See: autosmiley, Heart Chamber Orchestra

Meanwhile: Some announcements and deadlines:

---

3/30/2010 (Tuesday), 7:00pm
Experimental Form Studio Machines
Where: MM203

What: Semi-autonomous Kinetic Visualizers
Interactive machines that draw, paint, carve and print.

Come enjoy some prototypes and pizza with the students of Prof. Baskinger’s
Experimental Form studio this coming Tuesday evening.

The Experimental Form studio encourages an exploratory study of physical
artifacts and provides a forum to examine and re-imagine our
relationships with objects. The projects in this course introduce
students to tangible, interpretive and expressive aspects of designing
and focus on the aesthetics of form and interaction.

---

3/31/2010, 6:15pm
Blinky Blocks!

Come learn about a new kind of modular robot! Blinky Blocks glow any color, make sound, and network with their neighbors – snap them into different shapes and configurations and they’ll figure it out. Using a built-in accelerometer they can detect taps or changes in their orientation. Using new distributed programming languages, LDP and Meld, writing programs is a snap – work at the ensemble level and the compiler will figure out what each block should do.

At the information session we’ll kick off a competition, series of workshops and open lab sessions to let the community try programming and interacting with the Blinky Blocks. Explore distributed computation on a table and create new kinds of interactive art!

What: Blinky Block Information Session
When: 6:15PM, March 31st
Where: GHC 6115
Note: Bring a laptop to download and try out our simulator, then download programs to the blocks!
For more information, contact: bkirby@andrew.cmu.edu

---

4/1/2010
Registration deadline for Meeting of the Minds.
There are a wide variety of awards available,
including the $350 “STUDIO for Creative Inquiry Award”; see below.

2010 MEETING OF THE MINDS – Undergraduate Research Symposium – MAY 5, 2010
REGISTRATION DEADLINE APRIL 1, 2010
http://www.cmu.edu/uro/MoM/index.html#MoM
http://www.cmu.edu/uro/MoM/competitions.html

The deadline for registration for the Meeting of the Minds is April 1, 2010 at 5 PM. Apply online at www.cmu.edu/uro/. All undergraduate research students are invited to present their work. Please direct any questions on registering to Jen Weidenhof at jweidenh@andrew.cmu.edu

---

Monday, April 5, 2010, 4:30 PM
Breed Hall (Margaret Morrison 103)
CAS ETB collaboration April 5 & 6 – Alexandra Juhasz, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin

New Media: Theory, Practice, Power
a panel discussion with media scholars Alexandra Juhasz (Pitzer College, Media Studies) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (University of California, Santa Cruz, Computer Science)

---

4/7/2010
Smiley Award Deadline – $500

As some of you may be aware, CMU CSD has set up an Annual Smiley Award for “innovation in technology assisted person-to-person communication”. Entries can be small, clever, and fun — no need for them to be world-shaking. Information about the award can be found at this web site:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley/sa.html

The award includes a trophy and a $500 cash prize, generously contributed by Yahoo, Inc. They also sponsor a nice party with food and beverages at which the prize is awarded. CMU students in all departments, graduate and undergraduate, are eligible; they may work individually or in small teams. Past winners include Jenn Gooch and Turadg Aleahmad for the “One Cold Hand” website that reunites lost gloves with their owners (creating an online discussion site in the process), and Ian Li for “Grafitter”, an application for sharing graphs and data logs via Twitter — a graph of your mood each morning, for example, or the number of potholes you spot in a day.

This award was initiated to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the 🙂 and 🙁 symbols by CMU professor Scott Fahlman back in 1982. Nominations are judged by a panel of CMU faculty and students.

---

Sunday 5/4/2010, 6pm
Deadline for Fine Art Awards for Electronic Arts — $500
Material will be due by 6 PM on May 4 sent to etb@flong.com.

---

9/15/2010
The 2010 NSF / AAAS Visualization Challenge

There is a point where it all comes together — imagination, insight, aesthetics, and technical understanding. That point is your visualization of deep structure or fine detail, of novel perspective or unique viewpoint. This is the competition to illuminate something of our natural or built world that we have never seen before. This is the challenge, and the opportunity, of a lifetime.

ENTRY DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 15, 2010
The 2010 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Awards categories include: Photography, Illustrations, Informational Posters and Graphics, Interactive Games, and Non-Interactive Media.

Winning entries will be published in a February 2011 issue of the journal Science and Science Online and on NSF’s website. One winning entry will appear on the front cover of Science. For more information, see: http://www.nsf.gov/news/scivis