CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

BATON ROUGE – The LSU Center for Computation and Technology will host the first International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, or TEI, bringing researchers and industry representatives from five continents to Baton Rouge. This conference, which is an outgrowth of CCT's 14th annual Mardi Gras Conference, will take place at the Sheraton Convention Center today through Saturday. Tangible and Embedded Interaction is an emerging field of technology that manipulates physical objects (e.g., paper, blocks, furniture and clothing) to make interfaces for digital information. This approach is rapidly growing, and has already had a commercial impact in many areas of business. This field has important implications for many areas of local business, including video conferencing, health care, entertainment, consumer products, software applications and beyond. The conference will showcase 50 contributions by 140 authors from 15 countries, from companies such as Sony, Nokia, Philips and Intel. “Hosting this conference in Baton Rouge establishes the city and LSU as major players in this technology field, which we believe also has important economic, cultural and business development implications,” said CCT and computer science Assistant Professor Brygg Ullmer, who is co-organizing the conference with four faculty from Boston, Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Projects to be presented at the conference showcase new developments in technology, design, computer science, sociology and art. Presentation formats include talks, posters, interactive exhibits and performances. Example projects to be presented include instrumented furniture, board games, pillows, architectural windows, paper, wallpaper, shoes, hammocks, many new kinds of graspable physical objects and even an art piece involving meat. A complete list of presentations, together with selected pictures, is online at http://tei-conf.org/program.html. Ullmer, whose research specialty at the CCT is applying this field to visualization, co-created the conference around this theme and recruited peers from around the world to participate. He and his collaborators hope to make it an annual event, and planning for next year's conference in Bonn, Germany, is already under way. To learn more, please visit www.cct.lsu.edu and click the “TEI ‘07” link.