Colloquium Rainer Malaka: Empowering People with Digital Media: Playful and Natural Human Computer Interaction

By Prof. Dr. Rainer Malaka, Technology Center Informatics and Information Technology (TZI), University of Bremen

Digital Media are omnipresent and ubiquitous phenomena. The digital revolution has already transformed our lives and societies. This trend will continue and include more devices in our surrounding such as cars and household robots. In this new digital society, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) will shape the way we think, communicate, and work. We co-exist in a digital society with a global infrastructure of information technology. The talk will look at perspectives of HCI that supports humans in their abilities and motivates them in solving their everyday tasks. Playful elements and computer games seem to be promising tools to shape new forms of interaction that turn tedious work into playful activities. We will look at some techniques from entertainment computing and discuss their potential for HCI and serious applications.
The talk will give a number of examples of systems that show how natural and playful interaction can be used for empowering people with digital media.

Curriculum vitae:

Rainer Malaka is Professor for Digital Media at the University of Bremen since 2006. The focus of Dr. Malaka’s work is Digital Media, Interaction, and Entertainment Computing. At the University of Bremen, he directs a Graduate College “Empowering Digital Media” funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. He is also director of the TZI, the center for computing technologies at the University of Bremen. Before joining the University of Bremen, he led a research group at the European Media Lab in Heidelberg. He did his PhD at the University of Karlsruhe on modeling brain structures using neural networks. He is also steering board member of the Interdisciplinary College for multiple years, a multidisciplinary international spring school on cognitive science, neurosciences and AI.
Rainer Malaka is the German representative in and chair of IFIP’s technical committee TC14 for Entertainment Computing.

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