Xavier Bonaventura, researcher at the GILAB research group and member of the Institute of Informatics and Applications, obtained a PhD on 10 July. Her dissertation was supervised by Miquel Feixas and Mateu Sbert and is entitled ‘Perceptual information-theoretic measures for viewpoint selection and object recognition’.

Marius Vila, researcher at the GILAB research group and member of the Institute of Informatics and Applications, obtained a PhD on 9 July. Her dissertation was supervised by Miquel Feixas and Mateu Sbert and is entitled ‘Information theory techniques for multimedia data classification and retrieval’.

Mateu Sbert, director of the GILAB research group, delivered a talk on serious games at the University of Reims Champagne – Ardenne (URCA) on 23 April. Invited by URCA’s Centre de Recherche en Sciences et Techniques de l’Information et de Communication (CReSTIC), Prof Sbert gave the seminar “IMSERIOUS et le rendu expressif pour les jeux sérieux”. During the seminar, Sbert explained the goals and first outcomes of IMSERIOUS, project which aims to improve the creation, rendering and management of digital contents for serious games.

IMSERIOUS is a three-year R&D project sponsored by the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness (Grant Reference: TIN2013-47276-C6-1-R).

GILAB participated at the fair “Ciència entre tots” (science together) 2015. The 2nd edition of the event, organized by the Catalan Government’s Gironès Educational Service, took place in Girona on 25 April. GILAB’s researchers Xavier Bonaventura, Juan Manuel García and Antonio Rodríguez exhibited educational videogames, explained visitors how to make a serious game and also informed about the Universtiy of Girona’s new degree on videogames.

Mateu Sbert, Director of the GILAB research group, participated at the workshop Philosophy of Information and Information Processing (PIIP 2015). The event, organized by the American University’s Info-metrics Institute, took place at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, on 27 March. Prof Sbert gave the paper “Information Theory and Aesthetics”. Mateu Sbert is a pioneer researcher in the field of computational aesthetics. He organized the 1st International symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization and Imaging in Girona in 2005 and co-organized a Dagstuhl seminar on the same subject in 2006.

Dr Imma Boada, senior researcher at GILAB, participated at the 1st Girona Conference on Research on Neuroscience.The event, co-organized by the University of Girona (UdG) and the Institute of Biomedical Research of Girona (IdibGi) took place at the UdG on 13 March. Boada presented GILAB’s research lines with applications to neuroscience such as new methods to visualize and process digital radiological images, serious games and e-learning environments. Boada also presented final products developed by the group under her direction such as Starviewer, a radiological viewer that automates many diagnostic tasks, RECOGNITIC, an e-learning platform that shares knowledge on cognitive rehabilitation, and EduBody a platform to visualize and explore the human body in 3D.

Olga Petrenko, researcher at the GILAB research group and member of the Institute of Informatics and Applications, obtained a PhD on 12 December. Her dissertation was supervised by Prof Mateu Sbert, director of GILAB, and Djamchid Ghazanfarpour, Professor of Informatics at Université de Limoges, and is entitled ‘Simulation of Flowering Plants’.

Mateu Sbert, director of the GILab, conducted a research stay at Yunnan University  in Kunming, China, on 24 – 29 November. During the stay Sbert delivered the talk ‘Informational Aesthetic Measures and the Evolution of Van Gogh’s Artwork’. The talk focused on the analysis of Van Gogh’s style using informational measures based on the entropy of the palette, the compressibility of the image, an information channel to capture the basic structure of the painting, and other entropy-based measures that take into account spatial information.

Alessandro Artusi, member of the GILAB, participated at the HDRi COST Action meeting which took place in Brno, Czech Republic, on 9 – 11 October. This action, with reference IC1005, brings together leading academic and industrial researchers and practitioners in Europe to propose a set of standards for Higy Dynamic Range imaging (HDRi) technologies. HDR improves digital imaging and photography because it captures, stores, transmits and displays real-world lighting.

Dr Alessandro Artusi is a Ramón y Cajal fellow at the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory and member of the HDRi Cost Action management committee.

Mateu Sbert, Director of GILAB, made a keynote speech at VRCAI 2014, the International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry. It was entitled ‘Advances in middle-ware and content creation tools for serious games’. The 13th edition of VRCAI, organised and sponsored by ACM-SIGGRAPH, took place in Shenzhen, China on 1 – 2 December. The event, provided an international forum for researchers, users and industry leaders in the field of Virtual Reality Continuum (VRC). Virtual Reality Continuum (VRC) emphasizes the consistence of virtual world and the real world. Spanning across next-generation info-communication environments like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). VRC is key in the way we define and interact, with and within, our virtual worlds.