CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

Baton Rouge – The LSU Center for Computation & Technology will host the first International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI), bringing researchers and industry representatives from five continents to Baton Rouge. This conference, which is an outgrowth of the 14th Annual Mardi Gras Conference CCT hosts each year, will take place at the Sheraton Convention Center from Thursday, Feb. 15 through Saturday, Feb. 17. Tangible and Embedded Interaction is an emerging field of technology that uses the manipulation of physical objects (e.g., paper, blocks, furniture, and clothing) as interfaces to digital information. This approach is rapidly growing, and has already achieved commercial impact in areas including the toy industry, health care, and logistics planning. 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, including 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 Asst. Professor Brygg Ullmer, who is co-organizing the conference with four other 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 including talks, posters, interactive exhibits, and performances. Example projects to be presented included 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; planning for next year's conference in Bonn, Germany is already underway. Members of the media who wish to view presentations and speak with the researchers can obtain complimentary passes to attend the event from 11 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 16. If you are interested in attending, please contact CCT Manager of Public Relations Kristen Meyer at (225) 578-3469 to obtain a press pass. To learn more, please visit www.cct.lsu.edu and click the “TEI ‘07” link.