St Andrews HCI Research Group

04

Apr 2011

Applications OPEN for Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism Summer School


Applications to attend our SICSA Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism to be held in St Andrews from June 27th – July 1, 2011 are now open. Full details can be found on our Summer School website at sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt. Thanks to all our guest lecturers who are coming from far and wide and to everyone in SACHI for helping out with this summer school (and we mean everyone!).
The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation.
We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are proving a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a MERL Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.
In addition, Ben Arent a leading interaction designer based in Dublin has agreed to host (subject to sufficient interest) a day long Arduino workshop for interested participants on Sunday June 26th.
Seminar Topics
– Multimodal Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Multimodal Interaction with the Android platform
– Creating Engaging Visitor Experiences in Museums and Heritage sites
– Multimodal Interaction with spatial data
– Speech-driven, hands-free, eyes-free navigation
– Haptic Tabletop Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Natural language generation for Multimodal Interaction
– Mobility as a challenge for interaction design, Tourism as a special case
– Multimodal Augmented-Reality Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Designing context aware-systems
Speakers
– Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow
– Tristan Henderson, University of St Andrews
– Eva Hornecker, University of Strathclyde
– Antonio Krüger, Saarland University
– William Mackaness, University of Edinburgh
– Miguel Nacenta, University of Calgary
– Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
– Antti Oulasvirta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
– Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews
– Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart
The deadline for applications to attend is May 3rd, with notifications by May 9th. Participation is limited to 30 and we expect a mix of both national and international participants. The registration fee is £450, which covers four nights of accommodation (Mon – Fri) in St Andrews, breakfast, lunch, dinner and summer school materials. Also included is a welcome reception and farewell dinner. An optional Arduino workshop (with Sunday night accommodation) is an additional £70.
The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) is providing 16 grants to cover the £450 registration fee for PhD students from most Scottish Universities. See SICSA website for details: http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/
See the summer school website for a full programme, biographies of speakers and full details for applications: http://sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt
The school is directed by Aaron Quigley (University of St Andrews), Eva Hornecker (University of Strathclyde), Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh) and Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow).