Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 From: Yusuf Pisan Subject: IE2005: Newsletter #1 Welcome to the first newsletter for IE2005: Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment I hope you have cleared your calendars for 23-25 November and made the necessary arrangements to be in Sydney. It looks like IE2005 is going to be a great conference. First, I should thank all the Program Committee members. They reviewed all the papers in a timely manner. The effort they put into selecting the papers, providing feedback to improve the quality of the papers will no doubt reflect on the quality of the conference. Second, thanks goes to all the people who submitted papers to IE2005. There is an active community on Interactive Entertainment and this was reflected in the high-quality papers we received. 57 papers (35 regular and 22 short papers) were submitted to IE2005. All the papers were peer reviewed by the international program committee. 38 papers (67%) (25 regular papers (71%) and 13 short papers (59%)) were accepted for presentation at the conference. The list of accepted submission is available at http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/ie/05/program.html Next, thanks goes to the Organising Committee Ian Gwiltt, Wayne Moore, Nicolas Szilas and Anders Tychsen who in addition to reviewing papers are helping out with all the organisational details for the conference as well. Organising a conference takes a lot of time and energy and IE2005 would not have been possible without the people on the Programme Committee and Organising Committee donating their time. Finally, I should thank the generous sponsors for IE2005: Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), Australian CRC For Interaction Design (ACID), Powerhouse Museum, X|Media|Lab, La Trobe University, Faculty of Information Technology at University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), University of Western Sydney (UWS) and Charles Sturt University. If you are interested in sponsoring IE2005, please visit http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/ie/05/cfs.html for sponsorship information. If you had a paper accepted to IE2005, once again congratulations. Please make sure that your camera-ready copy is submitted by 23 September 2005. See author instructions on http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/ie/05/instauth.html for formatting details. The registration web page for IE2005 will be available starting next week http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/ie/05/registration.html - Early registration ends on 23 Oct 2005, so register early to save some money and to make it easier to plan the event. Too many news items for one newsletter. I will quickly summarize some of the major ones *** Invited Speakers We are lucky to have the following people as invited speakers for IE2005. More information on the speakers are available at http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/ie/05/program.html Mark Pesce, co-creator of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), lecturer at AFTRS Stacey Spiegel, Founder, President and CEO of I-mmersion R. Michael Young, Assistant Professor in Computer Science at North Carolina State University *** Volunteers We need volunteers who are willing to put in 10-20 hours helping with the conference. Helping out does not mean missing all the sessions, but you will be expected to attend the full 3 days and help out when possible. In return for attending the registration desk, stuffing bags, making name tags, etc you get to attend the conference for free. PhD students working in a related area will be given preference. If interested, email ie05@it.uts.edu.au. *** ACM Digital Library IE2005 will be an ACM In-Cooperation conference, specifically with SIGCHI and possibly with other SIGs as well. We are waiting for the official approval before we can put the ACM logo on the web page, but what this means to authors is that IE2005 papers will be available via the ACM Digital Library. Almost all universities subscribe to the ACM Digital Library, and papers that are available via DL have a much higher citation rate. A very timely article from ACM President titled "Does ACM support matter to conferences or journals?" is available at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1076211.1076231 *** Posters vs Regular Presentations We were originally planning to have the short papers presented as "posters" in a large poster session. We are currently investigating whether it would be possible to have the short-papers presented in the regular sessions in the form of a short presentation. More news on this front closer to the conference date. *** D-Factory event As a part of IE2005, in collaboration with Powerhouse Museum, we will hold a D-Factory event on Thursday September 24th, to have a a few drinks and to informally talk about interactive entertainment design and computer games. You can find out about other D-Factory events from http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dfactory/ *** Panels In addition to the regular paper sessions, invited speakers, demonstrations, D-Factory event at the Powerhouse, we are planning to have a number of panel sessions. If you are interested in organising a panel session, please contact ie05@it.uts.edu.au with a brief proposal on the topic and the list of potential panelists. *** Industry presentations While IE2005 is primarily an academic conference, we would like maintain close ties with the industry. To this end, we are looking for industry speakers from the Australian game development community or from the interactive entertainment community to give talks at IE2005. If you have somebody in mind, please contact them to confirm their availability and then contact ie05@it.uts.edu.au (If you yourself are interested in giving a talk, check your calendar first and contact us by email :) *** Bids for IE2006 The number of papers submitted is a strong indication that there is a thriving community on interactive entertainment and that we should continue to hold the IE conference series. If you would like to chair and organise IE2006, please email a bid to ie05@it.uts.edu.au by 1 November 2005. There is no set format for the bid, but it should include the names of key people (Chair, Local Chair, Treasurer, Publicity, ...), indicate possible venue, approximate dates, and what support would be available from the local organisation. We will announce the location and the chair of IE2006 in November at IE2005 to give people plenty of time to write their papers for IE2006. That is all for today folks! Cheers, Yusuf Pisan Conference Chair, IE2005: Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment -- Yusuf Pisan Senior Lecturer Department of Software Engineering Faculty of Information Technology University of Technology, Sydney http://staff.it.uts.edu.au/~ypisan/ ypisan[AT]it.uts.edu.au