Steven Fuller about "Intelligent Design"

The Cafe Scientifique is a series of talks given by people who are experts in their field. This Tuesday the guest speaker was Steven Fuller who talked about the concept of "Intelligent Design". He pointed out that most scientists in the 17th and 18thy century came from the approach of "Intelligent Design" (ID).

The talk was very interesting but caused a lot of controversy afterwards, when the audience could ask questions. Many members in the audience did not agree with the viewpoint of Steven, who implied that ID has still a lot of validity in the current scientific efforts, as it would give a meaning to the goal of scientific pursuits. This was heavily contested by the audience who expressed the viewpoint that the patterns occuring in nature, which are to be uncovered by science, would not have to be based on any intelligence behind it. The most prevalent argument was the one of evolution: there are many "dumb" paths of evolution which counter the idea of having a smart design behind it. This is the reason why evolution and intelligent design are so much in competition with each other, especially in the US: it is more a fundamental discurs about ideology and belief rather than on scientific evidence.

Talk about Driverless Vehicles

This summer, Leeds Met has organised a lunch-time lecture series in Leeds city centre, where speakers from Leeds Met could give presentations about their work or an interesting topic. The audience were intended to be just people from the street, during their lunch break. I was asked to give such a talk, about "Automotive Futures: Driverless Vehicles".

The series had been going on since June and was relatively well visited. However, now in August most people are on vacation. So when I set up my laptop and was ready to talk, there were only 4 people in the audience - all of them from Leeds Met. Well, this was a bit disappointing, but I went ahead anyway and gave an overview on driverless vehicles, with a history of robotics and some of my own work in the PROMETHEUS program and in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. The latter was actually quite relevant, as one day later there would be the announcement from DARPA about the Semi-finalists.

The talk took place in the Old Schoolboard in Leeds, 13:00-14:00. It might be repeated within the next few months, when people are back from vacation, and when the next DARPA Grand Challenge is in preparation on 3. November.

HCI Conference: My "Main" Presentation

My own session is the first one in the morning. I had been asked by the conference organizers to chair this session "Gesture Recognition" - not sure why me and not anybody else from that conference. Yesterday I had already checked where this session room is: 2-F, on the 1st floor (= ground floor, they use here the US system for naming floors). Since there are 24 parallel sessions, some of those larger exhibition halls in the convention centre have been subdivided into smaller rooms. I have a map from the conference booklet, but the way down seems weird: one staircase seems to lead to a dead end, so I go back and take the main stairs. From there, a sign points through a dark dungenous hall, with damaged floor and very little lighting, to that other subdivided exhibition hall.

The entrance to the room 2-F seems to be the furthest away from everything; I hope that not too many would be discouraged by the strange location of this room and the early time of the session.

But at 8 am about 15 people actually attend this session. Just to be on the safe side I try my laptop on the projector - and the image is shifted. What the hell? This never had happened. I try to get tech support, there is one of the conference assistants sitting around the corner. When she comes into the room, someone had already fixed this, and the first presenter could give his talk. So I assumed that the fault was with the projector - the laptops would have to be set to 800x600, I was told. When I as the 2nd presenter connected my laptop again, with the new resolutions settings, the same thing happened again: only the left half of my slides was visible. So I quickly changed the order of the session, accepted the offer of a memory stick from that friendly conference attendee, put my presentation there, and presented as the 3rd presenter on the laptop computer which had been provided by the conference. This worked ok. (Note to myself: next time prepare memory stick with presentation, just in case).

Interesting talks in my session, about gestures and multimodal interaction.
In the following break I visited the exhibition room. Tobii showed their eye tracking system, also another company (Seeing Machines) showed their individual setup of stereo eye tracking. One company from Austria, g-tec, showed a system for controlling a computer through the brain, by measuring voltages around the head.


I met a former colleague of mine: Prof. Axel Schulte, now a chair of the department at UniBw Munich where we both had worked for our PhD in the early 1990s. A nice opportunity to catch up after so many years.

First day at HCI Conference

This HCI conference is huge. This has the advantage to be able to get in contact with many people in the field. Of course, this also has the disadvantage that one cannot attend all of the many parallel sessions. There are usually 24 parallel sessions - full of interesting talks. I guess, I will have to study the DVD with all the papers later, to get the most out of this conference. Unfortunately I did not bring a DVD reader with me - is not built-in in my light laptop. The morning sessions included topics of interfaces, AR/VR, human-robot interaction, and many other related issues or ergonomics and human factors.

There were also several exhibitors: Tobii showed their eye tracker, a few companies showed some demos of automatic interaction through face tracking, and several publishers displayed their current program. In the foyer there were 370 posters - some of the poster wall, howerver, were empty, due to the presenters not being present.

One of the afternoon sessions was chaired by my friend Marc Fabri, about "Emotions in HCI". Interesting perspectives and investigations. Also Marc himself gave a talk about his PhD work on emotional avatars. One software glitch: the laptop just displayed the avatar head - no GUI of the messenger app showed up. Looked still quite nice, these two heads just nodding around on the desktop - there must be an application for this!

The last session this day was chaired by Prof. Andreas Holzinger, about Future Interfaces in Technology-Enhanced Learning. Quite a relevant topic, also considering our Leeds Met focus on eLearning. I gave there the 2nd talk: it had actually been prepared by my student Johannes Christian, but he was unable to attend the conference. The session went well, everybody kept their 15 min time - Andreas made sure that the session ended in time, as he had to go on to a board meeting right after the session.

Research and Ethics

Today was the last day of the 3-day INN research conference. In the morning was Prof. Alistair Black's session on libraries, which he began with an interesting talk about the architecture of libraries. I used the opportunity of the presence of the students from Krems to have a few meetings with individuals, to discuss plans and progress.

In the afternoon then the session of the PRAXIS centre, which is led by Prof. Dave Webb. The afternoon ended with the scheduled debate between me and Phil Webber, about the importance of ethics in research. Each of us held a 20 min talk, outlining our views on this issue. Actually, we both spoke about slightly different things: while I addressed the basic philosophical issue behind this question from the point of view of the scientist, Phil addressed the issue from the point of view of the funding opportunities, which in his view were too much targetted towards commercial and military benefits rather than ecological and social. So we did not directly address each other's opinion, but after our statements we answered questions from the audience, and a vivid discussion arose.

As a PowerPoint junkie, I had of course prepared a set of "viewgraphs" (vugraphs) which are available for download.

Busy: conference, presentations, demonstrations

What a busy time! Yesterday began the 3-day Innovation North Research conference, and in the evening we celebrated the launch of the Centre for Creative Technology with an array of presentations and demonstrations by staff members, covering many of the topics in creative technology. First I gave a presentation, then we had a buffet, and my colleagues presented technology demonstrations in the Music Studios. I was asked to write a 200 word summary to be posted today on our web site. And our Vice Chancellor mentioned the launch in his daily refection today. But I had no time to pause much - today I was session chair in the conference session Creative Technology. Our keynote speaker Dr. Kia Ng from Leeds University opened the session with a fascinating insight into his wide range of work - being a trained violinist and computer scientist gives him the unique insight into this area between creativity and technology.

It was great to welcome our distance students from Danube University Krems. Tomorrow we will have the last day of this 3-day conference, and I will participate as one of the speakers in the afternoon session on professional ethics. Time now to get some thoughts together for this presentation.

And then, I have to complete the reviews for 7 papers... and write a paper for another conference ... and prepare my presentation for another upcoming conference... busy times!