ISMAR 2011 in Basel: 26.-29.October

This year, the annual ISMAR Conference (International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality) will take place in Switzerland: in Basel, from 26.-29.October 2011. Since the time when this conference was founded 13 years ago, in 1998, as the "International Workshop on Augmented Reality (IWAR)", it has established itself as the world's leading conference on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

I was fortunate enough to have been involved for many years in this very successful conference, and I am also glad that this year I could help in selecting the papers to be published, as one of the 12 area chairs. Next Monday is the deadline for submission of the final camera-ready papers - there were many excellent submissions, but the review criteria were also very strict.

Unfortunately I will not be able to participate this year at ISMAR 2011, but I wish the organizers the very best! This shall be an excellent conference, and the participants will surely enjoy their attendance.

The EuroPLOT project

My colleague at LeedsMet, Prof Janet Finlay, has started her sabbatical year this September, and after that she will leave LeedsMet to pursue other things in life. I wish her the very best for this move!

As a result, I have now "inherited" leading the project "EuroPLOT", which she has initiated and led since last year. This project is devoted to the development of "persuasive learning objects and technologies" (PLOTs). LeedsMet's role is here to lead the project, to contribute to all the work packages, and to lead the dissemination activities. For this project, I began to expand some of the online activities: we set up a blogger page and a page on Facebook, and opened a Twitter account.

Since August 2011 we had a few internal meetings at LeedsMet, with the next teleconference meeting coming up next week. Every 6 months there is also a face-to-face meeting; the next one in November will take place in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic.

The project is moving towards the end of its first year, with two more years after that. It is funded by the European Commission Lifelong Learning Programme (Project ref: 511633-LLP-1-2010-1-UK-KA3-KA3MP).

Another academic year begins

It has been exactly to the date one year, when I posted my last entry into this blog here. For some reason, I did neglect writing here. Not because of a lack of things to report, but because I was busy with actually doing work, rather than writing about it. But I want to restart posting here, to give an account and an insight into my work at LeedsMet. As one year ago, also this year around this time the new semester is starting. Things are still quiet, next week the International students will come, a week after this all other students will have their induction.

Back for the New Semester

On 1.September I returned from my holiday into my office. The email inbox had closed due to overflow, so the first item to do was to save the emails with the largest attachments in a local folder.

Overall the first days after the summer break were quiet: no students are here yet, the campus appears empty. However, there is a lot of work going on in the offices: staff prepare their lectures and assignments for the coming semester, the time table is being setup, and the curriculum for the semester is finalised.

In order to cope with the variety of projects in which I am involved, I have devised a new method handling the often changing tasks, requirements, and ideas for those projects: somewhat based on "agile software development". It involves a patch of paper and handwritten notes. I hope to be able to create a software for this approach eventually.

Upcoming Presentations at Leeds Met Research Day

On 1. July, the Research and Enterprise conference for LeedsMet members of staff will take place at the Headingley Campus. I will give two workshops: in the morning I will talk, together with Prof Rod King, Prof Tony Parson, and Andrew Marran about the "Proof of Concept" fund, which has supported several projects at Leeds Met with the prospect of commercialisation. In the afternoon I will hold a workshop about the European FP-7 program and will describe what opportunities there are for research and development funding.

Preparing Major Bid

In recent weeks I have gathered momentum for preparing a major bid for funding, together with several partner institutions across Europe. This is quite an effort: the partners must be approached with an idea that is already more or less feasible, as a starting point for further discussions. Now the concrete milestones, work plan, and deliverables must be worked out in collaboration with these partners, and a consistent project schedule and a reasonable resource allocation must be developed before the deadline. A lot of work is still ahead in this...

Crossover Business Lab

I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in a great event which took place in Leeds from 25.-26.February 2010: the Crossover Business Lab. Frank Boyd had organised this event, with speakers who presented case studies and held workshops. One could learn a lot about business development and venture investing. This knowledge is crucial when setting up businesses and trying to commercialise some developments from within the university. The speakers were enthusiastic and conveyed very well the issues that businesses face when then move from one stage to the next.