The KTH HCI group is part of the school of computer science and communication at KTH (Swedish Royal Institute of Technology). This group is deeply connected to a number of important partners included the Interactive Institute described in detail previously. The Group is engaged in a number of ‘high level’ EU funded research projects that are often distributed over a range of other institutions.
The group lists its research focus as including; ‘Computer Support for Writing and Reading processes, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, User oriented design and development, Perceptual user interfaces, Human-Robot interaction and Connected Communities.
As is the case with many of these Swedish institutes the work here is often developed in collaboration with a cluster of partner institutes. I would guess that this has to do with EU funding structures and it would be interesting to work this out in more detail. This appears quite divergent from the approach in Australia where Networks and Centres generally remain tied to the infrastructure/bureacracy/authorship(?) of a university. This might have something to so with concerns of IP and commercialization and the universities need to create/defend potential revenue streams form external claims – I admittedly no very little about this and maybe someone can put me straight on this. It is quite common to find the web sites for these institutes link to independent domains named according to the research project rather than the principle partners. This is a small point but I’d be surprised to see that kind of open proliferation of projects in Australia – we might say plenty about how this effects the development not only of the Australian research ecology but also the Australian domain space – what was potentially a useful a vibrant neigbourhood has become a stagnant pool of commercial and institutional sites.
Research projects are many and varied but I’ll include a brief overview of some that are relevant to this project. These and an extensive list of others can be found here;
Cogniron: The cogniron project is a robotics and HCI project aiming at the development of a robotic companion for the home. The aim is to build a robot capable of adapting to context, not delimited to a particular function but capable of learning about the environment and learning to interact with the inhabitants of that environment.
The results of the project’s first two years 2004 & 2005 are printed here.
The research publications are published via a wiki – this includes publications from all of the projects partner organizations.
Inscape: Concerned with the development of a Inscape – a multimedia publishing system that allows writers and developers to collaborate on Interactive Storytelling projects. Inscape is developed to be inclusive in terms content types – both internally (supports 2d and 3d graphics production) and allows an open incorporation of interface and control devices. The software will not be available until 2009 (? – so at the moment this is vaporware)
Micole: Multimodal Collaboration Environment for the Inclusion of Visually Impaired Children
This project is particularly interesting. It seeks to address the problem presented to the visually impaired in an ocular centric educational environment where visualization is heavily depended upon in communicating often abstract relationships -particularly in the disciplines of maths and science. The project is exploring the use of haptic systems (magnetic force/resistance communicate realtionships) and audio systems and has had considerable successes in verifying that these systems work preferably when compared to the less dynamic modes of representation previously available (raised paper). Some interesting descriptions and results can be found here.
NEPOMUK – Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge – The Social Semantic Desktop;
This project is concerned with the development of a collaborative environment that is desktop based, semantic, and social. It appears to be an attempt to create a delicious/google.docs/bittorrent hybrid that is built into the desktop environment. An interesting idea but one must wonder whether the corporate sector is gassumping projects like this one – for better or worse. Nepomuk was destined to have an open API and to foster an active and collaborative environment in development as well as application – something Google is not likely to encourage or inspire.
MonAMI: Mainstreaming Ambient Intelligence.
From the MonAMI website;
‘The MonAMI (Mainstreaming on Ambient Intelligence) project will demonstrate how accessible and useful services can be delivered in mainstream systems and platforms. Services provided via digital television, mobile telephones and the Internet will support daily tasks and increase quality of life for elderly persons and persons with disabilities in their home environment.’ There is not any substantial publications or detail on this site. Once again the work under the project is distributed to a cluster of organizations.KTH is simply one partner working under this ‘funding stream’ which is operating under the eInclusion priority of the EU IT program.
There are many other projects listed for KTH – most of which are shared projects in which researcher based at KTH play a part.