Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Steve Di Paola and Marek Hatala

First Fall SIAT faculty presenters

Wednesday October 18, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Room 3875, SFU Surrey Campus, third floor Central City Tower in the Research Labs

Intelligent systems in new media art and design

Steve Di Paola abstract

Steve Di Paola will discuss and present his work in using intelligent systems in real-time new media art and design. By intelligent systems we mean those systems that use a knowledge space to explore, or use artificial intelligence to drive the work. Steve will demonstrate his ongoing research work with the Vancouver Aquarium to create an Artificial Life based Virtual Beluga Whale Interactive, where visitors can collaboratively interact with a simulated pod of wild beluga whales, a system that allows online gamers to browse face-space for the EA/Maxis game The Sims, as well as his art work based systems that explore computer creativity which painterly 3d face animation control completely by extracting emotion out a music score or automatically evolve a related family of abstract portraits using Genetic Programming.

User Modeling and Reasoning for Ambient Intelligence Environments

Marek Hatala Abstract

People experience an environment through the responses the environment provides to their actions. Ambient intelligence aims to build environments that are more immersive, more intelligent, and more responsive to individual’s or group’s needs and actions. We will argue that understanding user needs and an interpretation of user actions from the perspective of user goals is essential for achieving the response that we would consider intelligent. In this talk we will present our research in the area of user modeling and user group modeling in the context of ubiquitous environments as found in the museums or media-rich interactive environments.

Marek Hatala Bio

Dr. Marek Hatala is Associate Professor at the School Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University and a director of the Laboratory for Ontological Research. Dr. Hatala received his MSc in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence from the Technical University of Kosice. His primary interests lie in areas of knowledge representation, ontologies and semantic web, user modeling, intelligent information retrieval, organizational learning and eLearning. His current research looks at how semantic technologies can be applied to achieve interoperability in highly distributed and heterogeneous environments, what are the social and technical aspects of building a distributed trust infrastructures, and what role user and user group modeling can play in interactive and ubiquitous environments. Dr. Hatala research has been funded from NSERC, SSHRC, Canarie, Canadian Heritage, A.W.Mellon Foundation (USA) as well as by industry.