IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015 - 72

there, the participants are there, and so are the potentially
strong interactions and outcomes.
However, we can assist these F2F meetings with the
available technology, especially consumer technology. Gone
are the days when each participant had a computer with him
or her during the conference. Many now use their mobile
devices such as tablets and smartphones. This is why we
have made a special effort to publish the proceedings on the
cloud rather than on a USB stick. This requires that each CE
Society conference provide a Wi-Fi connection to all participants during the whole length of the conference. It is not
always easy to get it, but we are of the opinion that it is
worth the effort.

The IEEE GEM community has a
Facebook page where attendees
are encouraged to participate
before, during, and after
the conference.
The same applies to social media. The IEEE GEM community has a Facebook page where attendees are encouraged to
participate before, during, and after the conference. In future
conferences, participants will be encouraged to publish Tweets
during the conference with a hashtag corresponding to the particular conference session they are attending. This way, members of the community and others will have access to some of
the technical material and experiences of the conference.
We realize that the technical content of a conference is not
the whole story. In a game-focused conference, it is appropriate for the participants to practice what they preach and test
and experience first hand the technology that they and others
are developing. This will help develop a fuller understanding
of its potential advantages and pitfalls.
In a conference on health, for example, it might be appropriate to include some public activities that promote health,
such as an exercise session in public before some talks. We
experimented with this concept at the Sydney eHealthcare
Workshop in December 2014 and at the 2015 International
Conference on Consumer Electronics in Las Vegas in January.
The results were quite encouraging.

BRINGING DISPARATE SOCIETY
ACTIVITIES TOGETHER
The IEEE GEM community has also worked to bring together
activities of the IEEE CE Society that are traditionally disparate
for the benefit of the Society and its members. The conference
was conducted, for example, with tight coordination with the
IEEE Toronto Section and the Toronto Chapter of IEEE CE
Society. In the coming year, IEEE GEM 2015 plans to hold an
72 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

july 2015

IEEE CE Society Toronto Chapter meeting and Distinguished
Lecturer presentations for the local Chapter around the time of
the conference, just to mention a few Society activities. As with
IEEE GEM 2014, the 2015 IEEE GEM conference will be coordinated together with the IEEE Toronto Section.

CONFERENCE LEADERSHIP
The conference chair was Bill Kapralos (University of Ontario
Institute of Technology), the conference cochair was Nahum
Gershon (The MITRE Corporation), the program chair was
Elena Bertozzi (Quinnipiac University), and the tutorial chair
was Jim Parker (University of Calgary). The Program Committee consisted of more than 30 well-known international experts
in games, entertainment, and media. The administration was
skillfully orchestrated by Charlotte Kobert.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Nahum Gershon (schmooz@mac.com) is a senior principal
scientist at The MITRE Corporation. His current interests
include people, communities, playfulness and games, visualization, storytelling, the Internet of Things, and social media.
He is right- and left-brain enabled. (The author's affiliation
with the MITRE Corporation is provided for identification
purposes only and is not intended to convey or imply
MITRE's concurrence with, or support for, the positions,
opinions, or viewpoints expressed by the author.)
Bill Kapralos (bill.kapralos@uoit.ca) is an associate professor in the Game Development and Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. His
current research interests include serious games, real-time
acoustical modeling, and three-dimensional (spatial) sound
generation for virtual environments and video games, multimodal virtual environments/reality, and the perception of
auditory events.
Steve Mann (mann@eyetap.org) is widely regarded as
"The Father of Wearable Computing" (IEEE ISSCC 2000).
His work as an artist, scientist, designer, and inventor made
Toronto the world's epicenter of wearable technologies in the
1980s, and it remains so to the present day. In 1992, he
founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media
Lab's Wearable Computing Project, and in 1998, he invented
the smartwatch videophone (wearable computer). Some of
his other inventions include high dynamic range imaging,
now used in nearly every commercially manufactured camera, and the EyeTap Digital Eye Glass, which predates the
Google Glass by 30 years. He is currently the chief scientist
at Meta, a California-based start-up.

REFERENCES
[1] N. Gershon and S. G. Eick, "Information visualization," IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl., vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 29-31, 1997.
[2] S. Mann. (2014, Oct.). SELF-HII: Strength+ endurance+ longevity
through gameplay with humanistic intelligence by Fieldary Human
Information Interaction, in Proc. IEEE Games, Entertainment, and
Media Conf. (GEM), pp. 1-8. [Online]. Available: http://wearcam.org/
fieldary.pdf

http://www.wearcam.org/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015