CyberSightings is a regular feature in CYBER that covers the news relevant to the cyberpsychology community, including scientific breakthroughs, latest devices, conferences, book reviews, and general announcements of interest to researchers and clinicians. We welcome input for inclusion in this column, and relevant information and suggestions can be sent andrea.gaggioli@unicatt.it.
In the Spotlight
Human Computer Confluence (HC-CO) is an ambitious initiative recently launched by the European Commission under the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) program, which fosters projects that investigate and demonstrate new possibilities “emerging at the confluence between the human and technological realms” (HC-CO Web site, EU Commission). Such projects will examine new modalities for individual and group perception, actions, and experience in augmented, virtual spaces. In particular, such virtual spaces would span the virtual reality continuum, also extending to purely synthetic but believable representation of massive, complex, and dynamic data. HC-CO also fosters interdisciplinary research (such as Presence, neuroscience, psychophysics, prosthetics, machine learning, computer science, and engineering) toward delivering unified experiences and inventing radically new forms of perception/action.
HC-CO brings together ideas stemming from two series of Presence projects (the complete list is available here: http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/fet/pr-sy.htm/) with a vision of new forms of interaction and of new types of information spaces to interact with. It will develop the science and technologies necessary to ensure an effective, even transparent, bidirectional communication between humans and computers, which will in turn deliver a huge set of applications: from today's Presence concepts to new senses, to new perceptive capabilities dealing with more abstract information spaces to the social impact of such communication enabling technologies. Inevitably, these technologies question the notion of interface between the human and the technological realm, and thus also in a fundamental way, put into question the nature of both. The long-term implications can be profound and need to be considered from an ethical/societal point of view. HC-CO is, however, not a programme on human augmentation. It does not aim to create a super-human. The idea of confluence is to study what can be done by bringing new types of technologically enabled interaction modalities in between the human and a range of virtual (not necessarily naturalistic) realms. Its ambition is to bring our best understanding from human sciences into future and emerging technologies for a new and purposeful human computer symbiosis. HC-CO is conceptually broken down into the following themes:
HC-CO Data. Online perception and interaction with massive volumes of data: new methods to stimulate and use human sensory perception and cognition to interpret massive volumes of data in real time to enable assimilation, understanding, and interaction with informational spaces. Research should find new ways to exploit human factors (sensory, perceptual, and cognitive aspects), including the selection of the most effective sensory modalities, for data exploration. Although not explicitly mentioned, non-sensorial pathways—that is, direct brain to computer and computer to brain communication—could be explored.
HC-CO Transit. Unified experience, emerging from the unnoticeable transition from physical to augmented or virtual reality: new methods and concepts toward unobtrusive mixed or virtual reality environment (multi-modal displays, tracking systems, virtual representations, etc.), and scenarios to support entirely unobtrusive interaction. Unobtrusiveness also applies to virtual representations, their dynamics, and the feedback received. Here, the challenge is both technological and scientific, spanning human cognition, human machine interaction, and machine intelligence disciplines.
HC-CO Sense. New forms of perception and action: invent and demonstrate new forms of interaction with the real world, virtual models, or abstract information by provoking a mapping from an artificial medium to appropriate sensory modalities or brain regions. This research should reinforce data perception and unified experience by augmenting the human interaction capabilities and awareness in virtual spaces.
In sum, HC-CO is an emerging R&D field that holds the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with computers. Standing at the crossroad between cognitive science, computer science and artificial intelligence, HC-CO can provide the cyberpsychology and cybertherapy community with fresh concepts and interesting new tools to apply in both research and clinical domains.
Internet Corner
HC-CO Initiative (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fet-proactive/hcco_en.html/). The official EU Web site, the HC-CO initiative, which describes the broad objectives of this emerging research field.
HC2 Project (www.hcsquared.eu/). The horizontal character of HC-CO makes it a fascinating and fertile interdisciplinary field, but it can also compromise its growth, with researchers scattered across disciplines and groups worldwide. For this reason, a coordination activity promoting discipline connect, identity building, and integration while defining future research, education, and policy directions at the regional, national, European, and international level has been created. This project is HC2, a three-year Coordination Action funded by the FP7 FET Proactive scheme. The consortium will draw on a wide network of researchers and stakeholders to achieve four key objectives: (a) stimulate, structure, and support the research community, promoting identity building; (b) consolidate research agendas with special attention to the interdisciplinary aspects of HC-CO; (c) enhance the public understanding of HC-CO and foster the early contact of researchers with high-tech SMEs and other industry players; (d) establish guidelines for the definition of new educational curricula to prepare the next generation of HC-CO researchers.
CEED Project (http://ceeds-project.eu/). Funded by the HC-CO initiative, the Collective Experience of Empathic Data Systems (CEEDs) project aims to develop “novel, integrated technologies to support human experience, analysis and understanding of very large datasets.” CEEDS will develop innovative tools to exploit theories showing that discovery is the identification of patterns in complex data sets by the implicit information processing capabilities of the human brain. Implicit human responses will be identified by the CEEDs system's analysis of its sensing systems, tuned to users' bio-signals and non-verbal behaviors. By associating these implicit responses with different features of massive data sets, the CEEDs system will guide users' discovery of patterns and meaning within the data sets.
VERE Project (www.vereproject.eu/). VERE—Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-Embodiment—is another large project funded by the HC-CO initiative, which aims at “dissolving the boundary between the human body and surrogate representations in immersive virtual reality and physical reality.” Dissolving the boundary means that people have the illusion that their surrogate representation is their own body, and act and have thoughts that correspond to this. The work in VERE may be thought of as applied presence research and applied cognitive neuroscience.
Upcoming Meetings
ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems
Pisa, Italy
June 13–16, 2011
http://eics-conference.org/
16th Annual CyberPsychology and CyberTherapy Conference
Gatineau, Canada
June 20–22, 2011
www.e-therapy2011.org/
2011 International Workshop on Social Computing, Network, and Services
Crete, Greece
June 28–30, 2011
www.ftrai.org/socialcomnet2011/
International Conference on Virtual Rehabilitation 2011
Zurich, Switzerland
June 27–29, 2011
www.virtual-rehab.org/2011/
12th IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics: Reaching Users and the Community
Zurich, Switzerland
June 29–July 1, 2011
www.icorr2011.org/
5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies
Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, Australia
June 29–July 2, 2011
http://ct2011.urbaninformatics.net/
HCI International 2011
Orlando, Florida
July 9–14, 2011
www.hcii2011.org/
International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
Kaohsiung City, Taiwan
July 25–27, 2011
http://asonam.im.nuk.edu.tw/
6th International Conference on Collaboration Technologies
Tokyo, Japan
August 29–31, 2011
www.collabtech.org/
8th International Conference on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies
Viña del Mar/Valparaíso, Chile
August 31–September 2, 2011
www.icdvrat.reading.ac.uk/
13th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human–Computer Interaction
Lisbon, Portugal
September 5–9, 2011
http://interact2011.org/
12th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Aarhus, Denmark
September 24–28, 2011
www.ecscw2011.org/
2nd Desire Conference on Creativity and Innovation in Design
Eindhoven, Netherlands
October 19–21, 2011
www.desire11.id.tue.nl/
10th International Semantic Web Conference
Koblenz, Germany
October 23–27, 2011
http://iswc2011.semanticweb.org/home/
VIEW Conference 2011
Turin, Italy
October 25–28, 2011
www.viewconference.it
Social Media World Forum North America
New York
November 1–2, 2011
www.socialmedia-forum.com/northamerica/
