Uh! It has been a while, i’m not writing here it’s a long time.
Tomorrow i will have my Doctoral defense in Florence, and i hope it will be fun!

Right after that i am going to donate blood for the thousands of wounded people in Abruzzo, Italy.
To them goes my thinking and prayer.

On tuesday i was invited by Frederic Kaplan at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) for a talk on Interactive Surfaces.
It has been a really interesting experience: the audience had precise questions about applications and technology. Besides the talk i had the chance to try WizKid live!
WizKid is a robot with social skills that features a novel interaction paradigm, combining robotics with a mid-air gesture interface called “halo”. Me and Frederic exchanged a lot of ideas about the project, the metaphors and the tech issues related to the “halo interface”, that in my opinion has the possibility to become widespread also in a number of other devices.
WizKid was exhibited at MoMa for three months, and it is now returning back to its swiss home (not on his own legs, at least for the moment ) to be upgraded and refined.
Thanks again to Frederic for the chance, and it was also very nice to meet again Nicolas Nova and talking about his experience as a veteran LIFT organizer.

My collaboration with Natural Interaction and iO is over.
I would like to thank Alessandro, Daniele and all the crew, It has been an intense year of work and breakthrougs.

I will continue my research on tabletop interfaces following the spark of the beginning: knowledge visualization.

Keep up the good work!

It seems that music from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra is stimulating my brain cells as it was not happening in some time… (Brian Eno is still unsurpassed).
I just found a citation from Jeffes, the orchestra founder:

"I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out ‘I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random’ and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a
nice orderly life, you kill off what’s most important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe your unconscious can just be. It’s acceptable there, and that’s how everybody is. There is an acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear in ourselves."

Very, very true.

My blog was.. deleted in mysterious ways yesterday.
Expect a slow backup, thanks to Bloglines and its persistent rss-feeds.
I love Bloglines!

Actually my summer holidays finished on the 16th of august, but i have to blog about the beautiful trip i did in France with Isabella.
We first went to Switzerland, i had to see the Goetheanum in Dornach, headquarter of the Anthroposophical Society of Rudolf Steiner. Impressive and threatening outside, warm and maternal inside.
We toured Basel, the in France to Dijon we entered bourgogne, hills, cows, lakes, more cows. After some days visiting villages (Avallon, Vezelay, Fontenay..) we went north to Fontainebleau, the city and nearby villages are surrounded by the second forest of France. I wanted to visit G.I.Gurdjieff‘s grave and find the place where he started his institute in the 20s: "Le Prieurè".
We then went to Chartres cathedral and headed south for more bourgogne, visiting Cluny and staying a couple of days in Taizè, the ecumenic prayer community.
What a summer :), Isabella took a lot of beautiful photos you can see here.

Back to work, more challenges ahead, ideas, code, experiments… what’s more, i am starting to get interested in Apple Macintosh history and internals.. gosh!
How is it to code for the Mac?

[There is a more updated post about tabulaTouch]
I am pleased to announce the birth of tabulaTouch, the multi-touch sensing platform for tabletop interaction i’ve been researching from the beginning of the year at Natural Interaction.
You may notice a similarity with Jeff Han’s project that made the net go "wow" in march.
Actually, my research started in the second part of 2005 following an intuition on the FTIR principle applied in Lightable,a pure design project that had nothing to do with interaction. I was assembling the table while Han’s paper came out, you know, ideas are in the air way before we catch them.
tabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape and
size, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.
The first case of study has beel tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach; we are planning to integrate it with GIS products.
We are also researching interesting media-handling templates that will bring the platform in public spaces, as well as ad-hoc environments, while iO Agency is engineering the hardware.
A very special thank goes to Viviana for her help in the initial hardware-related steps, and Fabrizio for his skills in electronics.
You can check a sample video in the NIRC projects page, as well as a longer version on YouTube.

The title is not an obvious one, but the perfect description of the double jet-lag effect after a 5 day trip to New York: i woke up in Italy on tuesday and i felt like i just had a very lucid and long dream!
The experience at CVPR has been smooth, some contacts, some interesting works (but mainly technical ones) and a cunning keynote talk by Alex Pentland on a new model of "social signaling".
This MIT guy talks about "really social software" that can monitor your body language (in his case he used speech) without looking into mean-making, but rather gathering social-signals that can be used to predict the outcome of any kind of negotiation (jobs, life, dating..).
The idea of people "mirroring" each other gesture, and learning from them, is not new to me and is appealing how this science breaks in, and is supported, by new technology.
The rest of New York has been a very interesting experience about being cheated by cab drivers, living park life, going downtown and bathing in memory at Ground Zero, Guggenheim museum and Zaha Hadid, MoMa and DaDa, dancing in Brooklyn at Max diner…
I had fun, and also felt like this journey gave me a real view from another world.
Back in the NIRC the work is developing fast, new prototypes are coming along, and Espresso (italian weekly magazine) wrote about us. Stay tuned!

Last weekend a took a break for visiting friends in London.
It has been a very relaxing journey, i’m becoming less excited in city events in general and looking for more serendipity, talks, meetings, coffee and tea while i try to relax my mind and listen to what’s inside.
It’s not such a mystical thing, but the feeling of "living on the top of my head", where only usual associations driven by external stimuli happen , is very strong these times.
I stayed at Padideh’s and Rudi’s beautiful flat in Holborn, went out for short trips (beautiful one to the London Silver Vaults), shops, university, books.. then i met my old friend Riccardo who’s living in the city for 6 months and plans a some-years stay. We had geeky talks, but also personal ones, Rick is one of my best
mirrored minds, i like talking with him. Also had the chance to see Meriel, who’s doing really well in London.
Keyspots: the video "What the bleep do we know", a US documentary on quantum physics effects on daily life, the only hand-made video about Mark Lombardi that Rudi managed to get from his gallery, and Babbage’s difference and analytical engine in the Science Museum.

Next week i will be in New York for the oral presentation of my paper at Vision for HCI Workshop. First time in the US ever!

They arrived…

But i’m not scared, or anything like that.

I feel them, but not in a negative way.
I feel more mature.
I feel more sensible.
I feel i know better how to use the next 30 years to come..

Happy birthday! good old MySelf..

Ste

My 2k5 starts with some news..

Ok, it seems like my "blogless life" is over..

This is my first blog post ever, so i am supposed to enter this new world with some kind of expectation or theory, no?
Well, i’ve always been fascinated by personal logs, from the old times of the .plan files in unix you could read with the finger command (my favourite was ID’s software lead programmer, John Carmack, writing on the Quake internals…).
So blogs have their fascination..
Anyway
they also have drawbacks, and one of the first observation is that they
somewhat promote a "digital divide" between the bloggers and the
blogless….

I’d like to provide the homeless a home, maybe a
temporary one, and design a blog that is not just for me.. but for some
blogless friend also. For this reason i decided not to use one of the
stable, full-featured, blog applications out there, but to assemble
mine… and its name will be MightyBlog )

Eh eh.. yes, i must admit that reiventing-the-wheel is one of my favourite sports, but i also have some goals related to this choice.
First of all i’m bringing on the developing of Portalia, a php application framework
i’ve been developing in 1 year and 1/2 and i’m using with success in
production environments. MightyBlog is just a lightweight app built on
top of it.
Then, i’d like to play with the technology (RSS, FOAF etc..) to learn about it, and i don’t learn by reading, but by coding (maybe this is a disadvantage.. maybe..).
Then i’d like to experiment some ideas
and common-sense tricks about CMS i’ve always wondered about, and i’d
like to have complete freedom of changing, implementing, throwing
away…
So, MightyBlog
will have quite an evolutionary approach and maybe will lead to some
interesting discoveries.. and maybe will be just reinventing the
wheel… but life is a challenge!
So, for now, don’t expect anything than an old .plan file on steroids
Just to finish up i’d like to thank Riccardo,
my good old blog-addicted friend, i’m learning everything i know of the
blogosphere (it’s written like that?) from him. And i also would like
to thank Lilia Efimova, the
knowledge management super-expert i’ve just met in Florence while
working for my master’s thesis project… i’ll talk about that later.
I’m here, and i’m Wet From Birth, just to put some rock’n roll..

Stefano