Manuel 2.0

Here are some photos from our system demo at the combined poster and demo session at the IUI 2010. We presented our multimodal dialogue shell for the MEDICO system.

Although small, all the hot shots were here:

• Hery Lieberman + bunch of other students from MIT Media Lab
• Princeton University, CMU, Cambridge
• a number of research labs: German T-Labs, IBM Research, SAP Research, Palo Alto RC, HP Labs
• and even someone from my alma mater TU Chemnitz

The organization was very well, location and service were top and a number of top speakers gave interesting and inspiring presentations.

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Currently I am attending the Intelligent User Interfaces Conference (IUI) 2010 in Hong Kong, China. Sunday was the day of the workshops. In the Gaze Workshop I gave a presentation for the Text 2.0 Framework, work by my colleagues at DFKI in Kaiserslautern. Some more information on the paper is online here.

Not only because of the jet lag we spend the evenings outside of the hotel. Above is a picture from Kowloon.

Tomorrow I have another presentation together titled “A Multimodal Dialogue Mashup for Medical Image Semantics” which is joint work with Daniel Sonntag from DFKI in Kaiserslautern.

The real conference has just started but it seems like brain computer interfaces are becoming a big topic in the community.

Here is another curiosity from one of our restaurants: Toothpicks with vitamins and minerals!

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John Sowa at MJCAI: “The difference between a trick and a technique: A technique is a trick that you apply more than once.”

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After the official conference program was over for today, I decided to first go to Kuala Lumpur’s City Center (short: “KLCC”) and visit the Petronas Towers.

Petronas is Malaysia’s biggest oil company and so are the towers.

Inside you find an gigantic shopping mall.

And even “Aunt Annie” came over from the US to sell her pretzels here as well. Welcome back to the Fast Food Nation Tour.

The area around the towers includes a nice and spacious park which is colorfully illuminated after sunset.

Naive as I am I had thought that I could walk from the Petronas Towers to China Town, the next sight on my list. On the way there I got into a conversation with a couple from Germany. They told me that the walk there would go along big streets and take about an hours. Instead, I joined them for a drink in a bar next to there hostel.

Since taxi rides are extremely cheap compared to German standards, I took a taxi to Chinatown.

It turned out to be another shopping mall, but this time featuring more Rolex and the like.

Despite the fact that is was already after 10pm, the place was very busy.

After stumbeling through the booths selling fake sport shoes and t-shirts I finally got another taxi which drove me the approx. 10 km back to the hotel. Price: around 3 Euros.

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Here are some impressions from the first day of the Malaysian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The conference hotel Palace of the Golden Horses.

These guys are watching over the buffet in the restaurant.

First day’s panel discussion.

The main auditorium of the conference.

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I am currently attending FOIS 2008 at DFKI in Saarbrücken where I have a paper with a couple of other people. Here are pictures from the first day (Nov. 1st). Click on the image to view the full album.

Update: more photos:

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