Ruck Thawonmas and Akira Fukumoto, "Frame Extraction Based on Displacement Amount for Automatic Comic Generation from Metaverse Museum Visit Log," Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services, Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, 2011, Volume 11, 153-162, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-22158-3_16

  By Kingkarn Sookhanaphibarn, Ph.D.

This picture was taken in the Poster session on Monday 20, 2011 at Stanford University. I was presenting the proposed visualization as a visual analytic tool for museum curators. 

This paper considers the use of a layout-independent display for visual analysis of the path and residing time of the movement data in circulation, named “PARTY”. PARTY is an abbreviation of Path And Residing Time display. Taking for example a museum in a 3D virtual world, the circulation behaviors of visitors moving through museum of interest are influenced by the items on which the visitors focus their attention.

By Kingkarn Sookhanaphibarn, Ph.D.

I attended the Workshop on Digital Media and Digital Content Management (DMDCM) at Hangzhou China during May 16-17, 2011 and presented my research paper entitled 'Spatiotemporal Analysis of Circulation Behaviors Using Path And Residing Time DisplaY (PARTY)'.

PARTY is the proposed visualization for analyzing the path and residing time of the movement data in circulation. The presentation slide can be download from the website below. http://www.ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp/~kingkarn/

By Kingkarn Sookhanaphibarn

Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE2010) was one of great conferences in GAME. In this year, the conference was held in the city of Taipei during November 16-19, 2010. There were variety of interesting events including paper, poster, and showcase sessions as well as social activities. The topic of my presentation there was "Spatiotemporal Analysis in Virtual Environment by Using Eigenbehaviors".

Reference:

Kingkarn Sookhanaphibarn, Ruck Thawonmas, Frank Rinaldo, and Kuan-Ta Chen, "Spatiotemporal Analysis in Virtual Environments using Eigenbehaviors," Proc. of the 7th Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology Conference (ACE 2010), Taipei, Taiwan, paper 249, Nov. 17-19, 2010.

By Alejandro Toledo

Recently I participated in DH2010, the annual international conference for digital scholarship in the humanities, sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. DH2010 was hosted at King’s College London by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities and the Centre for e-Research, with the support of the School of Arts and Humanities, Information Services and Systems, and the Principal, Professor Rick Trainor. At DH2010, I participated in a paper session whose theme was Visual Art/Visualization, the chair Prof.  Charles van den Heuvel, and my paper’s title Contexts, Narratives, and Interactive Visual Analysis of Names in the Japanese Hyohanki Diary. This paper was based on a previous research presented at DH2009 at the University of Maryland, US.
 

e-mail: alex[at]ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp
URL: http://www.ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp/~alex/

By Kingkarn (Ploy) Sookhanaphibarn, Ph.D.

It is my pleasure to write about Digital Humanities 2010 during July 7-10, held at King’s College London, Strand Campus. Digital Humanities is the annual international conference for digital scholarship in the humanities, which was held at Maryland last year and will be held at Stanford USA next year. The conference had a variety of events not only academic but also social programs. The academic program started from six workshops two days before the conference, and then consisted of 36 parallel sessions and four poster sessions. The social programs are three reception parties and banquet, which all participants enjoyed musical performances and tasted English wines.

My talk was in the Visualization session on Friday 9^th, where Prof. John Unsworth was the chairman. There were so many questions from audiences who were interested in my research topic. In the conference banquet, I was honored to receive the 2010 Bursary Award, for young researchers, from the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Therefore, I was very pleased to share my success with all members in the GCOE program. Lastly, I would like to thank you the GCOE program with all of you directly and indirectly giving me comments and suggestions in my research so that my research paper was qualified.

 By Alejandro Toledo

Recently I participated in two international conferences: EuroVis and Nicograph. EuroVis  is the annual visualization symposium jointly organized by the Eurographics Working Group on Data Visualization and the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee. NicoGraph, on the other hand, is organized by The Society for Art and Science. This year EuroVis took place in Bordeaux, France, where I participated in a poster / demo session. At Nicograph, this time in Singapore, I participated in a paper session. During both events, I presented the results of a research on information visualization and visual analytics that our research group has been recently conducting. Basically, this research focuses on the analytical side of information visualization systems, e.g., how effective they are as cognitive tools. As in a previous work, we continue the work on the Stacked Graph visualization and now our system has an extension to enable visual analytics on it. This new functionality has been tested on a usability study and reported to be presented at EuroVis and Nicograph.

e-mail: alex[at]ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp
URL: http://www.ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp/~alex/

Recently, Cyberworlds 2009 was held in Bradford University, Bradford, UK during September 7-11.  The beginning of Cyberworlds was from the workshop on Cyberworlds held as the International Workshop on Synthetic Worlds (University of Aizu, Japan) in 1993. After that, the proceedings were published as a book entitled "Cyberworlds" by Springer Verlag, 1998. Since then, the conferences are organized on an annual conference and its proceedings are published by IEEE Computer Society with special issues published by The Visual Computer. I am thankful that the Center Grants for Young Researchers (Global COE Program, Ritsumeikan University) support my travelling and accommodation expenses for participating in Cyberworld2009.

My presentation topic in Cyberworld 2009 is “Content Management Systems for User-driven Museums in Second Life”.  As seen in the statistical records of an increasing number of Internet visitors, many well-known museums in the worlds has focused on digital museums that requires an integrated technologies of art and scientific techniques, for example, how to preserve the intangible assets in the digital achieves and re-generate them in the future. Nevertheless, the more visitors, the higher achievement on museums requires a practical and effective personalization technique. Personalization, another called “customization” has been a vast research area by analyzing and classifying the characteristics consisting of interests, social category, context, etc. of individuals. Using the personalization concept, an user-driven museum is defined as the museum in Second Life, the most popular virtual world, supports and guides visitors to explore it based on their individual preferences. The aim is to increase the visitors’ satisfaction and the number of returning visitors, who have been visited the museums and then come again. 

This paper, written by Sookhanaphibarn and Thawonmas, provides a framework of my three-year project supported by Global COE program. The framework was divided into six modules to handle data mining approaches in digital museums in Second Life. The following modules were proposed in the paper: 

1) Guide Avatar (GA) who gives an audience his/her personalized information of each artifact

2) Personal Route Generation (PRG) module for a museum tour

3) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module

4) Audience Satisfactory Evaluation (ASE) module

5) Museum Content Adjustment (MCA) module

6) User Profile Adjustment (UPA) module

The reference is “Sookhanaphibarn K. & Thawonmas, R.  (2009). A content management system for user-driven museums in second life. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cyberworlds (pp.185-189)” 

Return to the conference days, it covers a wide variety of topics including philosophy, evolution and ethics of cyberworlds, cyberworlds and their impact on the real worlds, virtual cyberworlds, virtual reality, animation, intelligent agents, communication, e-business, image processing, data mining and machine learning in cyberworlds, computer vision and augmented reality for cyberworlds, cyberworlds for education, and games for cyberworlds. First-two days were tutorial sessions in the following topics: 

1)    -  Geometric Algebra by Professor John Vince who wrote “Geometric Algebra: An Algebraic System for Computer Games and Animation”, He was a great speaker because he could organize the subject in the way that anyone could understand. 

2)     - Real-Time Individualized Virtual Humans by Profess Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, who found MIRALab in 1989, and Professor Daniel Thalmann who found the Virtual Reality (VRLab) in 1988. Their tutorial sessions cover the state-of-the-art researches in virtual realities and hot issues. Their presentation was full of the representative slides including the screenshots and video clips of their students’ theses.

I have a great experience in Cyberworld 2009 not only to conduct my ongoing researches but also to create a social network from professors, researches, Ph.D. students, CEO, editors around the world.  I would like to thank all people in GCOE program that support my research and let me have the wonderful trip, especially, Professor Keiko Suzuki, and Professor Ryo Akama, who kindly assisted me to get the UK Visa, and Professor Ruck Thawonmas, who is my supervisor.

Dr. Kingkarn Sookhanaphibarn, Post-Doctoral Fellow

I was filled with emotions during the months of June and July. Recently, I visited two remarkable institutions:  the University of Maryland and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; in the cities of Maryland and Cambridge respectively.

In the last week of June, I participated in the edition 2009 of the Digital Humanities International Conference, where I presented the paper Interactive Visual Analysis of Personal Names in Japanese Historical Diary.  That was my first experience in three aspects:  my first visit to USA, my first accepted paper, and my first participation as a presenter in an international conference. Although I was a nervous wreck, fortunately everything was going well. See some personal comment s here.

More recently, I made an extraordinary journey to the MIT. This time, I aimed to attend a course titled Data and Models in Engineering, Sciences and Business, where we were taught how to fit data to models using formal methods; particularly, the method of Least Square.   After a long trip, I was again stepping on American soil.  At that time, I could not imagine how wonderful would be the new tour. The MIT is great; I used to be in an area which looked like a factory because there were machines everywhere. The courses were also very interesting in spite of were full of mathematical terms. I was especially satisfied with the way instructors were able to balance the course between the fundamentals and concrete applications. Additionally, Boston and Cambridge are very beautiful cities and I would also consider them as very rich cities in literature because of the great bookstores you can find there.

Both journeys were great, but I would consider even better the pleasure of meeting wonderful people. During my staying in the city of Maryland, I met professors and colleagues. In general, people with similar interests. Also, that was a good opportunity to share great moments with my Japanese colleagues. The MIT was not the exception, the academics and especially the administrators were all very kind and they were always willing to make our staying more enjoyable.

 

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Alejandro Toledo Nolasco
Research Assistant/PhD Student, Global COE Program
Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures
Intelligent Computer Entertainment Laboratory
Graduate School of Science and Engineering
Ritsumeikan University, Japan
alex@ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp
http://ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp/~alex/
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