Three thoughts on FI:1- Embodied social media

2- Ideology of present: is there the past in FI?3- UCM for Health and for Cultural Heritage

Antonio Camurri (^)Casa Paganini – InfoMus, DIST, University of Genoa

antonio.camurri@unige.itwww.casapaganini.org www.sameproject.eu

Brussels, 19 January 2010

(^) Thanks to my collegues Donald Glowinski, Alberto Massari and Gualtiero Volpe for precious discussions.

1. Interaction with content in FI

• Intuitive and natural, deeply integrated with everyday physical activity: embodied interaction.

• Users interact with content by means of disappearing systems supporting natural human-to-human communication mechanisms (e.g., natural language, gesture), including the subtlest expressive, emotional, sympathetic aspects of human physical interaction.

• Non-verbal, including full-body, communication channels play a paramount role.

Interaction with content in FI: research challenges

• gaining a deeper understanding and exploitation of human non-verbal expressive communication channels,

• developing techniques for analysis and recognition of a broad range of spontaneous expressive gestures, nouances, etc.

• developing techniques for analysing the subtlest and more significant human emotional expressions,

• supporting social interaction: entrainment, empathy, co-creation, contagion, emotional engagement.

Embodied social media: the social dimension of interaction (1/2)

• Social networks are mainly based on sharing of static textual and audiovisual content,

• whereas real-time interaction between users, immersiveness, and sense of presence and embodiment are far to be fully reached.

• Mobiles embed growing numbers of sensors and context-aware devices enabling to support full-body physicality and social interaction. Games follow a similar trend (eg Nintendo WII, MS Natal project)

• The rapid grow and diffusion of social networks and internet games bear witness of the importance of the social dimension of interaction for the future internet and UCM and, in particular, of the relevance of the emotional and embodied component of social interaction.

Embodied social media: the social dimension of interaction (2/2)

• The analysis of non-verbal expressive social descriptors, like entrainment, empathic behaviour in a group, co-creation and contagion, the individuation of leadership and salience descriptors along the evolution of a group behaviour, are building bricks candidate to greatly enhance UCM.

• Toward embodied social networks ?

2. The ideology of present and the risk to loose past in FI

• Anthropologists (e.g. Marc Augé, "Ou est passe l'avenir?", 2008) depict visions of the future where humans will depend on FI in the same way one depends on her own glasses or hearing-aid.

• The "state of the world" appears to users familiar at each instant, thanks to the evidence of the images available from internet, which continuously recompose time and space.

• ideology of present: a concrete risk that the sense of past, of history (and therefore the sense of future) will be lost in FI.

A perspective from anthropology: the ideology of present

• internet as a non-place, is going to become a non-time: a user is pushed by huge amounts of data, all declined at present time, the now: • A user can read the latest news, knows what her

friends are doing now, she updates her profile/blog/twitter with what she is doing, thinking, or listening now. . .

• How to preserve the awareness of past, of history, and therefore of future?

A perspective from anthropology: the ideology of present

• In some FI scenarios, the objective is to support more and more huge quantity of data, to store exabytes of information in a cloud and to send data to any user on demand.

• This model is incomplete, oversimplified, perhaps inadequate.

How to face the ideology of present?

• How to re-appropriate “time”? How to preserve and be able to understand and exploit data ?

• Possible traces of answers:– Data as active memory capable to delete

progressively from the past the things which are duplicate, “noise”, or “poorly relevant”, (decant)

– Data capable to re-shape itself: a sort of “lossy algorithms” preserve the “essence of the data”,

– capable to “blur the boundaries” to better focus on the past,

Blur the past to better focus on it• Novel perspectives for annotating and access audiovisual

content, inspired by theories on human memory, on attention, on consciousness.

• Emotion, empathy, and social signals associated to A/V content can contribute to determine its persistence, relevance, and links.

• To reflect the fact that the digital content is intertwined to physical body.

• This would contribute to empower users with new tools to manage awareness and understanding of content.

• In a broader perspective: increase awareness and participation in our globalization era.

• A crucial issue: how much these mechanisms to determine the shaping of the “history” are under the control of the user?

3. Social impact of future UCM: EU Cultural Heritage

• Improve the awareness and the knowledge in EU citizens of the rich European cultural heritage

• UCM supporting novel forms of "active fruition" of A/V cultural content may attract citizens to know unexplored parts of their culture.

• Active fruition refers here to UCM supporting and enabling embodiment of A/V content, the possibility to shape the fruition and the experience of prerecorded A/V content according to individual and group behaviour, fully exploiting non verbal components of human behaviour, including emotions and non verbal social signals.

• www.sameproject.eu on active music listening extended to active fruition of (EU) cultural heritage

Example of active fruition

Permanent installation “Viaggiatori di sguardo”, by Casa Paganini – InfoMus,DIST Univ of Genoa, for the active fruition of the UNESCO treasure Palazzi dei Rolli,Palazzo Ducale, Fondazione della Cultura, Genoa, Italy. www.casapaganini.org

The user mimics the gesture to point with a(virtual) binocular to explore and zoom incultural heritage data.

Social impact of future UCM: Independent Living

• Current research on elderly and independent living usually rely on custom ICT solutions and devices.

• This is a big obstacle to the diffusion of such services.• UCM embedding novel sensoring, networking, and context

awareness devices can provide an ideal platform to support crucial tasks in independent living: maintaining social links (e.g., more effective and engaging remote links with caregivers, links with elderly sharing the same problems), monitoring elderly at home, support services on fall prevention (by monitoring the quality of body movement while walking and doing normal actions in the home, just wearing the device), . . .