Rodolphe Gelin Keynote Speaker – Humanoid robots for everyone

Professor William Latham – Chair

Dr. Steven Collins – Challenges Creating Human Interactive Virtual Environments for Games and Entertainment

Guy Davidson – Total War: Creating a Very Large Game

Dr. Henrietta Bowden-Jones – Internet addiction disorder: a modern illness

Professor Elisabeth Hill – Chair
Jed Ashforth – Project Morpheus; Bringing VR to the Living Room
Professor Nilli Lavie –  Brain interactive: The attention challenge
Professor Mike Sternberg – Interactive Modelling of Biological Macromolecules
Professor Jonathan Freeman – i2 media research: applying psychology to unlock value in the commercial world

Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie – Chair

Limor Schweitzer – 3D printable social robots

Professor Ajay Kapur – Building a Symbiotic Human/Machine Orchestra

Dr. Parashkev Nachev – Distributed psychophysics

Professor Robert Zimmer – Chair

Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink – Data as Design Tool

Dr. Jean-Christophe Baillie – Dual Universe

Rich Holleworth – Putting the man in the machine – an overview of performance capture at the Imaginarium

Atau Tanaka – Chair

Heather Kelley – Mind and Body: Engaging Humans with Play

Memo Akten – Data Dramatization

Dr. Freida Abtan – Dislocated Presence

Professor Mark d’Inverno – Creative Feedback

Since its creation in 2005, the objective of Aldebaran Robotics is to commercialise humanoid robots to assist people in their everyday life. As a first product, Aldebaran developed Nao, a 57cm humanoid robot, dedicated to man-robot interaction thanks to its numerous sensors and its embedded CPU.

From the very beginning Nao has been designed as a future mass market product and as a platform for innovative development by researchers and developers. As for the mobile phones, Aldebaran knows that the manufacturer of the hardware won’t be the only developer of the applications running on its robot. The robot will come with the powerful development tools proposed by Aldebaran. A new ecosystem of robotic application developer will grow around Aldebaran. This will be the way to offer the most relevant applications for each use of it.

In computer games and in movie special effects, we’re often striving to create as realistic a portrayal of a world as possible.

Historically, we’ve seen great improvements in the graphical representations of these worlds, even in real-time applications like computer games, fuelled by big advances in the hardware used to render the worlds and in the algorithms developed to simulate the surfaces, materials and lighting. In contrast, physically plausible motion, and in particular the simulation of human motion, has lagged behind. Even today we’re arguably still a long way off having truly realistic and adaptable virtual actors that behave plausibly in arbitrary contexts and that can convey emotional state in the support of a narrative or an interaction with the player. This talk will explore the challenges of simulating realistic virtual worlds and the characters that populate those worlds, drawing on experiences from building the Havok technology, the world’s leading physics simulation solution for games and entertainment.

The Total War franchise has developed over the past fifteen years from a twenty man project to a 250 man project. The challenges involved in creating such an absorbing title grow all the time: as we add more features and create greater depth, keeping it hanging together and
keeping everyone communicating is an ever-present problem.

In this talk I’ll describe how the team has grown, divided, grown again, divided again and grown again, while retaining the required vision to deliver our games to a discerning audience. I’ll look at how we have developed an ever-more detailed AI, improved fidelity of audio and visual representation, and collected an awful lot of data from our users along the way. I’ll finally take a glimpse at what may be coming next in gaming trends, and why I am still a VR sceptic.

The talk will introduce Internet addiction as a concept, defining it and describing both the international and the UK prevalences. There will be an outline of the different manifestations of IAD which can range from gaming to gambling online to porn addiction. The clinical
manifestations of the disease will be explained with a significant emphasis on the negative adverse consequences of each.

Lastly, treatment modes will be discussed and evidence-based outcomes explained. Preventative measures will be given to reduce the risk of developing the illness.