HotSoft

The Chateau Laurier is an icon of Ottawa: it reminds me of a dreamier vision of Canada, romantic, heroic, and yet knowingly aware of the time. This photo, on display in the Chateau, spoke volumes to me: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Pierre Trudeau, all at the Chateau. It was 1969, and I was 16 and at school only a few kilometers away. Anyway, my visit to the Chateau today, all of 10 minutes drive from our lab, was for the official announcement of SurfNet, the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s Strategic Network on Surface Computing. Let’s think of the future.  Robert Biddle

GRAND was announced today: the Graphics, Animation and New Media NCE (Network of Centers of Excellence). This is a national network of scholars in Computer Science, the Social Sciences and Humanities, put together by the redoubtable Kelly Booth over the past year. Our group is leading the project on Security and Privacy in New Media, and is involved in two cool projects on games: play and performance, and games for learning. The announcement was made that NCE conference in downtown Ottawa, where the keynote speaker was Canadian astronaut Julie Payette.

Several members of the lab attended ACM’s CCS 2009 conference on November 10-12 in Chicago. We presented our paper on multiple password interference on Wednesday afternoon.   We were happy to see that despite being the last talk of the day, many people stayed behind to chat and ask  further questions.  CCS is regarded as one of the main computer security conferences, with a focus mostly on the technical aspects of security. However,  there seems to be a gradual recognition that human factors are also an important component of security. This year’s keynote by Dorothy Denning was on usable authentication, and Jeff Yan held a tutorial introducing usable security methodologies, both were well attended.

Oopsla 2009 and WikiSym 2009 were held in Orlando this year, and not just Orlando but Disney World: a strange island of space and time right down to the Mickey Mouse shaped swimming pool. I find Oopsla itself hard to keep up with: too many interesting workshops, panels, technical talks; and with WikiSym too I was overwhelmed and didn’t see as much as I would have liked. Moreover, this marked the year that Oopsla was more formally distinguished from Onward 2009, the conference on the new and the strange in software, so they are full sibling conferences. For me the highlights were the Onward “Plateau” workshop on the HCI of programming languages, the Onward talk by Jenny Quillien, Pam Rostal, Dave West on Christopher Alexander’s work, and the WikiSym closing keynote by Brion Vibber of the Wikimedia Foundation. I also had a great time at my tutorial on human aspects of software development practice based on our hacked version of the board game Monopoly. New year Oopsla and Onward are both under the new “Splash” umbrella at Reno, and WikiSym is co-located with WikiMania in Gdansk. Robert Biddle

Oh Agile: so ever-changing. In Chicago this year, huge attendance and huge industry involvement in this bad year for conferences. More diverse than ever, UX, Kanban, Real Options, a real bazaar of ideas for the new in making software happen. Buzzy yet familiar. New faces and old friends. The UX stream organized by Angela Martin and Lane Halley was really mainstream this year, and the closing keynote by Jared Spool still took focus on the Agile-UX potential. Angela and I also presented two papers based on her thesis work about the customer role in XP, and I presented tutorials on Activity Theory and on the role of culture in software development practices. Busy busy! Next year at Opryland. Robert Biddle

ISSNet is an NSERC strategic network on computer security. Each year, a week long summer school is organized for members of the network. This first year, it was held at the École Polytechnique de Montréal from August 2nd to August 7th. It is an opportunity for ISSNet researchers and students across the country to get to know each other, discuss on-going research, and learn about various security topics. Each day, in-class and hands-on lab sessions were taught by instructors from participating universities on subjects like experimental security research, phishing, and network device and protocol abuse. Two members of our lab, Robert Biddle and Sonia Chiasson, co-presented a one-day workshop on usable security and HCI methodologies with Kirstie Hawkey from UBC.  Students from our lab found that the week-long summer school was “cool and seriously informative”.

The Immersive Worlds conference was this week, held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. This conference is largely sponsored by Silicon Knights. Many game-industry topics were tackled throughout. Geoffrey Rockwell’s debate-style keynote explored the purpose, role, and value of “serious games”. The “Making Good Ideas Work” panel emphasised building bridges between the games industry, academia, and the government to enable bright game developers to find employment or entrepreneurial success in Canada. The three tracks offered insightful presentations on game-related issues in areas such as education, intellectual property, marketing, new interaction media, social impact, and more. Several members of Carleton’s Hyperlab and HotSoft lab gave presentations: Jessica Aldred, Pippin Barr, Claire Dormann, Alain Forget, Brain Greenspan, Rilla Khaled, Natalie King, Jennifer Whitson.

This week Marty Kauhanen successfully defended his MCS (Master of Computer Science) thesis: congratulations, Marty! He has been working at Microsoft in Redmond since July of 2008. Marty’s thesis is entitled “Examining Support Of Narrative Scripting For Serious Games”, and the abstract is as follows:

In this thesis, we explore the support required to build interactive narratives for serious games. Serious games typically are built to support learning, training or persuasion and have different requirements than other types of games, including shorter durations of game-play and much smaller development budgets. In addition, there is a need to support non-programmers in scripting serious games. We believe authoring tools can provide this support.

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MIT6 (Media in Transition) was in Boston for the last few days, and we did a road trip: Rilla Khaled, Pippin Barr, Natalie King, Jennifer Whitson, Chris Eaket, Brian Greenspan, and Robert Biddle. Although at MIT, this is a humanities conference, with a focus on new kinds of literature and new kinds of literacy. Our group of HotSoft and Hyperlab people had a number of talks, on topics ranging from journalism to hyperfiction. The conference had many parallel streams, and it was always difficult to choose what to attend: on the whole I think  was particularly impressed by the talks that exposed vibrant ecosystems of new media. For example, there is more going on at Youtube that I realized. We left at mid-day on Sunday to drive back to Ottawa, and so missed Thomas Pettitt, from the University of Southern Denmark, summarize the conference and reference both Natalie’s  paper on Patchwork Girl, and also our new StoryTrek system.

Ben Sawyer invited us to present a poster at the Serious Games Summit, part of the Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco this year. The presentations and attendees were an eclectic mix of busniess executives, academics, game developers, and enthusiasts. I recommend anyone looking to land a job, strike a deal, or simply network in the games industry to attend the GDC. Plus, you’ll get to enjoy some awesome keynotes. This year, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata gave his insights on Mr. Miyamoto & Nintendo game development, and Hideo Kojima described how turning impossible problems into opportunities gave birth to the Metal Gear & Metal Gear Solid series.