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KMi Seminars
Morpholingua: Shape Language and its application to Archaeology
This event took place on Monday 30 April 2007 at 11:30

 
Frederic Fol Leymarie Digital Studios, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London

I will describe the elements of a shape language for 2D and 3D objects, and illustrate its potential in particular in the field of archaeology. This early version of a shape language builds on the work and collaboration from the fields of Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Computational Geometry, Visual Perception, Arts and the Humanities. It is based on a representation for shapes taking the form of graphs, called "shock graphs" in 2D and "shock scaffolds" in 3D. These incorporate ideas from well-known concepts such as the "medial axis" of H. Blum (pattern recognition), Voronoi diagrams and recent results from Singularity theory. I will illustrate the use of theses graphs in various applications, with a focus on the field of archaeology, which is supported by an on-going collaboration with Brown University's Archaeology group and their internationally re-known work at the site of the Great Temple of Petra, Jordan.

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KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.