Interactive Entertainment 2009 is on!!!

I am the PC Chair for IE2009. Below is the call for papers.

It should be an exciting conference. We should know the invited speakers by June!

========== IE2009: CALL FOR PAPERS ==========

IE2009: The 6th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment
14-16 December 2009, Sydney, Australia
http://ieconference.org/ie2009/

*** Important Dates ***
Paper Submission: 21 Aug 2009
Short Papers/Demo Submission: 1 Sep 2009
Author Notification: 1 Oct 2009
Camera Ready Papers: 1 Nov 2009
Conference: 14-16 Dec 2009

The Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, in
its sixth year, is a cross-disciplinary conference that
brings together researchers from artificial intelligence,
audio, cognitive science, cultural studies, drama, HCI,
interactive media, media studies, psychology, computer
graphics, as well as researchers from other disciplines
working on new interactive entertainment specific
technologies or providing critical analysis of games and
interactive environments.

Previous keynotes at Interactive Entertainment have included
the following people:

Kurt Busch, Krome Studios
Adrian David Cheok, Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore
Chris Crawford, http://www.erasmatazz.com/
Kenneth D. Forbus, Northwestern University.
Tracy Fullerton, University of Southern California
Ross Gibson, University of Sydney
Robin Hunicke, Electronic Arts
Elina M.I. Koivisto, Nokia Research Center
Mark Stephen Meadows / pighed, http://www.boar.com/
Madjid Merabti, Liverpool John Moores University
Scot Osterweil, MIT Education Arcade
John Passfield, Pandemic Studios
Mark Pesce, co-creator of the VRML
Caryl Shaw, Electronic Arts
Stacey Spiegel, I-mmersion
R. Michael Young, North Carolina State University

=== IE2009 will accept three kinds of submissions; all
accepted submissions will be included in the conference
proceedings.

Regular Papers - Maximum 10 pages. Regular papers represents
mature work where the work has been rigorously
evaluated. All regular papers will be peer reviewed for
technical merit, significance, clarity and relevance to
interactive entertainment.

Short Papers - Maximum 3 pages. Short papers represent novel
work in progress that may not be yet as mature as regular
submissions, but still represents a significant controbution
to the field. All short papers will be peer reviewed for
technical merit, significance, clarity and relevance to
interactive entertainment.

Demo Submissions - Maximum 1 page. Technical demonstrations
showing innovative and original approaches to interactive
entertainment. Demo papers will be reviewed by the
conference chair and the program chair for significance and
relevance. All demo presenters are responsible are
responsible for bringing the necessary equipment to the
conference and setting up their demo at the conference.

=== Topics include but are not limited to:

* Art, Design, New Media, Social games - games as art forms,
novel approaches to game design, mobile games and games that
leverage from social networking tools, convergence and
cross-platform media, cultural and media studies on games,
policy and legislative responses to games

* Artificial Intelligence: path-planning, camera-control,
terrain analysis, user-modeling, machine learning,
interactive storytelling, NPC modelling, planning and
general AI architectures.

* Games and Education: integrating games into traditional
computer science classes as well as novel ways of teaching
games, curriucula development at university, high-school or
middle-school levels, special games based programs for
attracting disadvantaged or underepresented groups.

* Game Design and Production - papers examining the game
production process from conception to design to prototyping
to bringing games to market

* Graphics, Animation and Interfaces - advances in graphics
techniques with applications to games, new animation
techniques, novel interfaces for games,
mixed-reality. augmented-reality applications, mobile games,

* Games Backend - papers that show advances in technical
fields that make games work, such as databases, networking,
cryptography, security, programming languages,


IE2009 will not accept any paper that, at the time of
submission, is under review for or has already been
published or accepted for publication in a journal or
another conference. This restriction does not apply to
submissions for workshops and other venues with a limited
audience.

Accepted papers will be published in the IE2009 conference
proceedings and also published in the ACM Digital
Library. Please see http://ieconference.org/ for papers from
previous years.

=== For the best student paper, IE2009 will waive the
registration fee and provide a scholarship of up to $500
towards travel adn accomodation expenses. There are also
limited spots for student volunteers, please contact
ie2009[at]ieconference.org if interested. Student volunteers
will get a discount on the registration

General inquiries should be forwarded to ie2009[at]ieconference.org

IE2009 Conference Chair: Malcolm Ryan, UNSW
IE2009 Program Committee Chair: Yusuf Pisan, UTS

To Kindle or not to Kindle

My friends who have Kindle from Amazon love it. My friends who have similar Kindle-like devices for reading books and research papers love it. Yet, I am still not sold on the electronic book reader.

First, Kindle is not an option if you are living in Australia. Yes, I can still purchase it, but I will end up missing out on lots of coll features. No impulse shopping, no easy download. Not worth it.

Second, Kindle costs $359 USD ($550 AUD). Not an insignificant expense. I need serious convincing for items over $500 AUD.

Third, I rarely re-read books so I feel it is wasteful to accumulate them on a book shelf. There are exceptions, but few, very few. Why do we have this crazy desire to own these pieces of paper if we will only look at it once?

Fourth, I love the public library. I visit the Stanton Library in North Sydney, Chatswood Library and Lane Cove Library on a regular basis. Every time I come out with a dozen or so books. Some books turn out to be crap, some turn out to be gems I would never have taught about buying. If I bought a book for $2.99, less than the price of coffee, I would still feel silly if it turns out to be crap. With the library, I feel free to explore and grab books on art, history, medicine, comics that I would never consider buying. Library makes me an explorer, the Kindle would make me a shopper.

Fifth, I do not see the attraction of having 100 books with me. I usually read a book every 2 weeks (if I am lucky). I do not need to carry around a year's supply of books with me just in case. Yes, the Kindle is as light as a book, but I am sure I would feel horrible the first time it gets dropped on concrete floor, coffee gets spilled on it or the screen gets scratched. I feel bad when this happens to paper books as well, but the replacement cost of a paper book si much smaller.

Sixth, Kindle is an amazing piece of technology. It is almost as easy to read as a book. It is almost as easy as a book to flip through. Search, annotation and other functionalities are also a bonus, but none of these is sufficient for me to give up paper based books.

So, there it is. No Kindle for me for reading books. At least not for 2009.

(I would seriously consider Kindle for reading thesis and other work that requires large amount of editing and taking notes, but not for pleaure)

ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference 2009

I am the tutorials chair for the The 7th ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference 2009. Check out the call for papers, art exhibition and live performances, workshops, tutorials and the graduate student symposium. See you at the Berkeley Art Museum, CA, USA on October 27-30, 2009.

Brief blurb on CC09:

The 7th Creativity and Cognition Conference (CC09) embraces the broad theme of Everyday Creativity. This year the conference will be held at the Berkeley Art Museum (CA, USA), and asks: How do we enable everyone to enjoy their creative potential? How do our creative activities differ? What do they have in common? What languages can we use to talk to each other? How do shared languages support collective action? How can we incubate innovation? How do we enrich the creative experience? What encourages participation in everyday creativity?

Keynote Speakers: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology & Management, Claremont Graduate University, USA; JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Director, Allosphere Research Laboratory, California Nanosystems Institute, USA; Jane Prophet, Professor of Interdisciplinary Computing, Goldsmiths University of London, UK

Learn the truth, challenge the myths

Start 2009 by absorbing some true facts and giving up on some myths. (Compiled by BMJ, The British Medical Journal. Articles at http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec17_2/a2769 and http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7633/1288

1. Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children
2. Suicides do not increase over the holidays
3. You do not lose most of your body heat through your head
4. Eating at night does not make you fat
5. You cannot cure hangover
6. You do not need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day
7. We do not use only 10% of our brains
8. Hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after death
9. Shaving hair does not cause it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
10. Reading in dim light does not ruin your eyesight
11. Eating turkey does not make people especially drowsy
12. Mobile phones do not create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

We made it around the Sun once again! Despite our efforts to destroy Earth's diversity, upset the weather system and use up all of its resources Earth has managed to complete its orbit the Sun yet again. Well, I guess Earth has been doing this for 4.54 billion years and we have only been around for the last 200,000 years.

Wishing you a healthy, happy, and peaceful 365 days. Make the best of it. None of these days are ever coming back!

Fluid Learning -- Maybe soon, but not yet

This entry started out as a comment to Fluid Learning, but grew long enough to warrant a blog entry of its own.

While I agree with the general message in Fluid Learning, Capture/Share/Open argument, I disagree with the examples in the article.

RateMyProfessors is a good start, and anecdotes about how people use it is interesting, but it has a long long way to go before it comes close to being reliable let alone authoritative.

Looking at a a couple of Universities:

MIT -- 13 CS professors rated, a total of 49 comments for CS professors. The most commented professors in all of MIT has only 36 comments. This is too low to be statistically accurate.

Stanford -- 33 CS professors rated, a total of 167 comments for CS professors. The most commented professors in all of Stanford has only 34 comments. Assuming each professor teaches a class of 30 every semester, these comments spread over the years is once again too small to be statistically relevant.

University of South Alabama -- This is currently the top rated university. The most commented professors in all of University of South Alabama has only 90 comments. It would be safe to assume that first year classes at University of South Alabama will have hundreds of students. The number of ratings is just too low to be meaningful.

Randy Bott from Brigham Young University is the "Top Rated Professor", but even he has only 197 ratings. Not sure how many students he teaches each semester, but this number is unlikely to be an accurate representation of the students' assessment.

While recording lectures has its uses, it does not change the basic process of learning. We have had books for a long time. What are books but compiled set of lectures, with pictures, comments, edited and improved over time. Lectures on the other hand vary immensely in quality as professors are prized for their research abilities and not necessarily for their oration. Lectures do not get practiced. Professors do not typically receive feedback on each of their performances. On top of all that, learning by listening is proved to be much harder than learning by reading. If you really want to learn something, you better stick to reading about it. Libraries have been sharing books long before youtube started video sharing.

Connections are not just important, but they are essential. For connections to be valuable, we must have something to contribute to the group. Connections alone are not sufficient if everybody in the group is relying on each other to "know stuff". Software industry has already discovered that you cannot replace 1 good programmer with 10 mediocre programmers. We are past the factory workers model. Connections are only meaningful when each individual has something to contribute.

Default Happiness Level

Research with identical and fraternal twins suggests that each of us is born with a particular happiness set point, inherited from our parents, that we are bound to return even after major positive and negative life events.

Lyubomirsky suggests that this genetic baseline makes up 50% of our level of happiness, while another 10% is due to circumstances and 40% due to intentional activities.

Here is a quick test taken from "The How of Happiness" to determine your happiness baseline, the 50% genetic component of your happiness.

Found a better version of the test that automatically calculates you score, click here to take the test

Maximum possible score is 7, the minimum score is 1.

Average score is about 4.5 to 5.5, depending on the group

College students tend to score lower (a bit below 5) than working adults and older retired people (who average 5.6)

What is your happiness baseline score?

Nonsymmetric flight prices

Los Angeles - Sydney return (17-26 Nov) is $821USD including taxes.

Sydney - Los Angeles return (17-26 Nov) is $1532USD including taxes.

Prices based on http://sidestep.com/ as checked on 14 Nov.

The distance between two points may be equal no matter which way you measure it, but going from Point-A to Point-B is sometimes much more expensive than the other way around.

As an Australian living in Sydney, making frequent trips to Los Angeles, these prices truly hurt!

Perception: University Professors

Are lecturers and professors at university well-off? The general perception is a big YES. In most cases, they have a job for life. They only teach couple of hours a week and that is only when the university is in session. They have flexible work-hours. They get to set their own research agendas and have lots of autonomy in their everyday work. It is "The Dream Job", or so it seems from the outside.

The article from The Chronicle of Higher Education provides some data on "The Dream Job". The figures are based on USA salaries, but I'd expect numbers to be similar for most countries: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i11/11a00101.htm

- From 1986 to 2005 salaries for Doctors have gone up 34%, salaries for Lawyers have gone up 18%, salaries for Engineers and Architects have gone up 5%, but salaries for Faculty Members have only gone up 0.25% (all figures adjusted for inflation)

- "From 1976 to 2005, the number of full-time college administrators (vice presidents and deans, for example), rose by 101 percent, while the number of full-time nonfaculty professionals (in student services, development, and information technology, for example) rose by 281 percent. Over the same period, the number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members rose by only 17 percent." -- Universities used to be filled with professors, now they are much more the domain of administrators and support services.

- From 1976 to 2005 " the number of part-time faculty members during those years rose by 214 percent." -- OK, so it is administrators, people in support services and casual-staff members. Of course, this also means that the remaining professors have taken on much more managing the casual-staff and adjuncts. The new Professor is more of an administrator than a teacher/researcher.

- The salaries for Australian universities are set by Enterprise Bargaining Agreements and can often be found online.

Associate Lecturer: 55-68K (depending on discipline, you need to spend 2-4 years as associate lecturer before going to the next level)
* apply for promotion to next level, most applications are successful, but disciplines differ *

Lecturer: 71-85K (usually takes at least 6 years)
* apply for promotion to next level, some applications are successful, but disciplines differ *

Senior Lecturer: 87-101K (usually takes at least 6 years)
* apply for promotion to next level, some applications are successful, usually takes multiple attempts *

Associate Professor: 105-116K (usually takes 4-6 years)
* apply for promotion to next level, few applications are successful, usually takes multiple attempts with multiple years in between*

Professor: 135K

In the best case scenario, to become a full Professor requires ~20 years on top of ~18-22 years of full-time formal education. Most academics in Australia retire as Lecturers or Senior Lecturers, some as Associate Professors and very few as Professors. There is no guarantee that you can continue to climb the ladder or will get promoted each time.

Compare these salaries to other professions with postgraduate degrees who have been working full-time in the same field for 20 years. According to  careerone.com.au in NSW

- HR Director 150-375K
- New accountants with 3 years of experience 63-70K, senior qualified accountants 175K+
- Architect 5-10 years, 60-100K
- Paralegal starting salary 55K, Senior Associate 200K, Salaried Partner 250K+
- Sales Rep 60K, Director of Marketing 180-220K

Compared to the average American (or average Australian), professors are still well-off, but no one else with as much education earns as little as they do!

Breaking into the Games Industry

Breaking into the Games Industry is not easy, but there are some good resources.

*  IGDA: http://www.igda.org/breakingin/resource_links.htm

*  Game Developer Magazine, Jul 2008; Vol.15, Iss.12; is the "Game
Career Guide" -- you can access electronic versions via UTS library
under "Game developer -- ProQuest 5000" database

* You should subscribe to the DLF mailing list, especially the
DLF-jobs list, if you have not done so already. Lots of good
discussion and jobs get announced there. http://www.dlf.org.au

* Read Gamasutra, Kotaku (Australia) and blogs from game designer and developers.

* If you want a job in Australia, visit http://www.tsumea.com/ and make a list of *all* Australian companies and start tracking them. The more you know about them, the better your chances are that you will be in the right position to put in an application.

* Subscribe to the Graphics and Games classes at UTS mailing list from
a nun-UTS email address to keep in touch with my occasional emails
which sometimes also have job announcements --
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gandgatUTS/

* There are some recruiters that specialize in recruiting for the games
industry, start contacting recruiters. It is in their interest to match you to a company.

* You need experience, but you cannot get experience until you get a job. Somewhat of a Catch-22, but you can 1) create mods; 2) put together an independent game with a small team; 3) participate in a GameJam; 4) contribute user-created content to games (both art and programming); and 5) create a resource for games (wiki, your own blog of slected articles, reviews of games, tips to user, etc)


If you want a job in Game Development, you will eventually get it, but it will take time and effort.