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IHL Projects

By admin • Jul 20th, 2010 • Category: Annoucements
Public Sector Call Research Projects
 
Principal Investigator Title Description
Alex Nareyek (NUS) Automated storyplanning for games Today’s games usually feature a statically scripted storyline just like other passive media. A whole new category of user experiences and a new generation of games can be created by incorporating real-time storytelling. This project aims to create such automated storytelling, taking building blocks from the designers/artists/writers, like set elements, lighting models, characters, behaviors and other script elements, and automatically combining these into a storyline for the player, dynamically modifying it in response to the player actions, always striving for an optimized user experience
Roberto Dillon (NYP) M-EDGE – Music-emotion driven game engine M-EDGE (“Music-Emotion Driven Game Engine”) is an innovative project merging together music, games, physical computing and cognitive science research. The aim of the project is to assess and further investigate cognitive science topics to design and develop an interactive and emotionally-aware musical game engine that enables a completely new experience within music related video games. Using this engine as a development tool, game developers will be able to build content on top of it where players are not limited to control their actions in the virtual world by using standard interfaces, like a mouse or keyboard, but also to directly affect the game flow by expressing emotional content through the playing of a real musical instrument.
Lawrence Wong (NUS) Life spaces Place Oriented Embodied Media (POEM) This proposal takes a use-scenario approach to define technical requirements for an IDM-enhanced infrastructure that will support a multitude of IDM applications. The application research will involve studying new methods of user engagement and the influence of such pervasive IDM-enhanced infrastructure on social and cultural user experience. A POEM System Architecture (PSA) that will enable multiple cameras to map the real physical world into a 3D virtual world will be developed. This virtual world can then be gradually augmented with a rich plethora of different media types, and sniplets of other user inputs to create a rich and diverse virtual world that has parallels to the physical world. Imagine, a student walking through the halls of NUS, and at the same time LiSSA enables his avatar in the virtual world to do the same.
Dong Jin Song (NUS) Systematic design methods and tools for developing location aware, mobile and pervasive computing systems “On-the-Move” computing systems have become increasingly distributed, dynamic and pervasive. The complex system state and dynamic interfaces of software components and their location-based concurrent interactions create challenging research problems in system specification, design and development. The context-aware IDM application systems need sound design techniques, toolkit and development methodology to support rapid programming. The project aims to develop the first set of systematic methods and tools that can improve the quality and reliability for context aware pervasive computing systems development.
Jon Quah (NTU) Smart proximity based service agents on mobile handsets This project will create a multimedia-based application that runs on mobile handsets and are location and context sensitive, i.e. information pushed to and presented on the handsets changes according to the user’s location. The objective is to create an information-rich environment that enables user to learn, work and play anywhere, anytime with the aid of a mobile handset, thus improving quality of life.
Sam Ge Social robots: breathing life into machines Social robotics is the study of robots that are able to interact and communicate between themselves, with humans, and with the environment, within the social and cultural structure attached to its role. As the society goes “grey” and “digital”, social robots are envisioned as indispensable parts of our lives. Currently available “social robots” are clearly inadequate in terms of interactivity, intelligence, mobility and social skills. The main aim of this project is push the boundaries of what is meant by, and what can be expected of an intelligent social robot, by advancing and strengthening the scientific and technological backbone of intelligent robotics and control, as well as intuitive human-robot interaction techniques within a social context and considering the different needs of individuals.
Seah Hock Soon (NTU) Computer assisted cel animation, CACAni 2.0 Traditional animation is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Animators have to spend hours at the drawing board tracing, sketching, and coloring each frame of an animation sequence, which can easily take more than 60% of the entire production time. This project aims to build Singapore’s technical capabilities in developing original and cutting-edge 2D and 3D animation. The research covers three crucial procedures in the animation production pipeline: i) how to represent 2D drawings and 3D models using novel and advanced mathematical models in an easy, fast and transparent way; ii) how to animate 2D drawings and 3D models in a fast, intuitive and interactive manner and; iii) how to efficiently render the images. The new technologies developed will facilitate original content development and new genres of animation and games. Also, Singapore can increase the productivity of animation production, improving the competitiveness of locally-based companies and thereby attracting more overseas investments.
Tai Xue-cheng (NTU) Surface construction, compression and encoding for IDM applicationsWebsite We are witnessing an explosion of digital data. To make sense of such an immense amount of information, being able to extract what is relevant and meaningful is important. Visualization allows people to comprehend data rapidly and efficiently, and surface processing is a key element of visualization. This project will develop new methods for tackling various fundamental problems in surface processing. Results of the research could be applied to visualization for medical imaging, numerical simulation and scientific computing as well as video gaming, virtual reality, electronic commerce, and many other applications in computer vision.
Gan Woon Seng (NTU) Next generation of directional sound beam with bass enhancement and beamsteering to support new interactive digital media applicationsWebsite The directional sound system is indispensable to companies and consumers who wish to have a private listening space. It is useful for projecting personalized audio message to the targeted audience in restaurants, museums, art galleries, libraries, shopping malls. This project will improve the performance of the directional sound system by studying beam formation and beamsteering in air. The research findings will enable the next generation of directional sound system to gain wider acceptance in applications such as directional billboard, multilingual teleconferencing, interactive gaming and home entertainment.
Chua Tat Seng Interactive media search Current search engines are designed to return rank lists of documents, often with low accuracy. The ability to perform precise media search moves us a step from the current document retrieval, to information retrieval and question-answering. Precise search is especially important for vertical domains, such as the local, finance, medical, legal and informational video searches. This project aims to develop precise media search technologies for both text and video contents on both the intranet and the Web. In the short run, the project will deliver a question-answering (QA) system on the Web, where users can ask any question and get exact answers on information available on Wikipedia. The project will also develop QA systems for medical domain, and image/video datasets. The long-term research goal is to develop a unified multimedia framework for precise interactive media search. The project will open up a variety of interactive media search applications and business opportunities.
Zhou Suiping (NTU) Towards highly interactive distributed media environmentWebsite This project will investigate some fundamental techniques in creating highly interactive, distributed media environments. An example of such an environment is a virtual world, where thousands of avatars, owned by real users, roam. To facilitate meaningful interactions among the users in such a media environment, the two basic QoS (quality of service) requirements are the interactivity and consistency of the environment. Maintaining interactivity and consistency in a large-scale Internet-based environment is a challenging task due to the large message transmission delay over the Internet and the huge resource demands of the environment. In this project, we aim to solve some fundamental problems in this regard. We do foresee the needs and potential of such media environments in the near future of the fast-growing online game industry. In particular, our results will be beneficial to a broad range of applications, e.g., massively multi-player online games, the modeling and simulation of emergent situations such as earth quakes or terrorist attacks in urban environments.
Kay O’Halloran (NUS) Events in the world – developing & using interactive digital media for multimodal discourse analysis (MDA)Website Effective practices for managing information in text-based documents have been developed, but not for images, video texts and interactive internet sites. Spoken and written language, static and dynamic visual imagery, music and sound combine to create meaning in such internet sites; a situation that clearly requires theoretical concepts and analytical approaches extending beyond traditional approaches to text analysis. This project aims to develop prototype software to help solve the problem of data analysis, search and retrieval of multimedia texts and internet sites by integrating social science approaches to multimodal discourse analysis with computer science approaches to multimedia analysis. The software will be used for the analysis and interpretation of events across technologies (print, electronic and digital) and cultures in the world. The research project will increase our understanding of cross-cultural constructions and evaluations of issues and events, a critical agenda for government, business and industry.
Ravi Sharma (NTU) Business models for interactive digital media services and policy implications for regulators While networks, content and services, as well as regulatory regimes have made adjustments to the changes brought about by new information technology, business models are only beginning to re-engineer themselves to the current realities of (dis-)intermediation. This project attempts to understand the emerging IDM eco-system, calibrate this understanding with industry, and provide perspectives for policy makers to grow the industry. More specifically, the goal is to guide regulators on policy issues concerning industry development, infrastructure investments in the eco-system and creating a competitive market.
Lonce Wyse (NUS) New music and the networked ensembleWebsite When people make music together, they take their cues from the sounds and gestures made by one another. Today, composers pushing the frontiers of new electronic and computer musical instruments are experimenting with new ways for musicians to interact with each other. Consider the “telephone” game where a message is conveyed from one person to another in a chain and eventually vocalized aloud by the last person. This methodology can also be adopted to create music, i.e. where one person generates music material that is transformed by a series of musicians before being finally played to the audience. This project aims to enable people to collaborate and interact in new ways to create new kinds of music. This can be achieved by developing computational and physical interface technologies that allow composers to explore interaction itself as a component of their music, and by providing musicians with new technologies for expanding the way they communicate with one another. As one, feedback between musicians in the form of synthetic graphics and haptics (touch) displays will be explored for their musical value.
Lim Ee Peng (SMU) Trust Prediction in Co-Space: A Data Driven Approach This project is about deducing the trust worthiness of users in cyber commerce, and making this trust information available to interested parties. Trust prediction will be performed on real data and trust will also be propagated to address the sparse data problem (not enough user trust data in each virtual space). The evolution of trust will be studied, and trust integration across virtual spaces will also be addressed.
Andy KHONG Wai Hoong (NTU) Next Generation Human-Machine Interface This project is about turning objects that we encounter in daily life into computer interactive interfaces. We can tap on a table, on a glass panel, on a book, and the location of the tapping will be precisely determined by a set of low cost piezoelectric sensors scattered across the surface. Ultrasonic transmitters and receivers will also be considered. This is a very challenging problem compounded by the complicated transmission medium which can be non-homogeneous. The goal is to achieve pervasive connection to the digital world.
Chen I-Ming (NTU) Replicating and processing of human body motion for participatory interaction in co-space This project is to develop a suit with built-in sensors to measure human body motion. The sensors are based on Optical Linear Encoder (OLE) technology. An interesting application is co-space yoga coaching through the internet – the yoga student postures are measured and compared to the perfect postures in the database. The yoga student will be corrected of any incorrect posture through vibro-tactile actuators.
Deepu Rajan (NTU) Attentional Mechanism for Video Retargeting This project is about automating the function of zooming in to interesting regions in video frames according to level of interest that will be consistent with the human visual attention mechanism. Visual saliency from both creator and consumer point of view will be defined and applied to guide the attention process. Image or video will be zoomed and resized based on the attention cues while not completely neglecting the non-attention areas to preserve the context and semantics. Video summarization, video collage generation algorithms will also be developed.
Dion Goh (NTU) MARGE: Layering Gaming Interactions in Mobile Content Sharing Environments This project is to enrich the mobile content sharing experience by injecting gaming elements into the sharing process. This will include weaving a storyline into the mobile content sharing scenario, as well as leveraging on location based technology and services.
Ooi Beng Chin (NUS) Structure-Aware Data and Query Modeling for Effective Information Retrieval over Heterogeneous Data Sources in Co-Space The current database structures and query languages are not efficient for heterogeneous data (text, images, video, audio). This project seeks to find a new data modeling method for such heterogeneous data, and design a query language that is more powerful than keyword search and yet very easy to use. Visualization interface and results ranking will also be investigated.
He Ying (NTU) Geometry Videos: Exploring Highly Detailed Motion Data in Co-Space This project is about the use of conformal geometry for shape analysis and motion data. Conformal geometry maps a geometrical shape into 3 canonical shapes: sphere, Euclidean plane, hyperbolic disk. The resultant mapping allows higher compression ratio (lossless) for motion data compared to the conventional case when shapes are represented using polygonal meshes. Merging algorithms for 3D scans and surface completion algorithms will also be developed.
Tan Ah Hwee (NTU) Agent-Augmented Co-Space: Growing cognitive autonomous agents for context-aware personalized experience in co-space This project is to develop autonomous avatars to populate the virtual worlds. Avatars with cognitive capabilities will be active in knowledge acquisition, provide situation awareness and context aware information services. The core technology will be based on self-organizing neural models. Avatar behavior will also be profiled in terms of memes, which is a set of cultural attributes like beliefs, values, etc.
Xu Dong (NTU) Next Generation Annotation Techniques for Consumer Photos and Videos This project is to build a system for users to organize their personal photos and videos. Advanced concept mining/detection will be incorporated into the annotation, organization and search process. Face recognition algorithms will also be developed to help annotation.
Olga SOURINA (NTU) Emotion-based personalised digital media experience in Co-Spaces This project is to build a system for users to organize their personal photos and videos. Advanced concept mining/detection will be incorporated into the annotation, organization and search process. Face recognition algorithms will also be developed to help annotation.
Yan Shuicheng (NUS) Visual cloning towards semantics and privacy This project is about taking a video stream and transforms it into graphical scene representation thereby protecting the privacy of the subjects in the scene. 3D physical space will be captured using depth cameras, and computer vision techniques will be used to recognize gender, estimate age, and perform facial expression recognition of arbitrary facial pose. Pattern recognition algorithms will also be developed to detect human body, dog, cat and other common objects so that they can be replaced by the corresponding graphical objects. Group activity analysis will also be done through object tracking and optical flow analysis.
Alexei Sourin (NTU) Visual and haptic rendering in Co-Space Traditional means of representing geometrical shapes, visual appearance and physical properties consume great amount of storage space. Their representation is also not invariant to the final rendering platform.
Mark Chavez (NTU) Cinematics and Narratives: creating stories within real-time visual toolsets This project is to leverage on advances in interactive games and apply the techniques to movie making (for movie directors) and movie appreciation (for audience). For movie making, it allows movie directors to create rich personality and emotional state, and to mix characters and visual effects to enrich story narratives. For audience, it allows audience to affect the storytelling process / outcome
GAMBIT Research Projects & 13 Games
 
Principal Investigator Title Description
Anthony Fang (NUS) & Jovan Popović, Russ Tedrake (MIT) Control of Active Characters in Physically Based Games Lifelike animation requires dynamic interaction between characters, objects, and their environment. These effects can be generated automatically with physically based simulations, but proper controls are needed to animate characters that move realistically and that accomplish tasks in spite of unexpected disturbances. The project aims to design controls needed for animation of characters in physically based games. The controls will be plausible, directable, and fast.
Lonce Wyse (NUS) & Eitan Glinert (MIT) Audio Games While extremely popular with the mainstream market, video games have not fared nearly as well with the disabled as few games meet accessibility requirements. This project proposes to create best practice guidelines and prototypes of visually impaired accessible games. These deliverables will explore the use of novel audio and interface techniques, and focus on innovative multiplayer elements. The resulting materials will have meaningful outcomes in multimodal and accessible user interfaces, and game genre development.
Alex Mitchell (NUS), Nick Montfort, Clara (MIT), Fernández-Vara (MIT) Tools for Telling: How Game Development Systems Shape Interactive Storytelling Throughout almost the entire history of video and computer gaming, games have been created using a variety of development systems and platforms. While software engineering measures have been developed to help determine how efficient these systems are, there have been few inquiries into how they influence game development more deeply. This project considers how development systems and platforms constrain, enable, and influence game development, focusing on interactive storytelling in gaming. This will allow developers to more consciously shape their production process, to better bring powerful story elements across media, and to develop new game forms and genres. This could help to bring story-based games back into today’s video gaming arena on a large scale.
Golam Ashraf (NUS), Fredo Durand (MIT) Computational Aesthetics: Shape Psychology in Character Design The impact of character design can be paraphrased as the alignment of artist-intent and audience-perception of key character features (e.g. traits, role, and actions). Trained artists are usually able to express these key features through their design skills and detailed study of their subject. The importance of skill and artisanship serves as a natural deterrent to user-generated character design. Our goal is to capture expert domain knowledge and help novices create impactful characters in an intuitive and simple manner. We want to do better than the existing 10,000 slider character generator by creating an informed higher-level UI that quickly achieves unique and targeted results. The outcomes should have a direct impact on entertainment and user experience. They fit well into the currently popular themes of user-generated content and customizable entertainment.
  AudiOdyssey An experimental computer game designed to be accessible to both the visually impaired community and mainstream gamers. The user stars as Vinyl Scorcher, an up-and-coming DJ, on his quest to get club patrons dancing. Swinging the Nintendo Wii controller to the beat, Vinyl lays down the various component tracks of a song, and keeps the party jumping.
  Backflow A cross between a casual-style action game and a multiplayer strategy game for mobile phones. In the game you take control of the waste disposal infrastructure for a city. It’s your job to make sure each type of waste goes to the right place.
  The Illogical Journey of Orez It employs game design and educational principles to enhance media literacy and improve the intuitive understanding of complex middle-school (secondary school) math concepts. The challenge: develop puzzles that give players hands-on experience with the concepts of addition and subtraction of positive and negative numbers, using real world examples instead of numbers.
  TakeOut! A multiplayer delivery game where you compete against your friends to get the highest score. Whoever can pick up the most items and get them delivered before time is up is the winner. Choose from 5 exciting characters, each with their own abilities and speed combinations.
  TenXion An asymmetric multiplayer third-person shooter designed to assist with artificial intelligence research. One player controls a robot fighting to escape a prison and his mutant captors, and other players control mutants trying to bring the robot down. The robot wins by reaching the exit to the level; while the mutants win if the robot is destroyed before it escapes.
  Wiip A PC-based casual game which explores the concept of interactivity through usage of an expressive physical interface such as the Nintendo Wii controller. In this single-player action game, you swing your Wiimote like a whip to tame your animals.
  Picopoke An interpretive Facebook photo game revolving around weekly challenge rounds, involving fulfilling challenges by taking photos and voting to determine winners. The core research idea is to create a persistent multiplayer game which encourages players to get away from the computer and in turn, share lived experiences.
  Mūzaïc An online social network game for Facebook designed for all kinds of players but made accessible to the visually impaired. This is a variation of the AudiOdyssey project that was done in 2007.
  Gumbeat An experimental, light strategy 2D Flash game to illustrate that it is possible to make a commercial game about political oppression. The main research objectives are to create a stealth game in a casual setting and to produce an engaging and fun game with a serious purpose.
  Akrasia A single player game that applies the game design approach suggested in the paper published at the MIT: Games about LOVE and TRUST: Harnessing the Power of Metaphors for Experience Design by Doris C. Rusch and Matt Weise. The game applies this research approach by tackling the abstract concept ADDICTION to make it tangible with the help of metaphors.
  Phorm A 3D puzzle game developed to support a research paper in the ACM SIGGRAPH conference proceedings which centers on automatic rigging and the animation of 3D characters. The team has created a game that allows players the freedom to fully customize their characters (known as free-form modeling).
  Oozerts An educational puzzle game prototype developed for the Nintendo DS. The prototype is designed to show that the use of the visual and procedural nature of video games can be used to capture the essence of mathematical principles.
  MokiCombat A 3D game designed to show that the gaming technology can take a step further into developing a platform that supports skinned physically simulated and kinematically animated characters. The research goal of the game is to demonstrate how the physics can help to improve the dynamism and realism of the game.
     
CSIDM Research Projects (Proposed)
Principal Investigator Title Description
Ng Hwee Tou (NUS), Zong Chengqing (CASIA) Dialogue, discourse and translation with application to language learning The long term vision is to enable computers to engage in dialogs with humans in learning a second language. To make progress towards this long term vision, this project will engage in basic research in dialog and discourse, as well as build a prototype system that makes use of translation for language learning.
Lawrence Wong (NUS), Wu Jiankang (CASIA) Wearable sensor networks for language learner’s gesture recognition and localisation Ubiquitous tracking and recognizing human movement has been a very important research topic for the last 5 years as MEMS sensors become available. The applications include IDM (games, mixed reality, interactive learning, animation and film special effects), medical care and rehabilitation, athletic training, and navigation. The proposed research will develop fundamental theory and methods for the tracking of a language learner’s movement, recognizing the gesture and body language, finding the location, and provide information and context for the creation and animation of the corresponding avatar of that learner in the Interactive and Immersive Language Learning scenario.
Mohan Kankanhalli (NUS), Huang Qingming (CASIA) Affective video analysis and retrieval As a newly developed multimedia analysis technique, affective video content analysis, taking advantages of both psychological knowledge and computer science, can detect the high level affects contained in the video. Thus the applications based on affective video content analysis are more consistent with human abstract thinking and cognitive process and usually allow for novel features. Some affective analysis based applications, such as Personalized TV, affective abased music retrieval and so on, have already shown a promising future. Combining affective video content analysis into Multilanguage learning environment will not only realize the automatic affective based video analysis, classification and retrieval, what is more, since the affective state of learners are closely related with the learning efficiency, affective video content analysis will help adjust their affective state and improve the learning experience and efficiency. Since the affections, emotion and feeling contained in the videos are independent of the language, affective video content analysis will not be limited by the diversity of videos’ languages. Consequently, affective video content analysis will be very suitable and capable for video analysis for Multilanguage learning environment.
     
8 IDM in Education Research Projects and 6 Future School Projects
Principal Investigator Title Description
Kim Beaumie (NIE) Serious Immersion and Embodied Learning: Traces of Dinosaurs in Earth System Science Immersive Virtual Environment: To develop an immersive IDM environment to support learning of Earth system science at the secondary levels.
Looi Chee Kit (NIE) Flexible Collaboration for Interactive WhiteBoard (IWB) Classrooms Learning of the Future: To adopt a design research approach to using Group Scribbles in the teaching and learning of Mathematics, Science, English and Chinese Language in order to develop point-at-able models of practice for scaling up across more schools in Singapore.
Alex Ong (RP) The Creation of Innovative Educational Environments exploiting Contextualized Interactive Augmented Reality Technologies Learning of the Future: To create new educational environments exploiting contextualised interactive Augmented Reality technologies within the academic and sports coaching domains.
Tan Kim Cheng (TP) Effectiveness of 3D Simulation-Based Learning for Polytechnic Level Engineering Students Learning of the Future: To construct an instructional model of 3D Interactive Simulation-Based Learning for a polytechnic engineering module, Machining Technology, and measure its effectiveness.
Looi Chee-kit (NIE) Leveraging Mobile Technology for Sustainable Seamless Learning in Singapore Schools Learning of the Future: To design learning environments with mobile technologies that will support primary school children in acquiring scientific inquiry process skills, mathematical understanding and language skills.
David Higgitt (NUS) Promoting Geospatial Literacy and Environmental Awareness with Participatory GIS Digital Literacies & Modalities of Representation: To develop the GIS infrastructure that will enable a problem-based learning initiative in participatory GIS (PPGIS) to foster students’ geospatial literacy.
Chee Yam San (NIE) Trans-contextual Learning: Student Learning with Mobile Devices in a Persistent-world Game to Construct Meaning and Identities Educational Games: To investigate how a multiplayer, persistent-world game, played over time and across space on mobile devices, can be successfully designed and used to support learning goals.
Chee Yam San (NIE) Legends of Alkhimia: Fostering Authentic Learning of Chemistry within Fictionalized Game Environments Educational Games: To design and develop a chemistry role-playing computer game that supports the authentic learning of basic chemistry at the secondary levels.
Beacon Primary Envisioning the Future, Varied Perspectives Beacon Primary leverages technologies to bring about engaged learning and to create a stimulating learning experience for pupils.  Pupils will extend their learning beyond knowledge, skills and values to grow the ability to envision for the future and contribute to make a difference. Highlights include the diverse digital learning spaces and innovative key programmes.
Canberra Primary School Empowering the Future Today Canberra Primary School’s proposed six-year Canberra Experience comprises three key programmes – Discoverer, Global Learner and Attuned Learner. Each key programme will be designed to deliver the national curriculum and 21st century skills through collaborative knowledge building-based pedagogies and assessment. These pedagogies include Experiential Learning, Inquiry-Based Learning, Cognitive Apprenticeship and Human Dynamics-Based strategies.
Crescent Girls’ School Empowered Learners While the national ‘O’ Level curriculum forms the core content, the distinctive features in the curriculum of FS@CGS are the integration of the subject disciplines, use of learner-centric teaching approaches, deployment of multiple assessment modes, and the infusion of 21st century skills to produce ‘world-ready’ youths.
Hwa Chong Institution A Passion-Driven and Borderless Learning Institution The HCI programme aims to combine technology with new ways of learning to create educational value.  This is achieved by creating opportunities beyond the school’s physical campus at Bukit Timah, so that learning transcends boundaries between subjects, classrooms, schools, countries and cultures.
Jurong Secondary School Networked Learning Community Teaching and learning in various subjects will be anchored on JSS’ unique brand of problem-based learning, called Problem-Based Learning-Authentic Learning (PBL-AL). Besides content knowledge, students learn various life skills, such as critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, and communication skills.
School of Science and Technology   Adopt innovative teaching approaches and the use of learning spaces that fully leverage on ICT to bring about engaged learning for the students.
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