Call for Papers for SKALID 2012

The "Workshop on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition with Limited Information Displays" proposed by Falko Schmid, Nicholas Giudice and me for Spatial Cognition 2012 was accepted. It is about the commonalities between tactile maps, visual maps on small displays and other types of maps on limited information displays. Now we seek YOUR submission! See details or download the Call for Papers as PDF.

Tactile Display coupled with Tactile Sensor

As Inside-Handy reports, there is an interesting development by NEC and the Tokioter Institute of Technology: a tactile display is uses coupled with sensory abilities which results in a complete tactile interaction device. In contrast to the original article, I doubt that this device provides any kind of force-feedback abilities. Real force-feedback would demand for any mechanism that can excert a force to the finger(s) or at least the sensation of a force to the mechanoreceptors in the skin. As far as I can see, there is no such think it this prototype. But watch yourself:

Links to work on Spatial Cognition, HCI & Tactile Media

Spatial Cognition

• Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) 
• "Spatial Cognition" trans-regional research group at Bremen University
• "Spatial Cognition and Wayfinding" lab at Bournemouth University
• Center for Spatial Studies, University of California
• "Spatial Thinking" lab at the University of California

Human Factors in Spatial Cognition

• "Human Factors in GIScience" Lab, Penn State University
• Computer Science and Media, Bauhaus Universität Weimar 

Tactile Media/Maps

• Arbeitsgruppe Studium für Blinde und Sehbehinderte & Professur HCI, Universität Dresden
• Computer-controlled, refreshable tactile displays: 
• with piezo-electric, descrete dots: HyperBraille (demo video)
• with dielectric elastomer, decrete dots (paper1, paper2, paper3)
• HaptiMap EU project 
• Open Street Map for the blind project (published HaptoRenderer) - some output printed with a  graphical embosser (pictures only)

Commercial Projects

• Tactile Maps by Intouch Graphics
• Map for all at RNBI
• Tactile Maps by Perkins Scout 

More links at The Blind Readers' Page

Motivation of scientific research

An article in the online version of the newspaper FAZ these days brought me to think about my own motivation of doing scientific research. I think it's pure curiosity - nothing more, nothing less. But in my professional environment I see at least some doctoral students that strive for relations with more senior researchers/professors/etc. I ask myself: what are their motives? Maybe, to have a better start after graduation. Maybe, because they generally like older people and want to surround themselves with they people they like. For me, it's startling because I cannot resist the feeling that the relation these people build is more of strategic nature, not real. Fortunately I see many other doctoral students whose first motivation is curiosity. And I hope that science as subject will continue to be grounded in curiosity, not in building up pure reputation networks.

The BSVH, Heiko Kunert and the blog Blind-PR

In Hamburg there is a quite vibrant scene of blind and visually-impaired people, most prominently gathered in the BSVH, the society of blind and visually-impaired people Hamburg.The activities of the BSVH are targeted at community building through joint activities, public awareness through the distribution of information, and policy advocacy through giving advice and comments to policy makers. The society gathers relevant  news, publishes the newsletter "Augenblick Mail" and its own press releases and twitter feed, has an event calender and provides information about sight-related illnesses and where to get help in Hamburg. Once a month there is the BSVH-Treff, a two-hour talk session aired by the Hamburg local radio station, that is available as podcast as well.

Heiko Kunert, the current public relation officer and designated manager general from 2012 on, is the most visible beacon of the active community members. He runs the blog Blind-PR where he comments on current developments of assistive technology, public policies and a diversity of issues adjacent to the needs and rights of people with special needs. Heiko supported different media in reporting about aspects of living with visual impairements, for example, in "DIGIsellschaft" for ZDF Elektrischer Reporter or in "Mein Leben als Blinder" for Pro7 Galileo.

Ken Forbus talked about "Sketching our way to human-level AI"

On Tuesday, Ken Forbus from the Northwestern University gave a talk "Sketching our way to human-level AI" as part of his 3-day visit to the SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition research group at the University of Bremen:

"This talk will summarize two large-scale efforts at Northwestern: (1) CogSketch, an open-domain sketch understanding system.  Our goal with CogSketch is to make it a useful research instrument for cognitive scientists (including AI researchers) and as a platform for sketch-based educational software.  (2) Companion cognitive systems, a cognitive architecture which makes analogical processing central.  Our goal with Companions is to create the first software social organisms, a step towards human-level artificial intelligence.  I'll focus on aspects of these efforts that might be particularly interesting from the perspective of potential collaborations: knowledge capture games to explore the semantics of spatial language, modeling 3D reasoning of engineers, learning by reading, and apprenticeship learning in a strategy game."

For me, the talk was highly interesting as it opened up a perspective how to analyse sketches of maps in a conceptual way. Other pictures are available here

In a personal conversation one day later, Ken took the time and discussed with me how I could use CogSketch in my research. This approach allows to compare sketches and helps to segment them into the basic conceptually entities. The algorithms and knowledge base behind CogSketch allow to compute a similarity value on the ground of spatial properties, for example, the directional relations of entities, their neighbourhood, the containment etc. CogSketch is really amazing and I will definitely give a try!

Thank you Ken for your time and your advice and please continue with your collaborators to provide such great tools like CogSketch!

Conferences on Tactile Maps or Cognitive Issues of Navigation

Recently, the 1st European State of the Map Conference of the OpenStreetMap project took place in Vienna, Austria. Participants from various countries were present and listened to a bunch of interesting talks. In the context of my research, the talk by Annette Thurow on OSM for blind users was particularly insightful. How to make customized maps from OSM data with Maperitive was demonstrated as well. All recordings of the presentations and conference proceedings (PDF) are available.

Upcoming conferences and possibly relevant presentations:

• Braille21 in Leipzig:
• T2: Banning a Chimera with the Hyperbraille Display
  Prof. Gerhard Weber
• 10th COSIT in Belfast (US):
• Poster: Towards a theory of spatial assistance from a phenomenological perspective: Technical and social factors for blind navigation
  Kirsten Jacobson, Nicholas A. Giudice, and Reinhard Moratz
• Poster: A Conceptual framework for comparing navigation across different domains: Lessons from blind navigation
  Julio C. Mateo 
• Paper: Towards Cognitively Plausible Spatial Representations for Sketch Map Alignment
  Malumbo Chipofya, Jia Wang, Angela Schwering
• Paper: The Effect of Activity on Relevance and Granularity for Navigation
  Stephen Hirtle, Sabine Timpf and Thora Tenbrink