BCS Edinburgh Branch

Virtual Worlds - Next Step for the Internet

Wednesday 21st November 2007, 6:30 pm

Speaker: Professor Austin Tate, Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

Venue: The Royal Scots Club Hepburn Suite, 30 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh EH3 6QE - map and direction.

This talk is free of charge and no reservation is required. Non members are most welcome. Refreshments available from 6:10 pm.

Synopsis

Professor Austin Tate, and his Second Life counterpart Ai Austin, will introduce what is happening in Second Life and similar virtual worlds. He will also describe some of the work at the "Virtual University of Edinburgh" including his own interests in collaborative and intelligent systems for emergency response. The speaker will outline the possibilities for 3D environments to work alongside collaborative and social networking facilities and web services to act as a basis for the next step of development of the Internet.

About the speaker

Austin Tate is Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and holds the Personal Chair of Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland's National Academy), Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI, Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the editorial board of a number of AI journals. His internationally sponsored research work involves advanced knowledge and planning technologies, especially for use in emergency response. 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. Austin Tate's Web page: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/