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2009年10月 2日

Cyberworlds 2009, IEEE International Conference on

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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

2009年8月21日

DH09 & Course at MIT: Two great experiences in USA.

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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