This month nine different members of SACHI will be travelling to Belgrade, Lisbon, Singapore, Berlin and Munich to attend womENcourage ’18, VL/HCC ’18, UbiComp 2018, UIST 2018, ISMAR 2018 and IEEE VIS 2018.

womENcourage ’18

At the start of October Maheshya and Adrianna will attend womENcourage ’18 in Belgrade. Adrianna is posters co-chair in 2018 and serves on the steering committee for this conference series. Maheshya will present two posters on “Novel Technologies in Teaching and Learning towards Enhanced Knowledge Retention” Maheshya Weerasinghe, Matjaž Kljun, Klen Čopič Pucihar and Aaron Quigley and “An Active Video Game Based Lower Limb Rehabilitation Approach to Assist Children with Cerebral Palsy” Maheshya Weerasinghe. Adrianna is involved with a further two posters on “Self-Flip: How Learning through Making Can Flip the Classroom” Anna Vasilchenko and Adriana Wilde and the “Impact of Design Decisions in Information Visualization: two takes on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites dataset” Paulina Busch, Eszter Kocsis and Adriana Wilde.

VL/HCC ’18

From Oct 1st Daniel will be in Lisbon to present two papers. First, a paper “Towards end-user development for chronic disease management” Rough, DJ & Quigley, AJ 2018, in Designing Technologies to Support Human Problem Solving: A Workshop in Conjunction with VL/HCC 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, Oct. 1, 2018. After this Daniel is presenting a full paper entitled “End-user development in social psychology research: factors for adoption.” Rough, DJ & Quigley, AJ 2018, at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2018). in Lisbon, Portugal.

Ubicomp and ISWC ’18

From October 7th, Aaron and Tristan will be attending Ubicomp 2018 in Singapore. Tristan will present “How portable is portable? Exercising the GDPR’s Right to Data Portability” Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Legal and Technical Issues in Cloud and Pervasive Computing (CLaw 2018) collocated with Ubicomp. While Aaron will give a talk on “Becoming a Volunteer at ACM SIGCHI and SIGMOBILE”, register here.

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Title: The story of Swarachakra – Cracking the puzzle of text input in Indian languages

Abstract: There was a time when text input in Indian languages was called a ‘puzzle’. People found it so difficult that became a barrier that prevented them from using most other technology products, from doing common tasks such as searching the web or saving a contact. As a result, Indians typed very little in their own languages. The Roman script (in which we write English) is an Alphabet. In contrast, a large majority of Indian scripts are Abugidas – a different type of scripts. In our lab, we were convinced that we need different solutions – what works for Alphabets may not work for Abugidas. Over the years we explored several designs. Our early solutions were for desktop computers. Later we developed concepts for the feature phones. We tried several creative ideas and made prototypes. We got interesting results in the lab. We published papers and case studies. But beyond that, we could not reach out and make a difference to the end-users. Then smartphones arrived, and quickly became popular. It became relatively easier to develop and deploy keyboards. Again, we tried several ideas. One solution stood out in comparison with others. We called it “Swarachakra”. Today, Swarachakra is available for 12 Indian languages and has been downloaded by about 4 million users. What was the problem, and how was it solved? And what challenges remain? Come to the talk to find out.

Speaker biography: Anirudha Joshi is professor in the interaction design stream in the IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay, India, though currently he is on a sabbatical, visiting universities in the UK. His specialises in design of interactive products for emergent users in developing economies. He has worked in diverse domains including healthcare, literacy, Indian language text input, banking, education, industrial equipment, and FMCG packaging. Anirudha also works in the area of integrating HCI activities with software engineering processes. He has developed process models, tools, and metrics to help HCI practitioners deliver a better user experience. Anirudha is active with HCI communities in India and outside. He has chaired in various roles in several conferences including India HCI, INTERACT and CHI. Since 2007, he represents India on IFIP TC13. He is the founding director of HCI Professionals Association of India since 2013. Since 2015 he is the Liaison for India for the ACM SIGCHI Asian Development Committee. Since 2016, he has been the VP Finance of the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee. Anirudha has diverse backgrounds. He is a BTech (1989) in Electrical Engineering, an MDes (1992), in Visual Communication Design, and a PhD (2011) in Computer Science and Engineering, all from IIT Bombay.

Title:  Digital Civics: Infrastructuring Participatory Citizenship

Abstract:  Firstly, this is not technical talk, its a talk about a research initiative in “Digital Civics” that Open Lab is undertaking primarily with partners in the North East of England, but also nationally and internationally. Digital Civics proposes the use of digital technologies in the provision of relational models of public services, that is, models that take as a starting point the potential of digital technologies to support citizen-focused sharing of knowledge, experience and resources. By framing government as more than simply the provider of uniform and mechanistic services, digital civics aims to leverage technology to foster environments in which local agents (e.g. charities, local businesses, citizens) are able to solve problems together. Digital Civics research is inherently cross-disciplinary, action-oriented and place-based, and this requires us (as academic researchers) to configure ourselves differently to the communities with whom we conduct our research. In this talk I will be describing examples of our digital civics research, from applications in community engagement and education to public health and social justice, as well as the trajectory and pragmatics of the overall endeavour.

Speaker biography:  Patrick Olivier is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing, Newcastle University, UK. He founded and leads Open Lab, Newcastle University’s centre for cross-disciplinary research in digital technologies. His research interests span interaction design, social computing and ubiquitous computing, particularly in public service and civic application contexts (education, public health and social justice). He is director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics (55 cross-disciplinary PhD students) and the EPSRC Digital Economy Research Centre (a multidisciplinary five-year project involving 25 postdocs).

Google scholar:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=CUu9heMAAAAJ

ORCID:

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2841-7580

Open Lab:

https://openlab.ncl.ac.uk/

Digital Civics:

https://digitalcivics.io/