ORGANISERS

Dr Marian F Ursu, the workshop chair, is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the department’s Deputy Head. He leads the Narrative and Interactive Media group, which researches into computational underpinnings of moving-image narrativity considered in the whole spectrum, from the artistic end, as a means of creative expression, to the pragmatic end of informal communication. The group works on the development of formal representations and reasoning techniques, but also of interfaces for narrative creation and access. The group was instrumental in the development of the ShapeShifting Media Technology, in collaboration with other European research groups participating in the NM2 project (New Millennium New Media). Currently, the group focuses on the development of formal models that support natural ways of moving-image mediated communication between groups of people separated by space, research partly supported through the EU collaborative project TA2 (Together Anywhere Together Anytime).

Dr Doug Williams is project director, leading large collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects for BT that address the development of new communication and media applications that can be delivered over broadband.  Doug has led research on the emergence of convergent forms of media including the project NM2 (New Millennium New Media) that led to the world first broadcast of ShapeShifting media, in which viewers were given the power to interact with, and hence shape, the emerging narrative of a TV drama in real time.  Doug currently leads the €18M international collaborative research project TA2 (Together Anywhere, Together Anytime) which is developing technologies for broadband that will help people socialise, communicate and have fun together. Previously Doug specialised in optical fibre design, a topic in which he holds a PhD and on which he has published widely.

Dr. Pablo Cesar is a postdoctoral researcher at CWI (The National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands) in Amsterdam. Pablo has (co)authored over 40 of articles (conference papers and journal articles) about multimedia systems and infrastructures, media sharing, interactive media, multimedia content modeling, and user interaction. He is, as well, involved in standardization activities (e.g., SMIL from W3C). He is co-editor of the book "Social Interactive Television: Immersive Shared Experiences and Perspectives" and of the TOMCCAP special issue "Human-Centred Television: Directions in Interactive Digital Television Research". In addition, he was the general chair of the 5th European Interactive conference (EuroITV2007) and has given tutorials about Interactive Digital Television in prestigious conferences such as ACM Multimedia and WWW Conferences.

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