Hmm, I guess if blogger.com forgets my login between blog posts, despite the fact that I click “remember me” when I log in, then I’m not posting often enough. Tee hee. Oh well. 
I think I may be going to Sydney over summer… at least, that’s how I read this email. It’s a bit vague:
Hi Martin
We are currently in the process of finalising offers for the Taste of Research Summer Scholarship program.
In your application you selected KRR-9 as a preference which will be supervised by Maurice Pagnucco.
If offered a summer scholarship, could you please confirm your full time availability over the ten week period, and continued interest in this topic?
Subject to your confirmation and Faculty approval, the School would recommend that you receive the award.
There is some urgency, so your immediate response will be appreciated.
Skye
If it comes through, it will be lots and lots of fun… KRR-9 is this:
As computing devices become more common, affordable and miniaturised, one can imagine a future in which such devices are capable of adapting and responding to user needs by being aware of the user’s mental and emotional state. For example, if the computing device determines that the user is stressed, it adapts its behaviour to present information in a more terse manner whereas if it senses that the user is relaxed, the information can be presented in a more verbose way. These notions have led to the idea of empathic computing and affective computing.
This project aims to investigate the types of concepts that need to be represented in order to model users’ mental and emotional states. In particular, to consider what sorts of information can be gathered about the user (e.g., biofeedback monitoring, gesture recognition, facial recognition, etc.), how this can be represented, and how such representation might be used for the purpose of reasoning to infer information about the users’ mental and emotional state. The objectives of this project are to:
- Develop an empathic ontology (catalogue of concepts) using the web ontology language (www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/) OWL
- Determine how information represented using this ontology can be used to make inferences about the user’s state
ooh aah.
In other news, today (well, today in the US of A, yesterday in Australia or something) is election day. A plea to my American friends… please please please with a cherry on top don’t give us Bush for another four years!!
