Emmanuel Rovithis

Vasileios Komianos, Emmanuel Rovithis, Athanasios Tsipis

This paper presents an analysis of five years (2021 - 2025) of conference discourse across six digital art conferences, aiming to trace thematic shifts associated with the rapid development of emerging technologies, namely artificial intelligence (AI), immersive technologies (including XR and the metaverse), and blockchain technologies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The results indicate a marked increase in AI-related contributions, while immersive technologies maintain a relatively stable share of the discourse, and blockchain- and NFT-based works remain marginal. Overall, whereas immersive technologies and blockchain-related topics exhibit relative stability, AI shows a significant rise after 2022, emerging as a dominant theme within digital art conference discourse.

Emmanuel Rovithis, Nikolaos Moustakas, Konstantinos Vogklis et al.

Citizen Science aims to engage people in research activities on important issues related to their well-being. Smart Cities aim to provide them with services that improve the quality of their life. Both concepts have seen significant growth in the last years, and can be further enhanced by combining their purposes with IoT technologies that allow for dynamic and large-scale communication and interaction. However, exciting and retaining the interest of participants is a key factor for such initiatives. In this paper we suggest that engagement in Citizen Science projects applied on Smart Cities infrastructure can be enhanced through contextual and structural game elements realized through augmented audio interactive mechanisms. Our inter-disciplinary framework is described through the paradigm of a collaborative bird call recognition game, in which users collect and submit audio data, which are then classified and used for augmenting physical space with virtual soundscape maps. We discuss the Playful Learning, Internet of Audio Things, and Bird Monitoring principles that shaped the design of our paradigm, and analyze its potential technical implementation.