2008.10.16

In the beginning of October we attended a LIREC (LIving with Robots and interactivE Companions) meeting in Lissabon, Portugal. We are right now busy with workshops, studies, meetings, students, writing and more, so the schedule is quite thick. We also had a FAL-meeting yesterday with everything from planning the future to assessments and individual development talks. I will use as much time as possible in November to update my thesis plan according to last years activities. Things are beginning to shape up!

2008.06.25

In the beginning of June I attended my first LIREC (LIving with Robots and interactivE Companions) meeting in Hertfordshire, London. To begin with we will arrange two workshops this fall. The first one will be at the ArtBots gallery in Dublin. The second one is held in conjuction with NordiCHI 2008 and is about "Designing Robotic Artefacts With User- and Experience-Centred Perspectives".

2008.05.14

Back from Idaho I came. Since our lab is moving into the Mobile Life research center at SICS I too have changed affiliation and workplace. From now and on I can be found in our great capitol of Sweden - Stockholm.

2008.02.25

At the moment I am doing an internship at Ugobe Labs near Boise, Idaho which is sponsored by a grant from Stiftelsen för Strategisk Forskning. In this case I do research about tools for studying HRI among other things. In december we went to Berlin attending a ECAgents meeting. We also started a collaboration project together with CNR-ISTC / La Sapienza about combining results from our earlier projects around the e-Puck platform.

2007.10.01

We are in the middle of moving content and home-pages between servers, so that is why updating has been delayed. This summer we made a lot of changes to the first GlowBots prototype and the most of the library's and code have been totally rewritten to better cope with energy, visualization and interaction demands. We then packed up and went to this years SIGGRAPH, Emerging Technologies in San Diego presenting our new version of the GlowBots. The response was very positive and we actually had more functional robots when we went home than when we came.

In September we did the whole thing all over again at WIRED NextFest in Los Angeles. The sight of thousands of school-kids entering the exhibition area, seemed to make some of our exhibition partners tremble, while we actually embraced their curiosity. Thus our demonstration was very much appreciated since it was "live" rather than on display, as many other demos. Also the robustness of our setup was greatly underestimated. All GlowBots survived, although one motor and an accelerometer broke, something that only seemed to add to their individual personality.

2007.06.01

Update. In the beginning of april I attended the AISB The Reign of Catz & Dogz symposia in Newcastle, United Kingdom, where I presented our work on the personas and the results that followed. Right after I presented an early prototype of GlowBots at the SICS and Interactive Institute open house. It was the perfect opportunity for me to test the dynamics of the demo including talking, switching them on and off, recharging and changing batteries and making an arena out of what was available at site.

Then I was also awarded a SSF grant to visit Ugobe Labs next year, which of course is great news! We have also accepted an invitation to this years WIRED NextFest event to be able to show off GlowBots just a little bit more.

Then in May we started one of the larger projects within the Mobile-Life Center called The Mobile Eco-system. This was accomplished during a two day internal workshop at Keio University , Japan. Our generous host and contact there was Takashi Matsumoto and the Okude Lab. After the workshop we also enjoyed presentations and demonstrations by the Okude and Inakage Labs. The rest of the time we visited a number of places including Sony CSL, AIST and Ericsson Research.

After the Japan-trip we immediately went for our next appointment in Venice, Italy. This time for this years ECAgents review meeting, where we presented four of our ongoing projects, GlowBots, Intelligent Fridge Poetry, Autonomous Wallpaper and Push!Music.

2007.03.21

And suddenly it is spring, and the sun is shining. Now, during the dark period often referred to as winter, I have actually kept myself quite busy. In December I visited EPFL and CNR-ISTC to show our display, the see-Puck and discuss future directions. From my meeting in Rome, we have begun a small side project where I will explore human-robots co-evolution. Inspired and motivated I then wrote and submitted a paper to Siggraph's E-Tech track. Also our student intern Jeffery Knurek completed his Masters Thesis entitled "Exploring the Implementation of Complex Appearances on Small Robots".

In February we had a kick-off for the Mobile-Life center and then also a following kick-on, where we initialized some of the planned projects together with industrial partners. Then last week I received an e-mail starting with a "congratulations" in its header... Guess we are going to this years Siggraph in San Diego this August then :)

Apart from that I also contacted Ugobe Labs for an internship next year. I am currently seeking funding for that project. On what is left of my spare time I am attending interesting Ph.D courses such as "Epistemology for Informaticists".

2006.09.28

In the beginning of September FAL visited Varberg for a two day meeting. Then me and my colleague Maria Håkansson presented two of our projects as demos at the Sweden ICT week in Kista. Finally a small picture to illustrate the current (or rather future) state of our see-Puck equipped robots.

2006.07.27

Time to update! In the beginning of March FAL attended an ECAgents review meeting. Then in May, I and my colleague Mattias Rost went to the AVI2006 Conference where we presented a fresh demo of Ubiquitous Graphics. We also presented the same demo about a month later during Volvo Ocean Race here in Göteborg. Other news is that Johan Bodin is one of our summer interns for 2006. He will be constructing a LED-display for the e-Puck and other hardware/software related projects. I am also involved in a project about folksonomies and tagging on mobile devices together with the students Rakesh Tanange and Malik Ammar. For now I do a lot of reading, and one particular book I would like to recommend is "The mind's I" by DR. Hofstadter and DC. Dennett.

2006.02.15

Earlier this year our project Push!Music caught quite a lot of attention in media. It all started with an article in New Scientist and soon others e.g. The Inquirer and Slashdot followed. The overall response has been positive, and the project will hopefully soon enter a next phase. About two weeks ago I presented the paper entitled "When Media Gets Wise: Collaborative Filtering With Mobile Media Agents" at the IUI'06 conference in Sydney, Australia. I also presented the work "Intelligent Fridge Poetry Magnets" made by Kavita Thomas, Pierre Proske and Mattias Rickardsson, which were one of the groups in our summer internship program 2005. After the conference I took a trip to Canberra for a visit at the NICTA centre.

2005.12.02

About two weeks ago I attended the European Conference on Complex Systems, ECCS'05, in Paris. This was right after the disturbances in some of the outer areas of the city. Highlights from the conference include work on the k-clique procedure, design patterns from biology for distributed systems modeling, language game communication and finally some aspects about tagging. When I'm not traveling I work on several things. To name a few we have just finished up the first user study about Push!Music, I'm also working on a project about agent modeling based on personas and I'm also starting up a new project currently going by the name Push!Photo. On weekends I look at social aspects of the language game.

2005.10.04

Last week FAL attended the fourth meeting within the ECAgents project in Bruxelles, Belgium. There I presented a summary of the model behind Push!Music. Then I took a quick trip to Paris to hang around at the other Sony CSL lab.

2005.09.20

Back and forth. The last couple of weeks have been quite intense. First I submitted an article for IUI 2006 before going to Tokyo, Japan to demonstrate Push!Music at the Ubicomp 2005 conference. Many were interested in the concept and we got a lot of interesting discussions and feedback. After the conference we first visited Sony CSL and then also Hide Tokuda Lab at Keio University. Then we visited professor Toshio Iwai, a media artist at Tokyo University. Finally we attended the Tokyo Game Show 2005 where the latest in gaming were presented. I was really impressed by the PS3 demo that was shown there.

2005.08.08

Home sweet home! Recently got back from Siggraph 2005 where we demonstrated Ubiquitous Graphics, a prototype where several users can interact on a large surface, still having both overview and detail. It is also possible to work with different layers of information which makes it extremely powerful in many application areas. The demonstration was a huge success and all 1200 handouts were gone just 15 minutes before E-tech closed! Now, of course I also had the opportunity to see all the other cool stuffs. Among my favorites were TouchLight, “Kobito: Virtual Brownies”, Augmented Coliseum and the Khronos Projector. Of the sketches i found “Beautiful Things” the most attractive, where “A fast fractal growth algorithm” and “Aggregation: Complexity out of Simplicity” stood out the most. And then there were the keynote starring George Lucas of course...

2005.07.22

More information to appear soon...
In the meantime I can recommend the latest book I read:

Steven Strogatz, “SYNC: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order”, 2003
ISBN: 0-7868-6844-9

Actually it is the same Steven Strogatz that together with his former student
Duncan Watts highlighted the small-world problem or “six degrees of separation”, resulting in the Strogatz-Watts model of a social network.