Author Archives: Pedro Lopes

About Pedro Lopes

Pedro is a PhD student of Prof. Patrick Baudisch’s Human Computer Interaction lab in Hasso Plattner Institut, Berlin. Pedro creates wearable interfaces that read & write directly to the user’s body through our muscles [proprioceptive interaction].  Pedro augments humans & their realities by using electrical muscle stimulation to actuate human muscles as interfaces to new virtual worlds. His works have been published at ACM CHI and UIST. A believer on the unification of art and research, often gives talks about it [Campus Party’13, A MAZE’14, NODE’15]. Makes and writes music using turntables [in eitr]. Enjoys writing about music [in jazz.pt magazine] and tech [as digital content editor at ACM XRDS].

Top 3 Winning Articles of the “The Time is Write 2.0” Competition

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Here are the three winners of our The Time is Write 2.0 competition! You can read the three articles below, but first: congrats to Dipika Rajesh, Aditi Balaji and Pratyush Singh.

The Time is Write is an article writing competition that encourages all the aspiring writers to lay out their thoughts in writin and to share them on a global platform. This year, participants had to write a short article on the topic “Your Dream Software: Revolutionize the future”, about what their idea of a perfect software might be in order to revolutionize a particular field.

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$500 prize money at the ACM SIGAI Student Essay Contest on the Responsible Use of AI Technologies! Apply now!

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  1. Do you have an opinion on the responsible use of AI technologies?
  2. Do you want to win one of several $500 cash prizes?
  3. Do you want to talk one-on-one (via skype) to one of the following AI researchers:
  • Murray Campbell (Senior Manager, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center)
  • Eric Horvitz (Managing Director, Microsoft Research)
  • Peter Norvig (Director of Research, Google)
  • Stuart Russell (Professor, University of California at Berkeley) or
  • Michael Wooldridge (Head of the CS Department, University of Oxford)?

Read on!

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A Place for Students to Shine at the ACM UIST Conference 2016 in Tokyo

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The UIST student innovation contest (aka the “SIC”) is one of those rare moments in a student’s life: a chance to present work at the heart of one of the top venues in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). In fact, UIST (i.e., ACM’s conference for User Interface Software and Technology) is often acclaimed as the top conference for those driven by hardware / software novelty, mad inventors of the HCI kind, and the likes.

So if you are a student interested in HCI and never had a chance to visit one of the main conferences, here’s your chance; because the UIST SIC is not only a place to meet some of your favorite researchers while they try out your demo, it is also a remarkable conference to learn about the bleeding edge of the field, a financially supported opportunity for those teams that have less support by applying the UIST SIC travel grants,` a chance to get some fabulous prizes — there’s 3K USD for the winning teams but also participation awards — last but not least, it is your chance to get in touch with some novel hardware: electrical muscle stimulation:

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Physical interaction with the IoT: animating everyday objects

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Our concept in a nutshell:

Upon hearing “The Internet of Things”, our mind day-dreams into meshes of entangled devices working around the clock, carefully sampling the environment with their tiny sensors and reporting to us at distance, in order to satisfy mankind’s voracious and inexplicable appetite for efficiency & more data. Also, many know that the Internet of Things (IoT), has become both a buzzword and a trillion dollar market — 1.9 trillion USD to be more precise. Forbes further cites an astonishing 16 billion interconnected devices by last year’s evaluations.

So two questions came to our minds: (1) where are all those “smart” devices? and; (2) why are those devices not enhancing my (human) experience?

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