The Playground Experiment aims at showing how a robot equipped with an intrinsic motivation system, and in particular artificial curiosity, can explore its environment autonomously and develop skills which were not pre-specified, and with an increasing complexity for an extended period of time.
Links: the homepage of the playground experiment
Participants: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Frédéric Kaplan, Verena V. Hafner and A. White
Net_Dérive has been created by Atau Tanaka in collaboration with artist Petra Gemeinboeck. It sets up social interactions, supported by mobile phones and internet technologies, within a loose network of people that are exploring the area around the Bastille in Paris. From the paths they take, a collective narrative emerges which is fed back through audiovisual means to each participant and thus shapes their evolving experience. A new kind of space is thus created at the interstices of existing spaces, a space that is fluid and transversal.
Team: Atau Tanaka
Collaboration: Petra Gemeinboeck, Ali Momeni, Gary Tunak, Clicmobile
The Robot’s Playroom was designed to offer new learning opportunities and exploration spaces for the Sony AIBO, and to test curiosity-driven learning algorithms. Thanks to this experiment the robot can now draw, ride a bike, control switches, pick up everyday objects, watch itself in a mirror, and more …
Team: Frédéric Kaplan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,
Collaborations: Martino d’Esposito, and ECAL Design Students
Jean-François Peyret, well-known for his theatre plays inspired by scientific figures such as Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, builds his pieces mainly through improvisations, where actors take scientific and philosophical texts as source material and thus approach a subject that is normally the provence of science. The result is a fresh and creative look at the issues and theatre rich in meaning and esthetic experience. For “Le Cas de Sophie K.”, Peyret invited Luc Steels to work with him on the script for a play inspired by the 19th century Russian mathematician Sophie Kovalevskaya. The play was performed at the Avignon theatre festival in 2005 and at the French National Theatre of Chaillot in 2006.
Team: Luc Steels
Collaboration: Jean-François Peyret.
A system for collaborative musical creation on mobile wireless networks. The work extends on simple peer-to-peer file sharing systems towards ad-hoc mobility, streaming, and collaborative creation. It extends music listening from a passive act to a proactive, participative activity. The system consists of a network based interactive music engine and a mobile rendering player. It serves as a platform for experiments on studying the sense of agency in collaborative creative process, and requirements for fostering musical satisfaction in remote collaboration.
Question: How to create a personal audio ambiance that seems ubiquitous to the user and is yet localized to him? How to exploit location sensing technologies to improve the quality of life in a home environment?
Images and music evoke memories of special moments in life. We harness this human dynamic in a personal music system. There are no playlists - music is associated with photographs. Drag-and-drop puts the music in the room. The music follows the listener’s movements throughout the home. A similar gesture lets friends share music, or purchase music at the café.
Olafur Eliasson is an artist who emphasizes process instead of final form in a lot of his work. This makes his art a perfect fit with the research of Luc Steels, whose work on the origins of language has always focused on the dynamic processes from which linguistic forms originate and change. Eliasson and Steels therefore collaborated on the “Look into the Box” installation. It was first shown at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2002 and came out of discussions held at the Bridge the Gap symposium in 2001 in Kitakyushu (Japan) between Steels and Eliasson.
Team: Luc Steels, Nicolas Neubauer
Question: How to create “interesting” audio music sequences from large collections of sound samples? The team invented the notion of musacing, by analogy with mosaicing, and explore new forms of interaction with music catalogues, such as song sampling.
The idea of musaicing is a transposition of the notion of image mosaicing to the world of audio. Musaicing makes intensive use of large databases of audio samples, and allows user to create music without having to perform the tedious and difficult task of listening and selecting individual samples. Musaicing consists in creating automatically large databases of samples by segmenting existing songs. Then metadata is computed for each sample to describe it in terms of perceptive parameters (such as timbre, percussivity, energy, pitchness, etc.). Finally the user can express high-level constraints to specify the structure and nature of a target sequence of samples. Constraints can be of various types, such as continuity (produce a sequence of samples which are continuous, timbre-wise), distribution (select a percussive sample every beat with tempo = 120) or cardinality (include at least 40% of samples which come from a Beatles song), or any combinations of these.
