By popular request, we provide a look at open source in video games. Two excellent talks one looking at the general area of opening up vidoegames, the second looking at cutting edge use of open source gaming to help children with ASD.
Once again, due to COVID-19 this will be a purely virtual meeting. We’ll be livestreaming using BigBlueButton to provide a rich online experience for participants. As always the talks will be recorded for later upload to YouTube. You are invited to join and socialize from 18:00, talks will run from 18:30-20:00 with 30 minutes at the end for further discussion and socializing.
In a change to our past practice there is no requirement to register, you can just connect to BigBlueButton on this link.
AGENDA
18:00 – Feel free to join the online meeting to chat with other participants
18:30 – Short introduction (5 min) of the evening by Mary Bennett
18:35 – Presentations
20:00 – Closing Discussion
We were live streaming via BigBlueButton and recording the talks for later posting on YouTube.
Opening Up Videogames
Lex Roberts
The National Videogame Museum’s most important maxim is ‘videogames are for everyone’. Empowering our audiences to play, understand and make videogames is at the core of everything we do. This is a behind the scenes look at how the NVM is using open source software, open hardware and open data to achieve those goals through game development, game interpretation, and game preservation, as well as its ambitions for the future.
Lex is part of the curatorial and exhibition team at the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield. They are an avid programmer and maker of things, both digital and physical. Lex helped establish the London chapter of the Code Liberation Foundation, which fosters the creation of games and creative technologies by women and non-binary people. They now sit on OpenUK’s museum committee, a not for profit organisation committed to develop and sustain UK leadership in Open Technology.
Virtual Social Robot Interaction for Enhancing the Social Skills of Children with ASD
Maha Hatem
Social skills training (SST) programmes are extremely important to train and enhance the social skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). SST programmes are designed to provide learning experiences to teach children the necessary skills to interact successfully with their social environment. Although traditional SST interventions were proven to be beneficial for children with ASD by many previous studies, their accessibility is limited. Physical social robots and virtual environments have been popular training tools for children with ASD in recent years. Studies have been conducted to evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing the social skills of children with ASD. The research presented in this talk investigates the potential of combining virtual environments with social robots as a novel approach to address some of their limitations and train the social skills of children with high-functioning ASD. A non-immersive (desktop) virtual reality environment that employs a 3D robot has been designed. The developed environment aims to enhance the social skills of children with high-functioning ASD through a social skills training programme guided by a parent or a teacher. The motivation of this research is providing a tool that can be widely accessible, cheap and easily used by parents and teachers either at home or at school. The designed training programme is adapted and modified from successful work has been done with physical robots (NAO, Zeno, and Qtrobot) to train the social skills of children with ASD. The developed training programme targets three social skills: imitation skills, emotion recognition skills, and intransitive gestures skill. Due to the current circumstances (COVID-19) and the closure of the schools and centres for autism, the experimental studies have been conducted on-line and onsite. The proposed tool has been launched on a website to make it accessible to a wider group and enable data collection over time. Questionnaires and observation sheet have been designed for data collection pre and post-intervention sessions. Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the University of Greenwich Research Ethics (UREC).
A preliminary evaluation has been conducted to ensure that the gestures produced by the virtual robot can be recognised by the children with ASD. Eight typically developed children without ASD (6-12 years) have participated in this preliminary evaluation, they have been asked to identify the meaning of the gestures demonstrated by the virtual robot in one of the training scenarios. The findings show that all the gestures had a consistency rate of 75% or above. That is an indication that the animated gestures performed by the virtual robot are recognisable and have a common interpretation. The evaluation process is still in progress with seven children with ASD. The emotion recognition training programme has been finished, and the participants showed improvement between the pre and post-tests in all phases.
Maha Hatem is a PhD candidate at the University of Greenwich, London. She is conducting research related to autism and how assistive technology can enhance their social skills. This developed tool is a free desktop virtual reality tool for enhancing the social skills of children with ASD. The tool is still in the evaluation process, and the evaluation is part of her PhD.
More and more vendors and suppliers in the automotive sector utilize open-source software. On this thematic evening, we’ll look into various aspects of automotive.
AGENDA
18:20 – Feel free to join the online meeting to chat with other participants
18:30 – Short introduction (5 min) of the evening by Julian Kunkel and Daniel Broomhead
18:35 – Presentations
20:35 – Closing Discussion
We were live streaming via BigBlueButton and recording the talks for later posting on YouTube.
Cross-platform open-source ECU diagnostic
With the ever increasing complexity and propriatary implementations of car diagnostic software, OpenVehicleDiag tries to provide a universal and open source tool for running car diagnostics, based upon the Passthru API, converting propriatary data formats into a common JSON schema. In the first part of this presentation, I will be discussing the process of creating an open source Rust based Passthru driver for Macchina’s M2 Under-the-dash ODB-II adapter, and the process of unoficially porting the API to UNIX systems. In the second half of the presentation, I will be discussing the process of creating OpenVehicleDiag using a Rust Passthru API backend and a JS Electron GUI, along with the process of converting Daimler CBF files into a common JSON format that can be applied universally to other OEM’s.
Ashcon Mohseninia is a computer science student at the University of Reading who has a passion for car hacking and open source software. Most noticeably known for installing a totally custom infotainment system on his Mercedes and reverse engineering its entire CANBUS network to achieve a ton of cool features that even modern cars lack. He got into open source car diagnostics after creating a custom Passthru API adapter from an Arduino in order to clear error codes from his car’s TCU after a simple mechanical fault rendered the car useless, and Mercedes attempted to charge a ludicrous amount of money to simply clear the error code stored on the TCU module. Visit his YouTube channel.
Automotive Penetration Testing with Open Source Software
In the recent years, automotive penetration testing became more and more important. We decided to contribute to an open source project to build a Swiss army knife for automotive penetration testing. This talk summarizes our journey in the world of automotive protocols and open source software development. We explain the automotive protocol stack, existing open source software solutions for different purposes and give some insights into the capabilities of our own tools. Finally, we discuss the importance for open tools for the security community as well as the benefits for OEMs and suppliers.
Nils Weiss is PhD students at the Laboratory for Safe and Secure Systems (las3.de) of the University of Applied Sciences in Regensburg. He is focusing on automotive security research since more than 4 years. After an internship at Tesla Motors, Nils decided to start with automotive security research. During his bachelor and master program, he started with penetration testing of entire vehicle. Besides penetration testing of automotive systems, he is contributing to open source penetration testing frameworks for automotive systems (Scapy).
Automotive Grade Linux: Driving Innovation and Collaboration
The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) community consists of more than 150 companies across the automotive and tech industries who are working together to develop an open source software platform for all in-vehicle applications from infotainment to autonomous driving. Sharing a single software platform across the industry decreases development times so OEMs and suppliers can focus on rapid innovation and bringing products to market faster. Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux, will provide an overview of AGL, production use cases including Toyota and Subaru, the project roadmap, and how to get involved.
Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux at the Linux Foundation
Dan Cauchy has over 22 years of experience spanning the automotive, telecom, networking, and mobile business verticals. Prior to his current position, he was the VP and GM of MontaVista’s Automotive Business Unit (acquired by Mentor). During this period, Cauchy served on the Board of Directors of the GENIVI Alliance and was responsible for the creation of the GENIVI Compliance Program, which he chaired for three years. Cauchy has also held senior management and engineering leadership positions at Cisco Systems, Newbridge Networks (acquired by Alcatel) and Nortel, and his startup startup experience includes Atrica (acquired by Nokia-Siemens Networks) and BlueLeaf Networks (now Picarro).