2009 Conference Plan

Here my list of conferences I would like to attend:

• 3DTLC - 3D Training, Learning and Collaboration Conference - is foreseen to become the new leading event for businesses seeking to maximize the added value of their use of virtual worlds. I'd like to give a talk about my research and maybe find subjects for experiments and collaborators. Washington D.C., USA, 20 - 21 April 2009 --> http://3dtlc.com

• FaVE '09: International Conference on Facets of Virtual Environments - This conference provides a venue to research related to the many facets of persistent virtual environments. I would like to present my semiotics-based framework for group interaction in 3D virtual environments, useful both for theory and practice. Berlin, Germany, 27 - 29 July 2009 --> http://www.fave-conference.org/

• ECSCW 2009: European Conference on Computer Supported Co-operative Work - among others, the conference has a focus on new (interaction) technologies for CSCW and new computer-enabled forms of organisation. I'd like to present a poster (or video/demo) showing results of my first virtual world collaboration experiment. Also, the doctoral colloquium would be interesting. Vienna, Austria, 7 - 11 September 2009 --> http://ecscw09.org/

2009 conferences

Here a list of ( :-P more or less) interesting (for me, almost) conferences with the link to their homepage:

• AIED 2009: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education - Building Learning Systems that Care : From Knowledge Representation to Affective Modelling. Brighton Thistle Hotel, Kings Road, 6 - 10 Jul 2009 --> http://www.aied2009.com
  

• UMAP 2009: User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization - concerns interaction with systems that acquire information about a user (or group of users) to be able to adapt their behavior. Trento, Italy, 22 - 26 June 2009 --> http://umap09.fbk.eu

• i-KNOW 2009: International Conference on Knowledge Management - to bring a broad array of these perspectives together, to learn from each other and to jointly find promising ways ahead for the future. Graz , Austria, 3 - 5 September 2009 --> http://i-know.know-center.tugraz.at/

As extra European conference I will be interested in:

• HCI International 2009 - International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: international forum for the dissemination and exchange of up-to-date scientific information on theoretical, generic and applied areas of HCI. San Diego, CA, USA, 19 - 24 July 09 --> http://www.hcii2009.org
  

And to finish, merry Xmas to all of you

E-Therapy

Maybe you already know about this, but I thought it'd fit in here..

This German article reports that online therapy is being more and more used, and will get really important/popular in the future, with the assumption that mental and neurological problems will become more and more important as causes for illnesses.
It is reported that in some countries services like E-Couch already are paid for by health insurance companies. Other services are called Beating the Blues, FearFighter, OCFighter, Shuti, Moodswings and Panic Online.

By the way, also 3D virtual environments are used for therapy, a good example is treating phobia by exposure therapy.

"Why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex and information appliances are the solutions"

Creeping featurism, is what I called this problem in 1988, the symptom of the dreaded disease of featuritis. By 1992 the word processing program Microsoft Word had 311 commands. Three Hundred and Eleven. That’s a daunting amount, more than I dreamed was possible when I wrote my 1988 book. Who could learn over three hundred commands for a single program? Who would want to? Who would ever need them? Answer: nobody. They are there for a lot of reasons. In part, they are there because this one program must cover the whole word, so, in principle, for every command, there is at least one user somewhere who finds it essential. In part, thought, they are there because the programmers dreamed them up; if it was possible to do, it was done. But the most important reason is for MARKETING. My program is bigger than yours. Better it can do more. Anything you have, I have too, and more besides.

Creeping featurism may be the wrong term: perhaps it should be called rampant featurism. Do you think 311 commands is a lot for a word processing program? Five year later, in 1997, that same word processing program, Microsoft Word, had 1033 commands. One Thousand Thirty three.


Donald Norman, The invisible Computer, The MIT Press,
Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1998, p.80-81.