courses/2007/DLSIshii.pdf
Registration is free but pre-registration is required.
To registration, please email your name, organization and email address to: engpac@nus.edu.sg by 8 January 2007.
Due to limited seating capacity, please register early.
Regards
Nurasyikin Mansor
Management Support Officer
Mixed Reality Lab
The Inaugural Distinguished Lecture Series Faculty of Engineering, NUS
The Distinguished Lecture Series, Faculty of Engineering, NUS is an initiative of the Faculty to bring in foreign experts and academics who could help to enhance th learning environment for innovation an entrepreneurship as well as the capabilities to teach and do research in cross-disciplinary areas which are relevant to all engineering disciplines.
Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels
Prof Hiroshi Ishii
Tangible Media Group
MIT Media Laboratory
10 January 2007- 3.30pm to 4.30pm
Engineering Auditorium
NUS Faculty of Engineering
9 Engineering Drive 1
Singapore 117576
http://www.eng.nus.edu.sg/PACentre/courses/2007/DLSIshii.pdf
Registration is free but pre-registration is required.
To registration, please email your name, organization and email address to: engpac@nus.edu.sg by 8 January 2007.
Due to limited seating capacity, please register early.
Regards
Nurasyikin Mansor
Management Support Officer
Mixed Reality Lab
Monday, January 08, 2007
The places you will go, the people you will see 1
During our trip back, besides catching up with family, friends and local food, I had the good fortune of being able to meet and speak to a great variety of interesting people. As a way to document my discussions with them and to help spread the word about the work that they are involved with, I am going to blog about my meetings with these individuals/groups.
Kevin Lim is a doctoral candidate at SUNY, Buffalo, New York. I first came across his blog and became aware of him as a result of my interest in the dissolution of the School of Information in Buffalo. Kevin's blog has been a wealth of information for me and he is the closest thing to an online personality that I personally know. Kevin is going to be in Singapore teaching undergrads in a course focused on new/social media at SIM. In particular, he is attempting to look at how games can be used to incentivize and structure student contributions with social media. I won't go into what we talked about during our meeting as he has beaten me to it in his most recent "face-to-face" blogpost :)Drop by his blog and keep updated with his latest gadgets and exploits ... and not to mention his teaching.
Himansu Shah and me go back quite a bit of time. Shah runs an outfit called AV8 media that was a pioneer in bringing digital video and nonlinear desktop video editing to Singapore. I approached him several years ago when I was experimenting with digital video as a way to facilitate creative and critical thinking amongst my students. Digital video has since taken off in a big way in Singapore schools in no small part due to Shah's work. AV8 outfits schools with digital video labs/studios and also conducts Adobe certified training for both students and professionals. I remember back in 2001 when he and I were talking about an online means to showcase student video. To a large extent the bulk of what discussed has been realized with the presence of youTube today. I had an interesting dinner and discussion with Shah about user contributed video and how that relates to the recent efforts by the Singapore government in setting up bodies such as IDM and MDA. The both of us ruminated about the present efforts from the government to seed a digital media industry. While laudable and noteworthy, such government funding often comes with expectations not to broach on 'taboo' subjects such as politics. Also, Shah pointed out to me that there is much funding available for HD content production and game development from the MDA. However, the funding comes with strict guidelines and seems to want to push large productions (no funding for productions made with handheld HD cameras). But it was also noteworthy that MDA funding has resulted in a splashy large budget film called, One last dance, featuring Harvey Keitel.
Shah also arranged for me to have lunch with Pete Kellock, who was the former CEO of MUVEE. I have been peripherally aware of MUVEE for a number of years as being a prominent local software company that made it's name on automatic video editing software. However, I was completely taken aback as to how much this company has grown. The company recently moved to its present location and had undertaken a comprehensive survey of its employees as to what they would like for their work environment. The results of this survey is nothing short of impressive and Pete took me on an a thoroughly enjoyable tour of MUVEE's premises. You can check out my Flickr set of my tour of MUVEE's space.
In my interactions with Pete, there were a number of things that stood out for me. Firstly, the company had only recently set up its first usability lab and were new converts to the user evaluation and experience. Pete, being the original developer of MUVEE's software, told me that he was absolutely taken aback by some of the findings produced by their usability evaluation process. It was also heartening for me to hear that they were now seriously considering deploying TechSmith's MORAE, a software that I had worked on as a user experience intern in the summer of 2005.
My conversation with Pete and Shah over lunched revolved around youTube, user experience and how ubiquitous mobile devices were changing the ways in which people were taking digital video. In particular, during the conversation I raised the fact that there was now a lot of attention being paid research on adolescent use of technologies. Take for instance Mimi Ito's work on Japanese Teenagers' use of mobile camera phones. Considering how OBSESSED Singaporeans are with their cellphones, research work like Ito's study would be particularly relevant and important. It would seem that there is a lot of work to be done with regards to user experience and how user make use of technology. This is especially pertinent to software like MUVEE's which has been embedded in devices like cellphones. In fact, Pete himself readily admitted that MUVEE needs to know its users better. Hopefully, I can follow up with him on this.
Meeting the media socialists was especially eye-opening and important for me. This is a group of prominent bloggers who are working in educational technology in the tertiary institutions, in the national library, in advertising/marketing etc. It was especially important for me to be able to put faces to the blogs that I have been following online for a while. In general, the meeting was more of a put a name to the blog meeting. But there were a lot of connections made and information exchanged. I won't go into the details of everything discussed right now. I'll save that for a following blogpost after I have followed up with a couple of individuals from the group :)
Kevin Lim is a doctoral candidate at SUNY, Buffalo, New York. I first came across his blog and became aware of him as a result of my interest in the dissolution of the School of Information in Buffalo. Kevin's blog has been a wealth of information for me and he is the closest thing to an online personality that I personally know. Kevin is going to be in Singapore teaching undergrads in a course focused on new/social media at SIM. In particular, he is attempting to look at how games can be used to incentivize and structure student contributions with social media. I won't go into what we talked about during our meeting as he has beaten me to it in his most recent "face-to-face" blogpost :)Drop by his blog and keep updated with his latest gadgets and exploits ... and not to mention his teaching.
Himansu Shah and me go back quite a bit of time. Shah runs an outfit called AV8 media that was a pioneer in bringing digital video and nonlinear desktop video editing to Singapore. I approached him several years ago when I was experimenting with digital video as a way to facilitate creative and critical thinking amongst my students. Digital video has since taken off in a big way in Singapore schools in no small part due to Shah's work. AV8 outfits schools with digital video labs/studios and also conducts Adobe certified training for both students and professionals. I remember back in 2001 when he and I were talking about an online means to showcase student video. To a large extent the bulk of what discussed has been realized with the presence of youTube today. I had an interesting dinner and discussion with Shah about user contributed video and how that relates to the recent efforts by the Singapore government in setting up bodies such as IDM and MDA. The both of us ruminated about the present efforts from the government to seed a digital media industry. While laudable and noteworthy, such government funding often comes with expectations not to broach on 'taboo' subjects such as politics. Also, Shah pointed out to me that there is much funding available for HD content production and game development from the MDA. However, the funding comes with strict guidelines and seems to want to push large productions (no funding for productions made with handheld HD cameras). But it was also noteworthy that MDA funding has resulted in a splashy large budget film called, One last dance, featuring Harvey Keitel.
Shah also arranged for me to have lunch with Pete Kellock, who was the former CEO of MUVEE. I have been peripherally aware of MUVEE for a number of years as being a prominent local software company that made it's name on automatic video editing software. However, I was completely taken aback as to how much this company has grown. The company recently moved to its present location and had undertaken a comprehensive survey of its employees as to what they would like for their work environment. The results of this survey is nothing short of impressive and Pete took me on an a thoroughly enjoyable tour of MUVEE's premises. You can check out my Flickr set of my tour of MUVEE's space.
In my interactions with Pete, there were a number of things that stood out for me. Firstly, the company had only recently set up its first usability lab and were new converts to the user evaluation and experience. Pete, being the original developer of MUVEE's software, told me that he was absolutely taken aback by some of the findings produced by their usability evaluation process. It was also heartening for me to hear that they were now seriously considering deploying TechSmith's MORAE, a software that I had worked on as a user experience intern in the summer of 2005.
My conversation with Pete and Shah over lunched revolved around youTube, user experience and how ubiquitous mobile devices were changing the ways in which people were taking digital video. In particular, during the conversation I raised the fact that there was now a lot of attention being paid research on adolescent use of technologies. Take for instance Mimi Ito's work on Japanese Teenagers' use of mobile camera phones. Considering how OBSESSED Singaporeans are with their cellphones, research work like Ito's study would be particularly relevant and important. It would seem that there is a lot of work to be done with regards to user experience and how user make use of technology. This is especially pertinent to software like MUVEE's which has been embedded in devices like cellphones. In fact, Pete himself readily admitted that MUVEE needs to know its users better. Hopefully, I can follow up with him on this.
Meeting the media socialists was especially eye-opening and important for me. This is a group of prominent bloggers who are working in educational technology in the tertiary institutions, in the national library, in advertising/marketing etc. It was especially important for me to be able to put faces to the blogs that I have been following online for a while. In general, the meeting was more of a put a name to the blog meeting. But there were a lot of connections made and information exchanged. I won't go into the details of everything discussed right now. I'll save that for a following blogpost after I have followed up with a couple of individuals from the group :)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)