INESC Porto welcomes sessions on Urban Sync project

INESC Porto welcomes sessions on Urban Sync project

The city of Porto welcomed for three weeks – 7 to 14 of October - Stephan Baumann, an artist/scientist from the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) who used this city as stage for the development of the Urban Sync. The project took place in the context of the SID project (Sonic Interaction Design - www.cost-sid.org) where INESC Porto’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM) is currently participating.

11th December 2008

This project consists of finding the correlations that define personal well-being in an urban context. More precisely, the work consisted of a methodical collection of urban signals. For that, Baumann recorded in-place sounds and data in different locations and, in order to do so, he did a thorough mapping of the city. The project is included in the domain of “Reality Mining”.

After this practical component, it was possible to discuss the results and get to know the research work carried out by Stephan Baumann.  During the sessions presented by the researcher, some of the collected data were transmitted and discussed by the participants. These presentations took place at the Future Places festival, at an Open Class of the School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University (http://artes.ucp.pt/artes_digitais/), as well as at a UTM Lab Meeting.

The data that were collected by the researcher (audio, GPS, biodata, and others) are available at http://urbansync.wordpress.com/.

Stephan Baumann will return to Porto in 2009 for the presentation of the conference SMC2009 - 6th Sound and Music Computing, which will take place between 23 and 25 July 2009. This conference will be co-organised and chaired by Fabien Gouyon, collaborator at INESC Porto’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit.

BIP, November 2008