Dr. Laine and Dr. Seo

Congratulations, Dr. Jungryul Seo!

Dr. Jungryul Seo, our expert in machine learning and emotion detection based on physiological sensors, received his doctoral degree at Ajou University yesterday. Jungryul’s journey at UbiLife started as a MSc student, but then he changed to a combined MSc+PhD track which officially ended yesterday at the graduation day. During this journey, he has grown […]

Ubilife

Updates from the past seven months

It has been a long since I wrote a post here. The reason is that the past seven months or so have been extremely busy due to relocation to the Department of Digital Media at Ajou University and getting started with my Associate Professor (tenure-track) position here.  The new position focuses on three areas which […]

Research methodology

Open Access Article on the Effects of COVID-19 on Location-based Game Players

Today we published an open access article that investigates how COVID-19 has affected players of Pokémon GO and other location-based games (LBGs), as well as their developers. This is a very topical and interesting area, since LBGs are largely based on user mobility in the real world, whereas people all over the world were encouraged, […]

computers

Best paper awards in 2019

My article “Mobile Educational Augmented Reality Games: A Systematic Literature Review and Two Case Studies” published in Computers in 2018 won the 2019 Computers Best Paper Award. It is an Open Access publication with 26 citations and counting. If you are interested in AR, games and/or educational technology, this paper should be of interest to […]

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Open access article on boredom detection using EEG and GSR accepted to Sensors

Jungryul Seo’s research on emotion detection has produced yet another fruit in form of an open access journal paper acceptance. This study focuses on detecting boredom from EEG and GSR data, with the details being as follows: Authors: Jungryul Seo, Teemu H. Laine and Kyung-Ah Sohn Title: An exploration of machine learning methods for robust […]

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Academic publications during the first half of 2019

It has been a while to update about recent scholarly activities at UbiLife. Since January four new articles have been either published or accepted for publication, which are summarised as follows: Authors: Teemu H. Laine and Haejung Suk Title: Designing Educational Mobile Augmented Reality Games Using Motivators and Disturbance Factors In book: Augmented Reality Games II: […]

EEG boredom detection resuls

Journal article on a boredom classification model using EEG published

An article describing Jungryul Seo’s boredom classification model using EEG was recently accepted and has now been published. The details of the publication are: Authors: Jungryul Seo, Teemu H. Laine and Kyung-Ah Sohn Title: Machine learning approaches for boredom classification using EEG Journal: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing Abstract: We propose a boredom […]

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Journal article on a step counting algorithm

An article describing Jungryul Seo’s step counting algorithm was recently accepted and has now been published. The details of the publication are: Authors: Jungryul Seo and Teemu H. Laine Title: Accurate position and orientation independent step counting algorithm for smartphones Journal: Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Environments Abstract: We propose the Position and Orientation […]

BERA blog article

Blog article in the BERA blog

Renny Lindberg and yours truly were asked to write a research blog post to  the BERA (British Educational Research Association) blog based on our recent BJET survey article on programming curricula and games (with third author Lassi Haaranen). The blog post is available here.

Programming games survey

A review of programming curricula and games accepted to BJET

I am delighted to announce that the following survey paper has been accepted for publication in the British Journal of Educational Technology: Authors: Renny Lindberg, Teemu H. Laine and Lassi Haaranen Title: Gamifying Programming Education in K-12: A Review of Programming Curricula in Seven Countries and Programming Games Journal: British Journal of Educational Technology Summary: […]

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Formative evaluation of an adaptive programming game

A paper reporting an evaluation of the Minerva programming game with adaptation to the player’s learning and play styles has been accepted to publication in the International Journal of Serious Games: Authors: Renny Lindberg and Teemu H. Laine Title: Formative evaluation of an adaptive game for engaging learners of programming concepts in K-12 Journal: International […]

Boredom detection from EEG and gaze

Boredom Detection from Gaze and EEG

Continuing our research thread on emotion-aware computing, I am happy to announce the following publication accepted to the Biomedical Signal Processing and Control journal with an impact factor of 2.214: Authors: Joochan Kim, Jungryul Seo and Teemu H. Laine Title: Detecting Boredom from Eye Gaze and EEG Journal: Biomedical Signal Processing and Control Summary: Boredom […]

Virtual Campus Tour

A study on UX in mobile AR accepted to Computers

User experience (UX) is often disregarded when novel technologies, such as augmented reality (AR), are developed and experimented with. This article was just accepted to the Computers journal‘s special issue on Advances in Mobile Augmented Reality, and it should be available online soon: Authors: Amir Dirin and Teemu H. Laine Title: User Experience in Mobile […]

Computers special issue cover

The EMARG survey in Computers special issue cover

I am happy to announce that our survey paper on educational mobile augmented reality games made it to the special issue cover (cover image + story): http://www.mdpi.com/2073-431X/7/1 The paper has also been published as open access. Grab a copy and let me know what you think!

Interplay between disturbance factors and motivators

A journal article accepted to the iJIM journal

Today our journal article was accepted to the International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM). This paper is a fruit of a long collaboration with Eeva Nygren and Erkki Sutinen at the University of Turku. Here are the details: Authors: Eeva Nygren, Teemu H. Laine and Erkki Sutinen Title: Dynamics between disturbances and motivations in […]

EMARG review

A review on educational mobile AR games accepted to the Computers journal

I am happy to announce that a systematic literature review on educational mobile augmented reality (AR) games has been accepted to the Computers journal‘s special issue on Advances in Mobile Augmented Reality.   Author: Teemu H. Laine Title: Educational Mobile Augmented Reality Games: A Systematic Literature Review and Two Case Studies Journal: Computers (MDPI) Summary: This […]

ASMP

A conference and a journal paper accepted

Great news at the beginning of the year 2018! Two papers were just accepted: one to the CSEDU 2018 conference and another one to the International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies. The details are as follows: Authors: Amir Dirin and Teemu H. Laine Title: Towards an Adaptive Study Management Platform: Freedom through Personalization Conference: International Conference […]

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Invited seminar presentations at Ajou University

I am honored to visit Ajou University again, this time being invited by Professor Gyuhwan Oh to give two seminar presentations (December 14-15) on the topics related to mobile augmented reality games and software design patterns. We also had productive discussions on how to increase research collaboration between Luleå University of Technology and Ajou in […]

Rönnbäret grant

Research Grant and PhD Position Opening

Woohoo! We were just awarded a research grant by the local Stiftelsen Rönnbäret (Rowan Berry Foundation) under the theme “Gamification and Learning”. The amount of grant is 300,000 SEK / year for three years, and it shall be used for co-funding a PhD student in the research area of: New interaction methods targeting future digital […]

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Paper at Koli Calling

I am happy to announce the latest result of UbiLife’s fruitful collaboration with our fine colleagues at the edTech lab at the University of Eastern Finland. This conference paper will be presented at the Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research on November 16-19, 2017. The paper details are as follows: Authors: Solomon Sunday […]

LTU

Relocation to Sweden

The past 5 and half years in Korea have been amazing in many ways. Ajou University has been a fantastic place to start my academic career after acquiring a PhD. I am deeply grateful to my dear colleagues and students at Ajou University for their collaboration and endless support. Now the time has come to […]

Dinner meeting with Dr. Carolina Islas Sedano

Dr. Carolina Islas Sedano visits UbiLife

We had the pleasure to host Dr. Carolina Islas Sedano from Ubium last week. During her rather hectic visiting schedule, Dr. Carolina delivered two seminars (as per the invitation from Prof. Gyuhwan Oh) in relation to the topics of context-aware game design and entrepreneurship. Moreover, she dedicated her time to have helpful in-depth conversations with […]

CALE survey

Two conference papers at the CSEDU 2017 conference

We are happy to get two papers accepted to the International Conference on Computer Supported Education to be held in Porto, Portugal in April 2017. Details of the papers are as follows: Authors: Renny Lindberg, Aziz Hasanov & Teemu H. Laine Title:  Improving Play and Learning Style Adaptation in a Programming Education Game Summary:  This paper […]

Driving School App

Journal article on user experience and emotional engagement in m-learning

UbiLife’s first article of 2017 has been published! This article presents the design of an m-learning application for driving schools and an evaluation from the perspectives of user experience and emotional engagement. Here are the details: Authors: Amir Dirin, Teemu H. Laine and Marko Nieminen Title: Sustainable usage through emotional engagement: a user experience analysis of […]

Mendeley desktop

Tutorials on Mendeley Desktop Reference Manager

Reference management is serious business. It can be extremely nerve-wrecking to write a paper only to discover that you have been using a wrong reference style for the past 10,000 words. Or that you have to add a few references in the middle of the document that uses numerically ordered citations. Manually maintaining references can […]

University of Eastern Finland

Prof. Laine’s academic tour in Finland

UbiLife’s Professor Teemu H. Laine visited several Finnish partner institutes in January 2017 to present our latest research related to the LAAF-PE project, discuss collaboration, and work on joint publications with our researcher colleagues in Finland. The visited partner institutes included: University of Eastern Finland Ubium Oy Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences Aalto University University […]

Renny Lindberg MSc

Renny Lindberg’s MSc defense

UbiLife researcher Renny Lindberg successfully defended his master’s thesis on December  13th, 2016. The thesis, titled “Minerva: an Adaptive Game for Programming Education”, covers Renny’s research on detection of learning and play styles among children, as well as development and evaluation of a programming education game Minerva that adapts content according to detected styles. Congratulations, […]

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Jungryul Seo’s Presentation at UEF

Our PhD candidate Jungryul Seo has been staying at the School of Computing of University of Eastern Finland as a visiting researcher during 2016 autumn semester. He stayed with Prof. Roman Bednarik’s research team that specializes in eye tracking research. During his stay, Jungryul is investigating emotion detection using eye tracking and EEG signals. On November […]

Minerva featured image

Minerva news

It has been a while! We just published a new project page describing Minerva, UbiLife’s latest smart educatio game. Shortly put, Minerva is an adaptive game for programming education in which adaptation is (currently) based on learning style and play style of the player. Minerva was largely created by our soon-to-be-graduated MSc student Renny Lindberg […]

Rome

CSEDU 2016 Conference

Ubilife participated in the International Conference on Computer Supported Education held in Rome, Italy on April 21-23, 2016. We presented one paper at the conference that discussed about: Different play and learning styles, a questionnaire we made to map these styles and resulting data from testing the questionnaire at a local Korean elementary school. The […]

CANA decision tree

Journal paper on machine learning and dynamic UI accepted

We are pleased to announce that a recent paper on our Context-Aware Nurse Assistant (CANA) application, developed in collaboration with Amir Dirin and others at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, was accepted to the SCIE-indexed Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. Here are the details of the publication: Authors: Nathan Ham, Amir Dirin and […]

Running Othello 2

A transactions journal paper on Running Othello accepted

We are happy to announce our recently accepted article to a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies journal. The paper discusses the latest version of the Running Othello exergame and its evaluation among 61 elementary school children in Korea. Here are the details of the publication: Authors: Renny Lindberg, Jungryul Seo and […]

Mika Luimula

Academic visit by Dr. Mika Luimula from Turku Game Lab

UbiLife was delighted to host Dr. Mika Luimula, the head of Turku Game Lab in Finland, who visited Korea on March 3-4th 2016 as part of his Asian tour. Dr. Luimula works as a principal lecturer at Turku University of Applied Sciences and he also holds an Adjunct Professor position at University of Turku. The purpose […]

playlearning

Ciao, Roma! Conference paper on Detecting Play and Learning Styles accepted

Earlier this month we received news that our conference paper was accepted to the International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU) to be held in Rome on April 21-23, 2016. The paper reports the latest results of our investigation on play and learning styles. The paper details are as follows: Authors: Renny Lindberg & Teemu […]

VTT demo

2016 academic tour in Finland

Ubilife visited several academic institutions in Finland between January 21 and January 28, 2016. This academic tour was supported by our NRF project on context-aware adaptation framework for programming education. We embarked on the tour with a purpose to advertise our project in Finland and discuss collaboration possibilities within the project’s theme. A summarized and […]

2015 end year party

End of 2015 party with Digital Film Lab

UbiLife Lab and Prof. Haejung Suk’s Digital Film Lab celebrated successful year 2015 by enjoying an abundant buffet dinner on December 11. There were 13 of us altogether, including Prof. Suk’s son, a future scientist perhaps 🙂 Many thanks to everybody for this year! Let’s make next year even more successful in all aspects of studies, […]

Leometry AR trap

Science Spots AR journal paper accepted!

An early Christmas present arrived to UbiLife Lab in form of an accepted journal paper on the ScienceSpots AR platform, which is the conceptual and architectural basis for our Leometry game. The paper presents the concept of ScienceSpots AR together with design, implementation and evaluation of Leometry. Here are the details of the publication: Authors: […]

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UbiLife Lab Youtube channel

We have been publishing Youtube videos related to UbiLife Lab research and teaching for some time now. While the existence of UbiLife’s Youtube channel is not “news” in the strictest sense of the word, the number of videos has increased to a point that makes the channel worth announcing. Currently, you can find three playlists […]

Best Professor 2014

Best Professor 2014 award

To much of my surprise, I received the Best Professor 2014 award of Ajou University. It was publicly announced during the annual workshop for Ajou University professors on August 20-21, 2015. The criteria for this award is mostly based on pedagogical merits (e.g., students’ anonymous ratings, passion, innovative teaching style, dedication to improving education).  As […]

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A three-year NRF project on learner-aware programming education

Fantastic news! UbiLife Lab was awarded a three-year project (7/2015 – 6/2018) grant by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea. The project is titled Learner-Aware Adaptation Framework for Programming Education (LAAF-PE), and it aims at facilitating the development of learner-aware programming education games for primary school students. Here is an excerpt from the project […]

Ubilife and Ubium

Visit of Ubium from Finland

During May 12-19 UbiLife Lab was delighted to host Dr. Carolina Islas Sedano and Mr. Mikko Vinni from Ubium, a game company located in Finland. A good relationship that was established a long time ago between Ubium and UbiLife was strengthened during this week. Highlights of the visit included Dr. Carolina’s lecture on hypercontextualized games […]

Joonas Westlin Defense

Joonas Westlin’s MSc Defense (May 14)

On May 14, Joonas Westlin successfully defended his MSc thesis “Middleware system for facilitating context-aware application development on smartphones”, which is essentially an account of research and development work done on the ManySense middleware. The defense committee consisted of Prof. Teemu Laine (Ajou University), Prof. Seok-Won Lee (Ajou University), and Prof. Adil Khan (Innopolis University, […]

UbiLife Lab conquered Ukko-Koli

UbiLife lab’s Tour de Finlande

From January 15 to January 23 we (Professor Teemu Laine, Jungryul Seo, Joonas Westlin and Minbeom Joo) toured southern and eastern Finland on a LINC-UR funded trip to demonstrate our latest research achievements as well as to promote academic and business uses of the ManySense middleware. Specifically, we disseminated our research results at several research […]

IMCOM 2015

Experiencing the ACM IMCOM (ICUIMC) 2015 conference

UbiLife participated in the ACM IMCOM (ICUIMC) 2015 conference held in Bali, Indonesia on January 8-10, 2015. We had two papers accepted to the conference. The first paper was on a context-aware nurse assistant and it was presented by Prof. Teemu H. Laine. The second paper focused on activity detection and it was delivered by […]

CBAR design

Calory Battle AR design journal paper accepted to Games & Culture (SSCI)

Exergames aim to make exercise more enjoyable, especially for children and young adults who are accustomed to digital technologies. Calory Battle AR is a mobile exergame that utilizes context-awareness and augmented reality (AR) to enable interaction with virtual content. Designing mobile exergames and AR interaction has received little scholarly attention. Thus, we wrote a paper […]

Linc_Logo

LINC-UR project funding

LINC-UR (Leaders in Industry-University Cooperation – Undergraduate Research) program run by the Korean Government aims at fostering research of both undergraduate and graduate students. Ubilife was recently selected to partake in the LINC-UR program with a 13,000,000 KRW (~13,000 USD) grant. Our LINC-UR project focuses on polishing the ManySense middleware, particularly its context-awareness module, to […]

CANA main menu

Two ACM IMCOM (ICUIMC) conference papers

We recently submitted two papers to the ACM IMCOM (ICUIMC) 2015 conference to be held in Bali, Indonesia in January 2015. Both papers were accepted as full papers. Below is a short summary of the two accepted papers. First paper describes the concept and design of a novel Context-Aware Nurse Assistant (CANA) system that combines […]

Running Othello

Journal paper on Running Othello accepted

Virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) have been utilized in various fields such as business and education. However, the concept of virtual worlds neglects the learner’s context because everything happens in virtual reality. Context-awareness is essential in learning today, as learners are carrying smartphones which are capable of sensing their immediate context. Thus, we have proposed […]

ManySense

ManySense journal paper accepted

Context-aware applications require data from various data sources (e.g., sensors) in order to infer the user’s constantly changing context. Often these data sources in heterogeneous devices providing different access mechanisms. To simplify the development of context-aware applications on Android platform, we proposed the ManySense context-aware middleware that not only provides a unified API for raw […]

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ScienceSpots AR workshop (March 21, 2014)

On Friday March 21 we hosted a kickoff workshop on the ScienceSpots AR platform concept which aims at providing a technical, pedagogical and motivational environment for creating context-aware story-based games for science learning. ScienceSpots AR will support augmented reality (hence “AR”) much like Calory Battle AR does. The first game to be developed on the […]

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IEEE WF-IoT 2014 in Seoul

The IEEE WF-IoT 2014 conference was held here in Seoul, and we participated with two papers to the conference. The Calory Battle AR short paper, and the Unity 3D paper. As the Calory Battle AR paper was a short paper, we participated in the poster session and had a short presentation in the morning. The […]

uhealthcare_gui_monitoring

Conference paper on U-Healthcare system accepted

This year has started well in terms of papers. Today a paper acceptance modification appeared in my inbox. The paper is about the U-Healthcare system developed in collaboration with Prof. Chaewoo Lee and Prof. Haejung Suk at Ajou University. Here are the paper details: Authors: Teemu H. Laine, Chaewoo Lee and Haejung Suk Title: Mobile gateway […]

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New students

New students have joined the Ubilife team at the beginning of Spring 2014 semester: Jung Ryul Seo is a master course student who will focus on activity recognition and context-awareness in his research. JungRyul’s work will complement Joonas Westlin’s work on context-aware middleware development. Renny Lindberg is a bachelor student from Haaga-Helia University of Applied […]

Activity recognition system

Article on activity recognition

Human activity recognition is an important part of future context-aware applications that are able to customize their behavior by considering not only changes in the user’s environment but also in the user’s activities. Prof. Adil Khan was the first author in this article that was recently accepted to a SCIE journal: Authors: Adil Mehmood Khan, […]

Mobile Learning: The Next Generation

Book chapter in “Mobile Learning: The Next Generation”

Good news again! A book on mobile learning’s next generation will be published later this year with a chapter on technology integration in UFractions: Authors: Teemu H. Laine and Eeva Nygren Title: Technology integration in next generation mobile learning Book title: Mobile Learning: The Next Generation Editors: John Traxler and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme Publisher: Routledge, New […]

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Calory Battle AR short paper/poster accepted!

Previously I wrote that a paper on Calory Battle AR Unity version was accepted to the IEEE IoT conference. We also submitted another paper on the original Calory Battle AR‘s technical architecture which was accepted as a short paper/poster: Authors: Joonas Westlin and Teemu H. Laine Title: Calory Battle AR: An Extensible Mobile Augmented Reality Exergame […]

Calory Battle AR Unity 3D

IEEE conference paper on Calory Battle AR with Unity 3D accepted!

We just received a nice Christmas present to our hard working students (Sung Lae, Joonas, Jeong Hwa and Jun Mo) who created the Calory Battle AR and particularly its Unity 3D version. Their conference paper was accepted: Authors: Sung Lae Kim, Teemu H. Laine, Hae Jung Suk, Joonas Westlin,  Jeong Hwa Kang and Jun Mo […]

UFractions session

Journal paper on active and passive technology integration accepted!

I’m happy to announce that our journal paper has been accepted for publication with minor revisions: Authors: Teemu H. Laine and Eeva Nygren Title: Active and passive technology integration: a novel approach for managing technology’s influence on learning experiences in context-aware learning spaces Journal: Technology, pedagogy and education (SSCI) The paper describes the concepts of active […]

Ubilife

Ubilife website launched!

After two months of on/off work on the website, today I can proudly launch it officially! This website contains detailed information about my past and present research projects, publications, teaching portfolio and collaborating people. Many of the projects were created with Dr. Carolina Islas Sedano and Mikko Vinni who are co-founders of Ubium Oy with […]