About

SACHI is the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group (a HCI Group) based in the School of Computer Science (location details). SACHI was established in February 2011 with dedicated facilities.  Members of SACHI co-supervise research students, collaborate on various projects and activities, share access to research equipment and our HCI laboratory. As the group develops, we aim to have a regular seminar series and to act a focal point for human computer interaction research across the University of St Andrews and beyond.
The user interface (hardware and software) represents the point of contact between a computer system and people and this is where the interaction occurs. For us, this interaction is studied both in terms of input to the system and output from the system but security, intent, privacy, preference, emotion etc. are also considered. One starting point is that the myriad of hardware, software, systems, sensors, and services we have today all act as a computational edifice around which we need realise our future user interfaces. This is often not the case today where single device constrained interfaces make use of bespoke data services available from the device or via network access. For us, many of the challenges in HCI stem not from such prosaic or common place embedded, desktop or mobile interfaces but instead the interfaces required when “computation is everywhere and computer functions are integrated into everything“. Hence, the broad motivation stems from the desire to bridge the divide between the physical world where our experience is, and the digital world where the power of computing currently resides.
The mission for SACHI is to develop into a world-leading human computer interaction research group. Working as a group our aim is to research aspects of advanced human interface technologies to bridge the digtial-physical divide. The current director of SACHI is Professor Aaron Quigley.
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