You can always change this.

You must have heard about the ratification process of LT. At the time of the writing, most countries 26 out of 28, the Irish included (they had a second go and said OK), had approved=ratified the treaty. Italy is just depositing the documents, so we have one and only remaining country. (Now, there is some talk about Åland, but let’s keep it out of business, no pun intended).

The last one is the Czech Republic. Can you now use the best of your imagination, and tell us all, what is the real reason?

Few weeks ago we had the Channel 5 from St. Petersburg shooting in our lab for their programme Progress. Have a look how we did (the eye-tracking bit in the stream starts around 9:55, our appearances around 15:00 and later).

Traveling is always nice. I enjoy getting surprised and affected; smelling new scents, interacting with strangers, learning how a toilet works, finding a way. All new and contrasting, but lot of same and similar, just done in some other way.

On my way to Ireland and PPIG’09, there were few moments of contrast-’aha’. Seeing the chaos at the Charles de Gaulle airport after the organized and effective Vantaa and Joensuu airport (”can I check you boarding pass?” is phrase I heard today first time at CDG and then about 10x again and again at CDG, when changing terminal, when entering the queue for bag scan, before getting scanned, when boarding (1x before the bus, 1 x at the aircraft! (”I want to make sure, sir, you entered the right plane”, “no no, I wanted to fly to Honolulu with this miniature aeroplane for 50 people” I thought) ;in Helsinki nobody asked for it, people just orderly show it when boarding the plane, and that’s it). Do you by the way also share the feeling that many male flying attendants are not always 100% straight?

At the same place, however, seeing how smile (nearly everybody) and short joke (bartender to get more tips out of 5 euro) can make a difference; while in Helsinki the guy who cashed for my lunch at the sky-high price of 15 euro even haven’t looked at me.

The cab-driver here at Shannon, Ireland, was quite surprised that I wanted to jump into his seat. “Oh sir, left please.” Again, forgetting that things can be different trapped me into a funny situation there, but cost me eight bucks for forgetting the right mains electricity adapter at home and buying it from CDG.

Oh yes, and they still check passports when you arrive to here, let long live the EU.

It seems that joint attention has been well studied in several interesting domains. For example, development and evolutionary studies (do not mix with international development) have confirmed that our elaboration of the skills related to joint attention are our main advantage against other species. Other major contributions are then from monkey research. Somebody even studied dolphins. The latest attempts focus on implementing architectures that imitate the shared visual attention mechanisms! So we have robots, to top the bunch.

Now, we will be researching programmers’ shared (visual) attention. Imagine that extreme title of this post as an upcoming paper title!

Starting 2011, the TV-fee should be replaced by a Media-fee, proposed yesterday a work-group dealing with financing the Finnish YLE (Public broadcast company). Instead of the present way where the TV-owners pay about 225 euro annually, next time all households –regardless do they own a device that can receive TV signal– will pay about 175 euro. This means virtually everybody: all students, seniors, or companies.

As you can imagine, there is some discussion and resistance. What do you think about this new tax?

I had an opportunity to collaborate on a paper with Marcus. His project, briefly, is about assisting a change in behavioral patterns of youth in Africa. By the means of application development, participatory design, and incremental implementation-evaluation cycles, he aims to affect the ways people talk (or do not talk, currently) about HIV.
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As I mentioned earlier, we started working on gaze-aware interfaces during autumn 2006. One of the fruits of that research has now been published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education, ICCE 2008 (paper is here).

We did a simple questionnaire-based analysis. The results of the analysis show some promises for implementing gaze-augmented problem-solving interfaces. Users of gaze-augmented interaction felt more immersed than the users of other two modes – dwell-time based and computer mouse. Immersion, engagement, and user-experience in general are important aspects in educational interfaces; learners engage in completing the tasks and, for example, when facing a difficult task they do not give up that easily. We also did analysis of the strategies, and we will report on those soon.

We could not attend the conference, but didn’t want to disappoint eventual audience. We thus decided to send a video instead of us. Have a look at it here. It feels that making the video was actually more time demanding than going to Taiwan and delivering the presentation. In addition, the lack of feedback is also worrying. Finally, we are not really media professionals, and you can hear and see it in the video (feedback of what could have been done better is welcome, use comments please!)