Two doctoral student positions in Media Technology at Södertörn University

INFO
Position 1. (Reference number 321/22/2010).
Profile towards work in the multidisciplinary study and development of metadata ontologies for participatory and collaborative web applications. Examples of such applications include Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, all of which rely, at least partially, of conceptual structure (ontologies) contributed by community members. The practices of accumulating metadata from the participants include tagging ("folksonomies"), profiling and annotation and use statistics, either explicitly or implicitly. The project arises from that conventional approaches to ontologies are typically conceptualized in the opposite direction, that is, a priori in a top-down and hierarchical fashion, and are thereby not ideally suited for the emerging forms of media. As an alternative to a priori ontologies, metadata ontologies that arise from the level of participants imply new types of media technologies for applications ranging from from knowledge-construction in collaborative environments to locative media, political communication, and scientific visualization. The overall goal is the conceptualization of what can be called interactive multi-perspective media. The work will involve formal modeling and software development aiming at working prototypes.

Position 2. (Reference number 322/22/2010).
Profile towards interaction design for innovative social and user-generated mobile media. We are already seeing how mobile terminals such as the iPhone and Android make it possible to create new forms of services that help people get in touch with each other and their surroundings. However, we also believe that the applications available today have hardly started to scratch the surface of the future possibilities of social, shared and user-generated content in a mobile setting. Taking a user-oriented starting point, the student will study mobile activities in order to design and test a variety of novel applications and services. These may be either implemented on standard mobile terminals, or on specialized devices including novel tangible and embodied interfaces. The focus is not on the technical implementation but on making the user experience on mobile devices richer and more enjoyable than it is today. This work will be carried out in close collaboration with the Mobile Life Centre, a research centre at Stockholm University with partners in the telecom industry.

Blog of locative media events, projects etc

A good site where to find information about locative media events, projects, environments etc:
http://locomogis.wordpress.com/

(See also the list of Categories in the right pane.)

Our future “Sixth Sense” is meta-technology

e-Eesti konverents 2009 "Tark mees taskus"

Today e-estonia conference "Wise man in pocket" is held in IT-college.  See more at http://www.riso.ee/et/koordineerimine/yritused/konverents_2009 . There is also livecast and skype chat avalable. 

Imagine Cup 2009

For those who wants to improve technological world...
Check out this article I discovered today. In Estonian, in English.
Related also to our current mash-up projects in Narrative Ecology Course.
The competition is unfortunately ended, but it would be interesting to follow this event.

Happy New Year

I wish you all a productive new year!

Mauri

Christmas readings!

Merry Christmas Readings to you all!

You don't need to wait for Santa! He has already brought quite a few
new IMKE-related books to the main library! Here is the list of
ordered books: http://imke.tlu.ee/imke_book_orders.xls/view . Use
ESTER to figure out whether they are actually there or yet to come: http://ester.nlib.ee/search
.

Mauri