Call for Papers

Research for Action: Networking University and Community for Social Responsibility

Theme

Relevant topics include but are not limited to the following:

Organisation and Submission Details

Guest Editors

Academic Career Development Workshop for Research Students and Early Career Academics

in conjunction with Internet Research 11, Gothenburg, Sweden, 20 October 2010

http://ir11.aoir.org/program/pre-conference-workshops/

Description

For research students and early career academics, universities offer resources that help develop their research skills – for example, critical theory development, literature reviews, research methods, data analysis, writing skills, etc. However, building a successful career in academia poses a wide range of new challenges in addition to the pure academic craft of research. The resources and resilience one needs in order to shape an academic career path often appear ambiguous, particularly in the innately transformative field of Internet research. In response to feedback from AoIR members, this full-day workshop seeks to address this concern by offering a supportive and constructive environment to discuss career development related issues that are of specific interest to research students and early career academics.

The first half of the workshop is devoted to the process of transitioning into research student training and supervision. In the second half, we will look at issues of academic leadership. The workshop chairs, along with invited senior academic researchers, will share with the participants some of their off-the-record insights of their career development milestones and the related decisions that have shaped their career paths. The workshop chairs will act as facilitators and moderators who will encourage the participants to join the discussion and share their own views and experiences with the rest of the group. The goal is to establish a peer support atmosphere that bridges disciplinary, cultural, and regional differences in order to distill the common skills and capabilities that are necessary to identify and seize opportunities for shaping one’s own career trajectory in academia. The main topics of discussion for each session will be negotiated with the participants on the day. This is to make the workshop as relevant and practical to the participants as possible.

Schedule

The following is the proposed activity plan:

09.00 – 12.00 Research training and supervision

• Building a track record
• On and offline communication and collaboration tools
• Mode of Thesis: Monograph / By Publications / Exegesis
• New ways of building and communicating knowledge

12.00 – 13.00 Lunch

13.00 – 17.00 Academic leadership

• Identifying significant research trends and building momentum and engagement
• Building and managing a multidisciplinary research team
• Social media tools for research and stakeholder relationship management
• Recruiting research partner organisations and liaising with external stakeholders
• Project management and research budget accounting
• Human resources: recruitment, performance planning, and review
• Research-teaching nexus
• Promotion and tenure

The final selection of the invited senior academics is to be confirmed.

Fees & Logistics

• Date: Wednesday, 20 October 2010
• Time: 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
• Location: Chalmers student union building, room TBA.
• Fee: 330 SEK
• Lunch and coffee included.
• Facebook event entry: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=110293655687140

Submission & Participation

The number of participants in this workshop is limited to 25. If you are interested in attending, please send an email by 1 Sep 2010 to both workshop organisers with a single PDF file that contains:

• Your name,
• Affiliation,
• 200 word biography,
• 200 word statement expressing your career aspirations, and what you hope to get out of your participation in this workshop.

Contact

Associate Professor Marcus Foth

Email: m.foth AT qut.edu.au

Web: www.urbaninformatics.net

Dr Jaz Hee-jeong Choi

Email: h.choi AT qut.edu.au

Web: www.nicemustard.com

Organizers

Associate Professor Marcus Foth is Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, and founder and team leader of the Urban Informatics Research Lab. He received a QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship (2009-2011), and a Smart Futures Fellowship from the Queensland State Government (2009-2011), co-sponsored by National ICT Australia (NICTA). He was awarded the inaugural Australian Business Foundation Research Fellowship on Innovation and Cultural Industries 2010 sponsored by the Aurora Foundation. He was an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (2006-2008), and a 2007 Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Dr Foth’s research explores human-computer interaction design and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on urban informatics, locative media and mobile applications. The high quality of his research work has attracted over $1.7M in national competitive grants and industry funding since 2006. Dr Foth has published over 70 articles in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. He is the editor of the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (2009), and is currently co-editing the book “From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen” for MIT Press (2011). He was on the AoIR Executive Committee between 2007 and 2009. He is the conference chair of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies 2011 in Brisbane.

Dr Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry) at the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. Her research interests are in playful technology, particularly the ways in which various forms of playful interaction are designed, developed, and integrated in different cultural contexts. In her recently completed doctoral research, she developed a new conceptual approach to urban sustainability that recognises ‘play’ as the core of transformative interactions in cities as ubiquitous technosocial networks. Her current research explores designing and developing playful ubiquitous technologies to cultivate sustainable food culture in urban environments. She has collaborated with leading international researchers and published across various disciplines, which as been a fun journey, but she is looking forward to even more – or some would say, ‘the real’ – fun to come.

Sustainable Interaction with Food, Technology, and the City

This workshop explores innovative approaches to understanding and cultivating sustainable food culture in urban environments via human-computer-interaction (HCI) design and ubiquitous technologies in urban environments. We perceive the city as an intersecting network of people, place, and technology in constant transformation. Lift Workshop @Weimar explores mobile human-food interaction and the role of interactive media in engaging citizens to cultivate more sustainable everyday human-food interactions on the go. Interactive media in this sense is distributed, pervasive, and embedded in the city as a network. The workshop addresses environmental, health, and social domains of sustainability by bringing together insights across disciplines to discuss conceptual and design approaches in orchestrating mobility and interaction of people and food in the city as a network of people, place, technology, and food.

Speakers

• Mark Shepard, Assistant Professor, Departments of Architecture and Media Study at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
• Katharine S. Willis, Researcher / Artist / Architect at University of Siegen
• Marcus Foth, Associate Professor / Principal Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology
• Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry) at Queensland University of Technology

The presentations will be followed by a Q&A session with the speakers.

More information, and registration page:

http://liftconference.com/lift-at-home/events/2010/10/31/lift-workshop-weimar

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154534607892420

The first edition of Lift Workshop in Hungary sets the scene in the Eastern Quartier of Pécs at a historical coal mining site, an outstanding architectural merit, now part of the city’s cultural heritage. As European Capital of Culture in 2010, Pécs attracts international attention as a cultural pole on the periphery of the European Union.

Departing from this context Lift Workshop @ Hungary addresses the possibilities of new technologies in the socio-cultural periphery of a changing post-industrial urban landscape. It turns this particular locality and its challenges into the centre of the attention of architects, artists, social scientists from the region and from regional media labs with the objective to explore and connect with recent discussions regarding urban computing and situated technologies and extend the discourse to specific regional issues and problems.

The aim of the workshop is to explore the implications of urban information systems for architecture and urban design, disciplines that have been largely absent from the mostly technologist-driven discussions of “ubiquitous” computing but nevertheless can provide new insights and alternative perspectives on the implications of “networked objects” for urban culture, newly emerging spatial practices and organizational forms. During the workshop participants develop responses, scenarios applicable to Eastern Quartier and later other urban areas undergoing similar transformation.

Lift Workshop @ Hungary: Eastern Quartier is organized by Kitchen Budapest in collaboration with KÉK – Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre. To find out more about the organizers, our sponsors click here.

More information, and registration page:

http://liftconference.com/lift-at-home/events/2010/09/26/lift-workshop-hungary

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=144865162214052

Find out about the exciting uses the near future holds for you and your mobile phone at QUT’s Urban Informatics showcase at the Ekka tomorrow, Tuesday, August 10th from 1 to 5pm.

A team of PhD students and early career researchers will demonstrate their work in ubiquitous computing, urban informatics, social media, and mobile phone applications at the National Science Week Pavilion.

QUT Professor Marcus Foth said the work of the Urban Informatics Research Lab was strategically positioned at the intersection of people, place and technology with a view to exploring new opportunities afforded by real-time, ubiquitous technology that links the physical city with the digital city.

“The projects we have selected allow Ekka visitors to participate in our research work and try out new ideas and prototype systems themselves,” said Professor Foth, who is the founder and team leader of the QUT Urban Informatics Research Lab.

“FixVegas, for example, is a simple yet powerful application we have released for the iPhone. It uses the in-built camera, GPS and internet access to allow Brisbane residents to report maintenance requests, such as broken park benches and pot holes in the streets, to Brisbane City Council.

“We will also demonstrate innovative ways to visualise music listening preferences and song choices in public places, a novel approach to allow people to engage in urban planning that we have developed in collaboration with Brisbane City Council, as well as new interface designs to convey information about domestic energy consumption in real-time.”

QUT PhD candidate Ronald Schroeter’s project, Discussions in Space, will also be showcased.

“This project is designed to allow residents to have their say about the future of Brisbane by installing large public screens at central locations. Passersby are invited to comment on and leave their ‘bright ideas’ on Brisbane’s River City Blueprint – the new master plan for the inner city – using their mobile phone via SMS, Twitter or a website,” Mr Schroeter said.

Dr Jaz Choi, an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow on the team, will showcase a project that gives visual representations of the user’s ecological impact and opportunities to engage and collaborate in fostering a sustainable food culture in Queensland.

“This project will go beyond merely informing by aiming to motivate and encourage to change and take action,” said Dr Choi.

The National Science Week pavilion at the Ekka is part of Australia’s annual celebration of science and technology and aims to encourage many scientific, bio technology, computer science and engineering communities to open their doors and ‘ignite the imagination’ of the public by demonstrating their science, engineering and technology achievements.

For more information, go to www.urbaninformatics.net and www.ekka.com.au

Media contact: Niki Widdowson, 07 3138 1841 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au

http://www.news.qut.edu.au/cgi-bin/WebObjects/News.woa/wa/goNewsPage?newsEventID=33261

Date: Monday, 16 August 2010

Time: 10.30am – 12 noon

Place: QUT Kelvin Grove, A 105

Presenter: Jan Seeburger

Who should attend: QUT staff and students who are interested in WWDC, iPhone, and iPad programming

Abstract:
The presentation will cover the experiences gained through attending the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June 2010 and how the Apple University Consortium (AUC) is supporting QUT staff and students to attend the event. Additionally the presentation will cover some of the new features of the iPhone 4 and the iOS4 for developing applications for mobile devices.

Additional information:
Apple WWDC http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/
AUC http://www.auc.edu.au/

The Urban Informatics Research Lab, the Institute for Creative Industries & Innovation, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation, and BEE School of Design are proud to present guest seminars by:

Dr Anne Galloway, Victoria University of Wellington

1. Speculative Design as a Research Method

Monday, 30 August 2010, 11 am – 12 noon
Please RSVP by 24 August 2010 to Ben Kraal <b.kraal@qut.edu.au>
Queensland University of Technology, Gardens Point Campus, S Block, room 620

Abstract

Design is increasingly seen as a creative and productive means of engaging imagined social and technological futures, but what kind of knowledge is being produced and how can we assess the impact of this kind of research? This talk outlines a project that aims to address these methodological concerns through a critical exploration of how NZ’s merino wool industry could be reconfigured by future RFID-based animal and product traceability initiatives.

2. Counting Sheep: New Zealand Merino Wool in an Internet of Things

Tuesday, 31 August 2010, 11 am – 12 noon, followed by light refreshments (to 1 pm)
Please RSVP by 25 August 2010 to julieanne.edwards@qut.edu.au
Queensland University of Technology, Council Room (A105), A Block (map)
Victoria Park Rd, Kelvin Grove QLD 4059

Abstract

Pervasive computing brings together wireless, networked and context-aware technologies, including Global Positioning System (GPS), environmental sensors and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), to embed computational capacities in the objects and environments that surround us. The “Internet of Things” is a related vision for future computing that proposes a shift from a network of interconnected computers to a network of interconnected objects. By virtue of their status as highly regulated and globally traded commodities, livestock animals and animal products have long been tracked and are primed to be amongst the first non-humans in such a network. Specifically, RFID-enabled livestock traceability programmes are increasingly being mandated by governments and agricultural industries worldwide to better support management of disease outbreaks and maintain access to high-value export markets. In these technologically determinist traceability scenarios, animals are largely envisioned as manageable and saleable information and farmers are more often positioned as technicians and data collectors than as animal caregivers.

This project investigates the role that cultural studies and design can play in presenting both producers and consumers with alternate visions for the future of human-animal relations. Through a juxtaposition of technological livestock management programmes and non-technological wool industry products and services, this presentation will critically question the social and cultural implications of emergent technologies and existing traceability efforts. Particular attention will be given to articulating research practices and stakeholder relations that can significantly engage relevant issues and avoid the pitfalls of both dystopian and utopian futurism.

Biography

Anne recently relocated from Canada (a.k.a. The Great White North) to take up a position as Senior Lecturer in Design Research at the School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Drawing on a background in sociology and anthropology, her research focusses on emergent technologies in their visual, discursive, material and practical manifestations. Anne really likes animals and technology, and you can learn more about her and the world’s best cat™ on the web at plsj.org or on twitter @annegalloway.

31/03/2010 Interview with John Zheng

Interview with John Zheng who is a strategic planner from the Rockhampton Regional Council. The interview discusses John’s work with the preparation of rewriting new planning schemes and his thoughts on engaging the community through the use of technology.

04/11/2009 Interview with Martin Zaltron

Interview with Martin Zaltron who is a manger and director for the Urban Development Institute of Australia, Queensland Branch. The interview will discuss the UDIA’s role in Queensland, neighbourhood planning, environmental sustainability and martin’s thoughts on urban informatics and how it can be used for community engagement.

http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-Challenge-Workshop-2010

Urban computing is an emerging multidisciplinary field which studies public spaces such as cities as computing sites. It is driven by two related trends, urbanization and rapid deployment of rich computing infrastructure in urban areas. As urban computing systems are by definition culturally situated in the public spaces, their successful development calls for harnessing the real world as your research laboratory.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

UBI Challenge Workshop 2010 (UCW 2010) solicits original contributions within the broad scope of real world urban computing. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

- devices and techniques

- systems and infrastructures

- applications

- methodologies and tools

- theories and models

- experiences

The fundamental requirement for all contributions is that they clearly address real world urban computing in some respect.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The one-day workshop will have two sessions. The morning session comprises of the presentation of the accepted papers and a summary of the recent activities and findings in the ubiquitous Oulu. The presentations provide the stimulus for the afternoon session, which focuses on prototyping of new urban computing applications and services using different prototyping methods and starting assumptions. The resulting prototypes are documented for further analysis and dissemination.

The workshop provides the participants with ample opportunity for active interaction with like-minded colleagues on urban computing. Additional benefits include inside access to recent activities and findings of a leading edge urban computing research program and a comprehensive overview of the ongoing UBI Challenge (http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-Challenge-Workshop-2010).

KEY DATES

Aug 09, 2010 – Submission deadline (final extension)

Aug 23, 2010 – Notification of acceptance

Sep 06, 2010 – Camera-ready deadline

Sep 26, 2010 – Workshop at Ubicomp 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark

CHAIRS

Timo Ojala, University of Oulu, Finland

Jukka Riekki, University of Oulu, Finland

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Anind Dey, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Jonna Häkkilä, Nokia Research Center, Finland

Timo Ojala, University of Oulu, Finland

Jukka Riekki, University of Oulu, Finland

Jürgen Scheible, Aalto University, Finland

Mikael Wiberg, Umeå University, Sweden

PAPER FORMAT

Papers should be formatted according to the Ubicomp ACM Word or Latex template (http://www.ubicomp2010.org/templates) and submitted as PDF files. Papers must be no longer than 4 pages, including the abstract of no more than 150 words, all figures, and references. Paper submissions have to be anonymized to facilitate double blind review. Authors should take care throughout their paper that their and their institution’s identity is not revealed. However, relevant references to an author’s previous research (which may be required for reviewers to understand and evaluate the paper’s contribution) should not be suppressed but instead referenced in a neutral way.

PAPER SUBMISSION

Papers are submitted using the EasyChair Conference System (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ucw2010). You need an EasyChair account to submit your paper.

WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS

Workshop proceedings will be published by the University of Oulu with an ISBN number in electronic format. The proceedings will be later offered to international publishers for publication.