Scheible JÃ - Mobile Python : Rapid prototyping of applications on the mobile platform

Jrgen Scheible

Jrgen Scheible is a designer, media artist and musician who holds a degree in telecommunications from Karlsruhe, Germany. After graduating, he worked for eight years at Nokia in Finland pursuing various positions such as programmer, product manager and competence transfer manager. Besides his occupation, he performed and produced music as well as media art under the pseudonym Lenin's Godson.

In 2003, he left his engineering career to concentrate full-time on his creative career, because he felt his heart was much more in his artistic works than in engineering. In 2004, he became a doctoral student at the Media Lab at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, where he established the Mobile Hub, a prototype development environment for mobile client and server applications. It has a strong focus on artistic approaches and creative design, and serves as a resource to art and design students who use mobile technology as part of their projects. His doctoral research focuses on designing multimodal user interfaces for creating and sharing interactive artistic experiences.

Since 2004, he has been evangelizing Python for S60 as one of its pioneers. He is internationally active having given talks and taught innovation workshops in both academic and professional settings on more than 40 occasions, in places such as Stanford University, MIT, NTU Taiwan, Yahoo Research Berkeley, Tsinghua University Beijing, Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks, in more than 17 countries. His focus is on rapid mobile application prototyping using creative approaches for innovation.

In 2006, he spent several months as a visiting scientist at MIT, Boston in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Jrgen was recognized as a Forum Nokia Champion in 2006 and 2007 for his driving vision of building bridges between art, engineering and research. He was one of the winners of the ACM Computers in Entertainment Scholarship Award in 2006 and of the Best Arts Paper Award at ACM Multimedia 2005 conference.

The philosophy behind his works is to bring back the depth of human feelings and emotional aspects to the digital world which, in his opinion, were lost with the arrival of the fast-paced digital production technology. By inspiring others with his works, he gets inspired himself. This leads him to many new ideas for designing new kinds of interactive experiences for people, especially in the area of mobile phone applications that fuse the real and the virtual worlds. He believes this era will change the way we live and communicate in the future and it will transform societies. Therefore it is important, in his opinion, to design for these coming applications.

Ville Tuulos

Ville Tuulos is currently a researcher in the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Finland. He has more than 15 years' experience of creative hacking, including data visualization, web search engines, and machine-learning algorithms. He has been an enthusiastic Pythonista since 2000 and he has been exploring and extending the limits of Python for S60 since 2005. He has used it to implement, among others, real-time image processing algorithms, various positioning techniques and an urban game for 200 players in New York City.