PhD defense of Michael Kuhn at ETH Zurich

Michael Kuhn defended his PhD thesis on "Understanding and Organizing User Generated Data: Methods and Applications" at ETH Zurich and I had the honor to be one of the examiners. His thesis is a prime example how solid theoretical concepts and practical applications go well together. He investigated the similarities in different domains, including people, conferences, and music. I came first across his work at Mobile HCI [1]. He has published an interesting set of papers on his work, see his page at ETH.

As one of the datasets he used http://www.livejournal.com which is can be freely crawled. This is an interesting resource for doing research on social networks.

As part of his dissertation project he implemented several applications. I found the following two remarkable and very useful:

• http://www.confsearch.org Looking for conference based on keywords? Searching for a conference in a field? Which conferences are related? Have a look and you will find some answers.
• http://www.museek.ethz.ch a comprehensive mobile music application for Android.

PS: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/ is another conference/publication search site - not sure how much I believe in automating the rankings of scientists - as the sites lists me with Aalborg University - and even a change request did not help to put my affiliation right ;-)

[1] Goussevskaia, O., Kuhn, M., and Wattenhofer, R. 2008. Exploring music collections on mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 - 05, 2008). MobileHCI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 359-362. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409288

How does a message sound? How does text sound?

Florian Alt is working on an idea of sonification of messages (if he is not enjoying himself at a summer school in Haifa). The approach is converting messages into music.

Are you curious about music and automated composition? Please have a look at the survey (it is fun, you probably get some ideas, and you help us with our research):

• English survey
• German survey

Keynote at Pervasive 2009 - Toshio Iwai

Toshio Iwai gave the keynote at Pervasive 2009 on expanding media art. He introduced us to the basics of moving images and films. The examples were fun and I think I will copy some for my introductory class on user interfaces for explaining the visual system (afterimages with a black-and-white negative image; the concept of combining images on two sides of a disk; the idea of moving images by using a flip book).

In his introduction he also went back to explain what he learned as a child and I found this very interesting and encouraging to expose smaller children more to technology than we usually tend to do (especially in Germany I think we do not give children much chance to explore technologies while they are in kindergarten and primary school). Hope to go with Vivien to the space center in Florida in few weeks :-)

Following up from the basic visual effects he showed some really funny life video effects. He introduced a delay to some parts (lines) in the picture when displaying which led to ghostly movements. Everything that is not moving appears in its real shape and everything that is in motion will be deformed.

In the final part of his talk he argued that the Theremin is the only electronic instrument that has been newly invented in the 20th century. For him an instrument has to have unique interaction, unique shape, and unique sound. Additional for the interaction it is essential that the interaction can be perceived by the audience (you can see how one plays a violin but not how one makes digital music with a laptop computer). Based on this he show a new musical instrument he developed that is inspired by a music box. The instrument is the TENORI-ON [1]. It has a surface with 16x16 switches (that include an LED) and 16x16 LEDs on the back. It has a unique interaction, its shape and sound is unique and it supports visibility of interaction as the sound is combined with light pattern. The basic idea is that the horizontal direction is the time line and the vertical the pitch (similar to a music box).

[1] Yu Nishibori, Toshio Iwai. TENORI-ON. Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME06), Paris, France. http://www.nime.org/2006/proc/nime2006_172.pdf

Hans is visiting, generating new ideas for projects

Hans was for a meeting in Stuttgart and he stayed another day to discuss project ideas with me - won't tell them here ;-).

Nevertheless there are always small new things to discover, too. Hans showed Vivien the Ocarina application for the iPhone - it is quite amazing how little it takes to create an interesting application - and that is very different from a traditional musical instrument. Especially the interweaving of playing yourself with the worldwide community is extremely well done.