Virtual Spaces for Intelligent Collaboration http://www.cafescientifique.org/ Edinburgh Cafe Scientifique Filmhouse, Lothian Road, Edinburgh 9pm Monday 24th August 2009 Austin Tate & Ai Austin http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/ http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~ai/ AIAI, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh Appleton Tower, Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9LE, UK Second Life and other emerging massive on-line persistent 3-D virtual world environments are set to follow the 2-D web as an essential element of future computing systems and are becoming more widely used in education, scientific collaboration and a range of other applications. Our speaker, Austin Tate, Director of the Artificial Intelligent Applications Institute in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and his virtual worlds counterpart 'Ai Austin', will introduce work at the Virtual University of Edinburgh - Vue - and describe what some University projects are doing in the Vue regions in Second Life. He will open up a discussion on how virtual environments are being used for research, collaboration and teamwork, especially in his own area of interest in improved emergency response. Biography: Prof. Austin Tate holds the Chair in Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh and is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute within the School of Informatics at the University. His internationally sponsored research work is focused on the creation of a "helpful environment", such as for improved emergency response, and involves advanced knowledge and planning technologies, and collaborative systems especially using virtual worlds. He initiated the "Open Virtual Collaboration Environment" (OpenVCE.net) to create open source tools in this area. He leads the Virtual University of Edinburgh, Vue, a virtual educational and research institute bringing together those interested in the use of virtual worlds for teaching, research and outreach. http://vue.ed.ac.uk http://openvce.net Image (c) 2009, Austin Tate - permission to use this is granted: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~ai/img/Ai-and-Austin-2.jpg Other resolution images available at: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~ai/img/