Prof. Erik Champion

Enterprise Fellow, Director, Playful Cultures Lab, Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments (IVE), University of South Australia

Short Bio

Erik is an Enterprise Fellow at the University of South Australia (Creative-Architecture), Honorary Professor at ANU Centre for Digital Humanities Research (CDHR), Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia and Emeritus Professor at Curtin University. In 2023 he was invited to be an adjunct professor at Universitas Bunda Mulia, Jakarta, he is a Senior Associate at Outside Opinion, and in 2021 he was a visiting scholar in Finland. He was previously UNESCO Chair of Cultural Heritage and Visualisation, and Professor at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. He was also CIC Visualisation Theme Leader and Steering Committee member at the Curtin Institute for Computation (CIC). He was recently a chief investigator on four Australian Research Council grants (involving research infrastructures and cultural heritage) and an Australian Research Data Commons Platform Grant. He trained as an architect / architectural historian, received a second master’s (with honours) in philosophy, a Graduate Certificate (with VC Commendation) in Digital Learning Futures, and his ARC Scholarship PhD was from two Faculties (Geomatics-Engineering and Architecture-Melbourne School of Design) with Lonely Planet as the industry partner. He has been teaching multimedia since 1990. He specializes in virtual heritage and serious games. Web site: https://erikchampion.wordpress.com/about/

Title: Immersive Visualisation and the Emergence of Collaborative XR in the Museum Sector

Abstract

In this talk, I will explore the increasing promise of extended reality (XR), new sensory data and immersive experiences, and recent emerging visualisation strategies for conveying increasingly immersive and data-driven possibilities for the museum sector. Some recent projects I will cover include the Australian Cultural Data Engine, the Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia, and smaller case studies and experiments in data-driven story-mapping, mixed, augmented, and virtual reality. A key issue is immersive literacy: how designers can cater to the visualisation and navigation issues of the general public not yet experienced in these emerging rich, multimodal, but potentially overpowering or confusing immersive experiences. I will sketch out concepts that may be borrowed from game design to engage, entice, and also encourage audiences to explore this new and more immersive world of big data.

Prof. Panos Constantopoulos

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Informatics, UNESCO Chair on Digital Methods for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Short Bio

Panos Constantopoulos is Professor Emeritus of Informatics and head of the UNESCO Chair for Digital Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Athens University of Economics and Business, and former Professor at the University of Crete. He has founded and led the Center for Cultural Informatics at the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (1992-2004), the Digital Curation Unit at the “Athena” Research Center (2007-), the MSc in Digital Methods for the Humanities at the Athens University of Economics and Business (2018-2022), and he is the coordinator of “APOLLONIS”, the Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation. His scientific interests include knowledge representation and conceptual modelling, ontology engineering, semantic information access, process mining, knowledge management and decision support systems, cultural informatics, and digital curation and preservation. Web site: https://www.aueb.gr/en/faculty_page/constantopoulos-panos

Jill Cousins

Retired Director & CEO of The Hunt Museum now working on projects in the Museum sector across Europe and Chairing the Discover Limerick DAC.  Jill founded Europeana with the European Commission and EU Ministries of culture. Working now in the museum sector she makes use of her entrepreneurial skills and understanding of the possibilities created by technologies for cultural experiences, participation and communication. She believes that a modern museum has to work on three platforms: the Human with its networks, professionals and volunteers; the Physical in care and innovative display of its collections and the Virtual making use of digital to reach the wider world. 

Her past experience includes the commercial publishing world as European Business Development Director of VNU New Media and scholarly publishing with Blackwell Publishing running their online journals service.  Prior to publishing she had a variety of marketing and research careers in the information field.   Jill holds a Ph.D in Geography on Sixteenth Century Arabic and Turkish Sea-charts.

Title: Why Might a Common Vision Matter for Cultural Data?

Abstract

This talk looks at what has contributed to museum data becoming open data.   The hypothesis is that previously to get large amounts of cultural heritage data open on the web a common vision is needed for organisations and governments to coalesce around. Looking, very conceptually, at continents, countries, large museums and a small encyclopedic museum from the West of Ireland thought is given to the place of a vision in the delivery of open data from the museum sector. 

Prof. Laurent d’Orazio

Professor at Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA

Short Bio

Laurent d’Orazio has been a Professor at Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA since 2016. He received his PhD degree in computer science from Grenoble National Polytechnic Institute in 2007. He was an Associate Professor at Blaise Pascal University and LIMOS CNRS, Clermont-Ferrand from 2008 to 2016. His research interests include (big) data algorithms and architectures, distributed and parallel databases. He has published papers in Information Systems, Sigmod Record, EDBT and CCGrid. He served in Program Committees in SSDBM, ICCCN, BPM DaWaK and workshops affiliated to VLDB, EDBT, Big Data etc., and Reviewing Committees in Information Sciences, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. He is or has been involved (sometimes as a coordinator) in research projects such as the PHC Jules Vernes IDENTITY project (2024-2025), the NSF MOCCAD project (2013-2019), the ANR SYSEO project (2010-2015) and the STIC ASIA GOD project (2013-2015). Web site: https://perso.univ-rennes1.fr/laurent.dorazio/

Title: Big Data in museum, a brief history of cloud data management and perspectives

Abstract

Conceptually introduced in the 1960s, cloud computing is now used in various applications such as healthcare, astrophysics, and smart cities. In this context, data management (from collection to visualization, as well as storage and processing) is crucial. This is why cloud databases have attracted significant attention over the past two decades. Considering the potential in museums, this presentation aims to provide a brief history of cloud data management, highlighting key concepts in distributed systems, and data management systems. It will then present some perspectives related to multi-objective optimization, hardware acceleration, green IT and security.