Call for papers: Intelligent Agents in Urban Simulations and Smart Cities

Readers of the blog might be interested in the “Intelligent Agents in Urban Simulations and Smart Cities” workshop at the  ECAI-2012 Conference in Montpellier, France, August 27 or 28, 2012.

To quote from the call for papers:

In this workshop, we intend to address specific methodological and technological issues raised by the deployment of agents in rich environments such as virtual cities. We will welcome contributions tackling issues related to reactive agents, cognitive architectures, the capacity to scale up to handle thousands or hundreds of thousands of agents, the ability to simulate realistic group behaviors which might be judged non rational, etc., all in the context of urban agents. We will also welcome contributions showcasing original applications of agent and multi-agent technologies within urban simulations, be it for design, planning, education, training, or entertainment. 

Workshop Chairs: 

  • Vincent Corruble (contact), Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), France 
  • Fabio Carrera, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), USA 
  • Stephen Guerin, Santa Fe Complex, USA 

Important Dates: 

  • *6 June 2012*: Workshop paper submission deadline 
  • 28 June 2012: Notifications to authors (subject to modification) 
  • 13 July 2012: Submissions of camera-ready copies of selected papers 
  • 27 or 28 August 2012: Workshop date 

Submission information: 

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Call for papers: Intelligent Agents in Urban Simulations and Smart Cities

Readers of the blog might be interested in the “Intelligent Agents in Urban Simulations and Smart Cities” workshop at the  ECAI-2012 Conference in Montpellier, France, August 27 or 28, 2012.

To quote from the call for papers:

In this workshop, we intend to address specific methodological and technological issues raised by the deployment of agents in rich environments such as virtual cities. We will welcome contributions tackling issues related to reactive agents, cognitive architectures, the capacity to scale up to handle thousands or hundreds of thousands of agents, the ability to simulate realistic group behaviors which might be judged non rational, etc., all in the context of urban agents. We will also welcome contributions showcasing original applications of agent and multi-agent technologies within urban simulations, be it for design, planning, education, training, or entertainment. 

Workshop Chairs: 

  • Vincent Corruble (contact), Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), France 
  • Fabio Carrera, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), USA 
  • Stephen Guerin, Santa Fe Complex, USA 

Important Dates: 

  • *6 June 2012*: Workshop paper submission deadline 
  • 28 June 2012: Notifications to authors (subject to modification) 
  • 13 July 2012: Submissions of camera-ready copies of selected papers 
  • 27 or 28 August 2012: Workshop date 

Submission information: 

Continue reading »

Book – Informotion

Infographics are everywhere and a lot of development both in therms of technology and style has gone into the representation of information in the last few years. It is however an old topic and through out the past century aspects of graphics, design and technology in regards to the presentation of data and information were developed.

The Gestalt Theory (Detailed article in the German Wikipedia) was developed in the early 20s of the last century or Tufte (earlier on urbanTick) wrote his much influential books in the 80s and 90s to name two.

Image taken from the189.com / Informotion project by Bryan Ku docuemnting the final game in the 122nd edition of the Wimbeldon Championship Men’s Final between tennis giants Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. See the animated version HERE.

The reason for some more recent development in information design and especially and especially handling is connected to technological and practical changes, but also the increased availability of raw data and details to be turned into information graphics.

Often however the subject to the data is temporal or process based with need for background or lead in, change of place or frequent change of perspective. For these cases animated inforgraphics can be a great way to communicate knowledge. Besides who doesn’t like to look at motion pictures? It really fits in with the whole TV consuming sort of urban lifestyle.

Its pretty save to say, that for the first time the book Informotion: Animated Infographics by Gestalten bring together a selection of the best motion picture graphics communicating knowledge. All of the examples are very recent projects and most can be found on either vimeo or youtube of course. However the interesting bit on the book is the context the examples are being put in. The editors Tim Finke and Sebastian Manger put great emphasis on contextual details in a wider sense. Where publications like the recent Taschen Infographics are a mere selection of great examples the Informotion book includes the theoretical and practical aspects too.

This of course makes the book heavier to read, it’s also but not only to look at, but you get a lot more out of it for your practice. Besides inspiration the book provides a refresh and update on the graphic, visual and design theories as well as the technical details of animation production such as software, storyboards or size, resolution or format.

Image taken from binalogue.com / Images showing the page spread design. The example shown here is an animated infographic by binalogue showing the CANAL Isabel II water cycle. See video below for the original animation.

There is also one of the aNCL (animated New City Landscape) informmotion graphics included as anexample in the book (p.188-189). It is the animation produced in collaboration between urbanTick and Anders Johansson on the Twitter landscape in the area arond the city of Zuerich in Switzerland. The original post on the animation can be found here, the animation is below.

Of course there is something awkward about a printed book about animated examples. However the content lives up to the expectations and whilst the animations can not be shown in the book the story can still be told. Even more so that the examples are discussed in detail and help to illustrate the theoretical elements of the book. In this sense there is literally more to the book than just the pictures and lines of text there is actual information in there plus Gestalten have a website where readers can get additional info and links to the animations. The list of examples can be found HERE.

Image taken from Gestalten / Book cover.

Finke, T. & Manger, S. eds., 2012. Informotion: Animated Infographics, Berlin: Gestalten.

Continue reading »

Book – Informotion

Infographics are everywhere and a lot of development both in therms of technology and style has gone into the representation of information in the last few years. It is however an old topic and through out the past century aspects of graphics, design and technology in regards to the presentation of data and information were developed.

The Gestalt Theory (Detailed article in the German Wikipedia) was developed in the early 20s of the last century or Tufte (earlier on urbanTick) wrote his much influential books in the 80s and 90s to name two.

Image taken from the189.com / Informotion project by Bryan Ku docuemnting the final game in the 122nd edition of the Wimbeldon Championship Men’s Final between tennis giants Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. See the animated version HERE.

The reason for some more recent development in information design and especially and especially handling is connected to technological and practical changes, but also the increased availability of raw data and details to be turned into information graphics.

Often however the subject to the data is temporal or process based with need for background or lead in, change of place or frequent change of perspective. For these cases animated inforgraphics can be a great way to communicate knowledge. Besides who doesn’t like to look at motion pictures? It really fits in with the whole TV consuming sort of urban lifestyle.

Its pretty save to say, that for the first time the book Informotion: Animated Infographics by Gestalten bring together a selection of the best motion picture graphics communicating knowledge. All of the examples are very recent projects and most can be found on either vimeo or youtube of course. However the interesting bit on the book is the context the examples are being put in. The editors Tim Finke and Sebastian Manger put great emphasis on contextual details in a wider sense. Where publications like the recent Taschen Infographics are a mere selection of great examples the Informotion book includes the theoretical and practical aspects too.

This of course makes the book heavier to read, it’s also but not only to look at, but you get a lot more out of it for your practice. Besides inspiration the book provides a refresh and update on the graphic, visual and design theories as well as the technical details of animation production such as software, storyboards or size, resolution or format.

Image taken from binalogue.com / Images showing the page spread design. The example shown here is an animated infographic by binalogue showing the CANAL Isabel II water cycle. See video below for the original animation.

There is also one of the aNCL (animated New City Landscape) informmotion graphics included as anexample in the book (p.188-189). It is the animation produced in collaboration between urbanTick and Anders Johansson on the Twitter landscape in the area arond the city of Zuerich in Switzerland. The original post on the animation can be found here, the animation is below.

Of course there is something awkward about a printed book about animated examples. However the content lives up to the expectations and whilst the animations can not be shown in the book the story can still be told. Even more so that the examples are discussed in detail and help to illustrate the theoretical elements of the book. In this sense there is literally more to the book than just the pictures and lines of text there is actual information in there plus Gestalten have a website where readers can get additional info and links to the animations. The list of examples can be found HERE.

Image taken from Gestalten / Book cover.

Finke, T. & Manger, S. eds., 2012. Informotion: Animated Infographics, Berlin: Gestalten.

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By: Sander

the 3-way marriage between Lumion, Cityengine and Sketchup (or other 3d modelling software)is a powerful one. I think it benefits from the same things: the ease and speed to create beautiful things. A pity there aren’t many cga rulefiles available to use, I see you’re still using the 2010 standard template as are many people. The emphasis is too much on possibilities of the program and integration with other software instead of creating real usable content. Creating a rulefile yourself is imo still too hard.

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A Semester with OpenSim

Over the last few months I have been teaching a class in the Department of Computational Social Science entitled “Building Virtual Worlds” where we surveyed the role of virtual worlds for social science research. The emphasis of the class was on tools, software frameworks, and applications of virtual worlds.  On the applications side we discussed how virtual worlds are being used for History, Archeology, Healthcare, Tourism, Urban Modeling, Architecture, Agent-based Modeling along with more generally teaching and learning. We explored a variety of tools for building virtual worlds before focusing on OpenSim. The movie below shows some of the final outputs using OpenSim.
We used OpenSim 0.7.3, configured with the Standalone-Hypergrid mode and a SQLite database hosted on a Windows 7 server. The server simultaneously simulated 64 different regions, and at various points during the semester the server hosted well over 15000 primitives (prims) and ran hundreds of scripts across this landscape; one region alone hosted over 8000 prims. 
Why so many regions? We were interested in how many the server could cope with but also we wanted to have a virtual world representing the whole of the GMU Fairfax campus  (~4km2) and regions in OpenSim are limited to 256m by 256m. We built the terrain for the campus utilizing the National Elevation Dataset (NED) DEM from the United States Geological Survey which was first manipulated in ArcGIS before being processed in  L3DT (Large 3D Terrain Generator). Finally, the DEM was imported into OpenSim. The movie below should give a sense of what the basic terrain looks like.
Once the terrain was built, we populated it with buildings, however, we were not just interested in the external appearance of the buildings but also there internal structure for modeling and simulation purposes.  Therefore the class focused their attention on building a highly detailed Johnson Center.
Model of Johnson Center taken from Google SketchUp 3D Warehouse
Vector based, 2D CAD files were obtained and imported into Google SketchUp before using SketchLife to build the 3D initial building core, walls, doors and windows.

Constructing a vector-based model of the Johnson Center internal structure
The SketchLife final rendering of the Johnson Center
Once built in SketchUp using SketchLife the model was imported into OpenSim 

External view “in world” of what we accomplished in building the Johnson Center
In addition to using SketchLife for the JC, many objects such as chairs, staircases and tables were either built using the tool or those native to OpenSim.
An “in world” shot at ground level, on the 1st floor, viewing the atrium and clock tower
 in the Johnson Center
CSS class photo “in-world”
However, our work with OpenSim does not stop here, below is another movie of some ongoing work with one of our PhD students, Chris Rouly who is creating agent-based models embedded in OpenSim to explore past habitats among many other things.
I would like to thank the “Building Virtual Worlds” class and the Department for enabling this blog post.

Continue reading »

A Semester with OpenSim

Over the last few months I have been teaching a class in the Department of Computational Social Science entitled “Building Virtual Worlds” where we surveyed the role of virtual worlds for social science research. The emphasis of the class was on tools, software frameworks, and applications of virtual worlds.  On the applications side we discussed how virtual worlds are being used for History, Archeology, Healthcare, Tourism, Urban Modeling, Architecture, Agent-based Modeling along with more generally teaching and learning. We explored a variety of tools for building virtual worlds before focusing on OpenSim. The movie below shows some of the final outputs using OpenSim.
We used OpenSim 0.7.3, configured with the Standalone-Hypergrid mode and a SQLite database hosted on a Windows 7 server. The server simultaneously simulated 64 different regions, and at various points during the semester the server hosted well over 15000 primitives (prims) and ran hundreds of scripts across this landscape; one region alone hosted over 8000 prims. 
Why so many regions? We were interested in how many the server could cope with but also we wanted to have a virtual world representing the whole of the GMU Fairfax campus  (~4km2) and regions in OpenSim are limited to 256m by 256m. We built the terrain for the campus utilizing the National Elevation Dataset (NED) DEM from the United States Geological Survey which was first manipulated in ArcGIS before being processed in  L3DT (Large 3D Terrain Generator). Finally, the DEM was imported into OpenSim. The movie below should give a sense of what the basic terrain looks like.
Once the terrain was built, we populated it with buildings, however, we were not just interested in the external appearance of the buildings but also there internal structure for modeling and simulation purposes.  Therefore the class focused their attention on building a highly detailed Johnson Center.
Model of Johnson Center taken from Google SketchUp 3D Warehouse
Vector based, 2D CAD files were obtained and imported into Google SketchUp before using SketchLife to build the 3D initial building core, walls, doors and windows.

Constructing a vector-based model of the Johnson Center internal structure
The SketchLife final rendering of the Johnson Center
Once built in SketchUp using SketchLife the model was imported into OpenSim 

External view “in world” of what we accomplished in building the Johnson Center
In addition to using SketchLife for the JC, many objects such as chairs, staircases and tables were either built using the tool or those native to OpenSim.
An “in world” shot at ground level, on the 1st floor, viewing the atrium and clock tower
 in the Johnson Center
CSS class photo “in-world”
However, our work with OpenSim does not stop here, below is another movie of some ongoing work with one of our PhD students, Chris Rouly who is creating agent-based models embedded in OpenSim to explore past habitats among many other things.
I would like to thank the “Building Virtual Worlds” class and the Department for enabling this blog post.

Continue reading »

Two Opportunities for New Research Groups at the Wittgenstein Centre (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU) in Vienna

Tweet“New Frontiers Groups (NFG)” (Austrian Academy of Sciences) The NFG programme aims at investigator driven innovative research in order to promote promising academic careers. Applicants must hold a doctoral degree which was conferred no more than 7 years prior  to the submission deadline (15thJuly) and have the ability to lead an independent research group. Candidates with […]

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QRator wins the The Museums & Heritage Award for Innovation

QRator, the Museum focused ‘Internet of Things/Smart Places’ project developed jointly with us here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL Digital Humanities and UCL Museums, with funding from the UCL Public Engagement Unit , has won The Museums & Heritage Award for Innovation.  Known as ‘The Oscars’ of the…

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