"Virtual Runner" Demonstration

Since summer 2007, we have been working in a collaboration between the Leeds Met Carnegie Faculty and the Faculty Innovation North in developing a learning game, which allows students to intuitively learn about physiological processes in a playful way. The second prototype of this simulation "Virtual Runner" has now publicly been demonstrated for the first time at the Venturefest 2010 in York on Wednesday, 10.February. At this occasion we received a lot of positive feedback.

We also had the opportunity to present this demonstration to the Leeds Met Governors during their meeting last Friday (12.February 2010), and they were very positive about this project.

During the first development phase, the project had been developed through funding from the HEFCE Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund (TQEF). The first prototype had been developed by Kooji Creative who are a student-owned (former graduates of Leeds Met Innovation North) organisation. The 2nd prototype which was the subject of the latest demonstrations has been developed with help from the Yorkshire Proof of Commercial Concept Fund, matched by funding from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF). Innovation North graduate Abraham Smith was the key developer of the software of this prototype.

We intend to offer more information at the Virtual Runner website.

Visit of Peter Baumgartner

Prof Peter Baumgartner from the Danube University Krems (DUK) visited our faculty Innovation North during the past two days. Since 2005, several students from DUK had registered at Leeds Met for a PhD degree, and the first students are approaching the completion of their degree. In our meetings with Peter we discussed the terms for future collaboration in teaching and also in research activities.

Peter was very impressed by the interdisciplinary activities which we demonstrated within our faculty and in collaborative work with other faculties, and by the 24/7 access to our library.

Unfortunately the weather here in Leeds was not very hospitable: rain on Tuesday, snow sleet on Wednesday, and today thick fog which led to the cancellation of his flight. He will have a very long journey back to Krems tonight.

Interactive Arts Display

In the past few weeks I have worked on writing software for an interactive arts display. The main concept is that a video camera monitors the visitors of the arts display, which is a projection of a video film showing the artist Lee Gascoyne creating an artwork (see his blog at http://artists-water.blogspot.com/. The replay of this video is influenced by the motion of the visitors, which is captured by the camera: only of the audience does not move, the video recording will be played properly.

The technical principle of this system is as follows: The video capture software captures a reference image and computes the "difference" of each subsequent video image, pixel by pixel, in RGB. Based on this difference the video replay is being disturbed, and the video jumps ahead or backward. The implementation of this interaction has been done controlling the video player Winamp: this player can be controlled from another software by sending Windows messages. In order to be able to place the video replay on a different PC than the video capture, a socket connection between these two programs has been implemented: the camera capture software runs a server, which is sending out the pixel change value to each client after connection.

In our tests today at the Barnsley University Campus of Huddersfield University (where Lee is a BA Hons student), Senior Computing Officer Alistair Reid-Pearson (who is a Leeds Met Alumni from Innovation North) set up a PC for running all the software components. There were some issues regarding downloading the .NET framework 3.5, but the system ran flawlessly on another PC which had a different image of the OS installation.

The art installation will be shown at the exhibition of "The Dearne Project" which will be opened on 5.February by Councillor Newman at the Emergency Pod 1, 14-16 Mayday Green, Barnsley, at 6:30pm. This exhibition is a part of The Rivers Movement.

European FP-7 - 6th Call

In November the European Commission has published their 6th call in the 7th Framework Programme (FP-7). This call has a variety of topics, ranging from robotics to cultural heritage digitisation: see the CORDIS web site with the details of the call.

I have posted three profiles on the CORDIS partner search site (related to Heritage Digitisation, Artificial Creativity, and general expertise) and I encourage anyone interested in joining a consortium to have a look there. For searching, no registration is required. For posting a profile and for replying to existing profiles you need to register on that site.

Interview by Times Educational Supplement

Today around noon I received a phone call from Dave Matthews from the Times Educational Supplement (TES). At first I thought I would be asked about Leeds Met and the changes it had gone through the past year, and I was not really prepared to talk about that. But fortunately, the topic of conversation was "Augmented Reality (AR)". The interviewer wants to write a column in the TES in the next days or so. I was asked about the history of AR, and I mentioned the AR work of Boeing in the early 1990s. Furthermore, I could recall that the first prototypes of mobile AR applications were presented at ISMAR sometime in 2002 or 2003; I remember seeing one of those handheld Compaq iPAQs with a camera and a graphical overlay of kitchen furniture. I was not sure when the first AR app on the iPhone came out... but AR has only made it into the mainstream awareness during the past year.

I will keep my eyes open for the article in the TES.

Talk at St. Aidan's Church of England High School, Harrogate

On 3.December I was invited by Marian Farrar, Business Liaison Officer of the St. Aidan's C of E High School in Harrogate, to give a talk about a Science and Technology topic suitable for the 6th form. I chose the topic "Towards Artificial Intelligence – How Computers 'See' the World". First I introduced the general concept of imaging, illustrating how artists during the Renaissance period discovered the perspective mapping and used it in their paintings. Computer vision basically needs to invert the mapping equation, to recover the 3D space around the camera from 2D image series. This is done by feature detection and tracking, employs image processing methods on the digitised image sequences. As a result, computer vision is able to extract enough information from the visual sensors for performing specific tasks. To illustrate this, I showed videos of cars performing automatic driving, and I talked about my contribution to visual road recognition and the US DARPA Grand Challenge. The students were very attentive, and I hope that I was able to stimulate an interest in this very important technology of Computer Vision which will have a significant impact in the next few decades.

Evaluator for the European Commission

Since the year 2000 I have been doing this: working as an evaluator / reviewer / auditor for the European Commission. The European Union awards a large amount of research funding to European consortia, and they need reviewers (experts) to judge the quality. There are usually many more proposals than there is funding available, and so these experts have the task to put the incoming proposals in a ranking - the top ranked proposals will then receive the funding.

This evaluation activity is done several times a year, and each time a new call is launched for proposals, the European Commission organises these reviews and invites experts all across Europe to participate in those reviews/evaluations. For the evaluators, this is a great honour to be invited, and it is also beneficial: they get to see the very latest state of research interests, and they can expand their network with other evaluators. Naturally all the proceedings are treated confidentially, so no evaluator can use the information obtained from reading those proposals.

Information about the current EU workprogrammes (Framework Programme 7 = FP7) is on the CORDIS website. This site has also a section where everyone with any considerable professional or academic expertise can register as expert. It is recommended to frequently update the profile there, because that is the expert repository from where the European Commission selects the evaluators so that their expertise matches the requirements for evaluating projects and proposals.

When the Commission invites the experts, they first send out an email for probing the availability at a given time. This is usually 4-6 months before the event and gives them an overview on how many experts would be available. About 3 months before the evaluation event an official letter will be sent with an invitation to participate in the evaluation. The expert then has to sign a contract, declaring any conflict of interest and complying with the confidentiality requirements. This then constitutes a binding agreement, and the expert can then book the travel - this will be reimbursed by the Commission later.

About 2 weeks before the actual meeting (which usually takes place in Brussels), the experts are given access to the material that they are to evaluate. Either the proposals are being sent by postal mail, or they are made available online. It is then the task of the evaluator to do a thorough review of the material and give a score, based on set criteria. These criteria may differ for each call, as the procedures slightly change over the years and are also different for each discipline. Th scores are then submitted back to the Commission before the meeting.

The meeting where all the evaluators come together can last a few days or a whole week. The purpose there is to come to a consensus: for each proposal, a number of reviewers (typically 3) provides a score, and these score may differ. In scheduled consensus meetings, these evaluators now discuss why they believe that their score is appropriate. They need to be prepared to change their score, because for the final ranking, the score is not simply the average of all evaluator scores, but is the score to which each evaluator agrees. There are mechanisms in place in case the evaluators have very stubborn opinions - another evaluator would join, and then they would try to reach consensus. They all sign the score sheet in the end, indicating their agreement of the score. One of them is assigned to be a rapporteur, writing the notes and comments into the final form that will be forwarded later to the applicants for the funding.

After all the individual project consensus meetings have been held, a final meeting with all evaluators takes place. The goal here is to achieve a ranking of all the proposals. Since not every evaluator will have seen every proposal, there is still a chance before that meeting to read the other proposals of interest. In this meeting, the highest ranking proposals are put to special scrutiny, because there could be objections by other evaluators who had been critical in their reviews. Important is that the same standard is applied in the overall scoring for each proposal.

I think that this process works quite well and is very well taking into account the difficulties in achieving a fair scoring. I noticed that over the past 10 years the scoring had been somewhat simplified: in 2000 there were 5 criteria, with different weighting. The latest evaluation I attended, only had 3 criteria, with equal weighting.