Academics in SACHI are now actively recruiting PhD students. The School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews has funding for students to undertake PhD research in any of the general research areas in the school. If you are interested in postgraduate research in the area of Human Computer Interaction then please visit our scholarship page on this site for further details and links.
News
Congratulations to Aaron Quigley and his colleagues in the Univeristies of Edinburgh and York for their recent grant success with JISC. Their project “Trading Consequences” (Universities of Edinburgh, York and St Andrews) will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents. The project will have a global scope while using Canadian natural resource flows as a way of testing the reliability and efficacy of the data produced. The sources for our study will be a large collection of digitised documents from the period in question, and we will use text mining – more specifically, information extraction – to transform unstructured text into structured data. This innovative digital resource will allow historians to discover novel patterns and to explore new hypotheses, both through structured query and through visualisation.
“This is one of 11 projects funded by eight international research organisations from four countries – including JISC, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the arts and humanities research council (AHRC) from the UK – the successful 14 teams are mixed groups of researchers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States. The projects will receive grants of over £3m in total to investigate how computational techniques typically applied to the sciences can also be applied to change humanities and social sciences research.”
For now, you can see more on the JISC website “Eight international research funders announce winners of 2011 Digging into Data challenge“.
Congratulations to Miguel Nacenta, Aaron Quigley and colleagues from ADS and Historic Scotland who have been awarded a Smart Tourism Grant named LADDIE or Large Augmented Digital Displays for Interactive Experiences of Historic Sites. LADDIE is an interactive display with spatially connected and temporally situated content for visitors. In this project we build on our research and industrial experience with situated, public, multi-touch, adaptive and augmented reality user interfaces. LADDIE provides layered accessible interpretation while at the same time gathering richer information on visits, interests and visitor intent.
Congratulations also to Aaron Quigley and colleagues from MUSA in St Andrews and Interface3 who have been awarded a Smart Tourism Grant named SMART or Scotland’s Museums Augmented Reality Tourism. The Museum of the University of St Andrews(MUSA) opened in October 2008. MUSA puts on display to the public hundreds of the finest treasures from the University’s collection of over 112,300 artifacts. However, do to space limits what you can see during a visit to the museum is less than 1% of their collection. This is commonplace in Museums which have more artefacts than space to display everything. Consider the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) which displays 8,000 historical artifacts out of an entire collection of over 4 million objects or the thousands of objects from the Smithsonian Collection on display out of 136,000,000 objects! SMART provides a new and novel interface to museum content which might be out of sight but not out of access.
Aaron Quigley, SACHI and Jeff Pierce, IBM Research Almaden are chairing the tutorial program at MobileHCI 2012. MobileHCI 2012 continues to build on the tradition of previous conferences with a high quality tutorial program. They are inviting proposals for 1, 2 or 3 hour tutorials on emerging and established areas of research and practice. Tutorials will be held on the first day of the conference and are expected to provide participants with new insights and skills relevant to the area.
A MobileHCI tutorial is an in-depth presentation of one or more state-of-the-art topics presented by researchers or practitioners within the field of Mobile HCI. The scope for tutorials is broad and includes topics such as new technologies, research approaches and methodologies, design practices, user/consumer insights, investigations into new services/applications/interfaces, and much more. For more details see Aaron’s blog (where you can leave comments suggesting tutorial topics) here Call for MobileHCI 2012 Tutorials.
Aaron Quigley and Per Ola Kristensson from SACHI are the Short Papers chairs for the BCS HCI 2012 conference. HCI 2012 is the 26th Annual Conference of the Specialist HCI group of the BCS and the short papers track has a submission date of June 15, 2012. The full paper track for HCI 2012 has a deadline of the 30th March 2012.
From the main call:
We invite submissions for short papers that address any area of HCI. Authors are encouraged to submit late-breaking research results that show timely and innovative ideas. Short paper submissions should report original work and must not have been published previously or be a condensed version of previously published papers.
This year we have returned to the founding theme of the conference: “People and Computers”. This is to encapsulate and highlight the growing diversity of our field of HCI in one event. Technology is now common in all walks of life and HCI practitioners and researchers have more areas of impact than ever before. We want the conference to reflect this growing importance and diversity.
Submission Tracks
The conference will have usual tracks of high-quality research papers, written as either Full or Short papers. Full papers should be a maximum of 10 pages in length. These submissions should be of original work and should not have been previously published. Short papers should be a maximum of 6 pages and should be compact short pieces of original work. There is also a ‘work-in-progress’ category. We strongly encourage participants to reflect the spirit of the track by submitting early-stage, surprising or incomplete results that may be of relevance and interest to the community. The submission dates for the tracks are below.
Following on from last year we have also included an alt-HCI track. This track is for work that highlights a more extreme, unusual and less mainstream side of HCI. The more alternative the work is, the better. We are looking for high quality contributions that might be highly contentious, using atypical methodologies, critical of established ideas or focused in an unconventional domain. If your work is alternative, controversial and interesting, then alt-HCI is the track for you.
The conference will also host a variety of workshops and a doctorial consortium. These will be held on the leafy campus of the University of Birmingham, in Edgbaston. A redbrick University and member of the Russell group, it offers a pleasant green environment.
Submissions
We encourage submissions that focus on human interaction with technology and computer systems. Whether your work is at the fundamental end of the spectrum (theory, design, or principle), or at the practical end (evaluation, product, or impact) we are interested in encouraging high-quality submissions to the conference.
The dates for submission for each paper track are:
Full Papers:- 30th March 2012 (Notification:- 31st May 2012)
Short Papers, WiP & Alt-HCI:- 15th June 2012 (Notification:-27th July 2012)
Relevant topics areas include but are by no means limited to:
- Persuasive Technology
- Mobile Interactions
- User Experience
- Touchtable interactions
- Affective Computing/Interactions
- Usability Engineering
- Accessibility
- Child Computer Interaction
- Interaction Design
- UCD4D
- Recommender Systems
- Annotation
- Brain Computer Interfaces
- Technology and Culture
- E-Government
Aaron Quigley wrote an article on the future of HCI in the Interfaces magazine of Interaction, a specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society (BCS). Founded in 1984, Interaction formerly known as The British HCI Group, is the longest-established and largest national group in Europe devoted to HCI. It provides an organisation for all those working on human-computer interaction – the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of technologies for human use.
Aaron Quigley is the Scottish Chair of Interaction and his article is a “view from the Scottish Chair”.
“For the past seven decades, computers have radically changed the world we live in, as have our interactions with them. Today, people require more sophisticated interfaces as computers are platforms supporting the entire spectrum of human activity. There is not an area of human society that has not been affected by computers and the power they afford us. Computing and hence human computer interaction touches on every facet of science, art, engineering and the economy as a whole. Desktop and mobile computing have evolved as advanced interactive technologies change our view of applications, services, gaming and computing. Today we have many researchers in HCI looking at gestures, haptics, large surface interaction, touch and sensing beyond the classical desktop system.
Looking to the future there are three essential issues to consider. Firstly, the future for human computer interaction research is, by its very nature, an increasingly interdisciplinary activity. Second, we need sustained investment in human computer interaction research at every level to ensure we unlock the potential of evermore powerful, embedded and interconnected computation. And finally, we require larger programs of research, with more ambitious goals with national and international teams. In Scotland we now have the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) which is a collaboration of Scottish Universities whose goal is to develop and extend Scotland’s position as a world leader in Informatics and Computer Science research. The majority of HCI research resides within the Multimodal Interaction theme which myself and Professor Stephen Brewster from the University of Glasgow, a world leader in this field, lead. We aim to extend our collective reach by working cooperatively rather than competitively. We do this by providing mutual support, sharing facilities and by working closely with industry and government. We are also appointing and retaining world-class staff and research students in Scottish Universities. To date SICSA has appointed 30 staff and have offered more than 70 prize studentships to PhD students from around the world.
Different views of computing may drive each of us in our HCI research. For some, the computer is a building block of science or the “new microscope” enabling new forms of scientific discovery. If this is your view, then a closer examination of the work practice, information flow and points for interaction are essential. Systems and interfaces which are interwoven with user tasks rather than multi-purpose devices are the key here. For others, the computer is simply and essential means to organise and process large amounts of information quickly. If this is also your view then new forms of interaction space are needed. And finally for many, Ubiquitous Computing, with computation “woven itself into the fabric of our lives, until it is indistinguishable from it” is the future. This is where I see the greatest challenges for HCI. Moving from the GUI to the Ubiquitous User Interface (UUI). With ubiquitous computational power we need ubiquitous user interfaces, to extend and enhance all human capabilities. To reach this future we need to make larger and more ambitious leaps beyond what the current market place is willing to support. The UUI will not be realised by cobbling together off the shelf systems sufficient for results for just the next conference paper. Without more ambitious research we are bound to a future of small incremental changes without real impact in our world.”
Congratulations to Per Ola Kristensson who was recent conferred with the the title of Docent (Honorary Associate Professor) in Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University in Sweden. Per Ola has been in the University of St Andrews since early 2011 but before coming to St Andrews Per Ola was the Schlumberger Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge and held personal Marie Curie and EPSRC fellowships at the Cavendish and Computer Laboratories at the University of Cambridge.
Per Ola’s research has been widely reported in the international press, including The Economist, Die Zeit and BBC World News. In 2005 he won the Best Doctoral Consortium Contribution Award at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, a premier publication venue in human-computer interaction. Together with Dr Shumin Zhai he pioneered gesture keyboard technology for touch-screens and co-founded ShapeWriter, Inc. to commercialise this technology in 2007. He was the Director of Engineering of this company (2007-2010) and worked fulltime in Beijing, China in 2007-2008 to set up and manage the engineering office with about ten employees. The company was acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc. in 2010. ShapeWriter was selected as the 8th best iPhone application in the world by Time magazine in 2008 and won a Google Android ADC50 developer award the same year. Per Ola did his doctoral work at the Institute of Technology at Linköping University, Sweden and at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA (Ph.D. Computer Science 2007).
<!–Date/Time: 1-2pm October 27th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)
Second Talk:
Speaker: David Flatla, Interaction Lab, University of Saskatchewan, Canada–>
Title: Using Situation-Specific Models of Colour Differentiation to Assist Individuals with Colour Vision Deficiency
Abstract:
Approximately 10% of the world’s population experiences either congenital, acquired, or situationally-induced colour vision deficiency (CVD – commonly called colour blindness). People with CVD often confuse colours that those without CVD can distinguish. When working in digital environments, CVD can lead to problems ranging from minor nuisances (e.g., being unable to distinguish ‘visited’ from ‘not visited’ links on a webpage) to major safety concerns (e.g., not seeing colour-coded warning messages).
Recently, recolouring tools have been developed that modify the colours presented on a display to eliminate the colour confusion that people with CVD experience. However, these tools are limited to individuals with dichromatic CVD – a particularly severe and somewhat rare form of congenital CVD. As a result, individuals with acquired and situationally-induced CVD as well as those with non-dichromatic forms of congenital CVD continue to have difficulties.
In this talk, I will present my PhD research toward a new recolouring tool based on situation-specific models of colour differentiation. I will first present my work on situation-specific models that capture the colour differentiation abilities of any individual in any environment through a two-minute in-situ calibration procedure. I will then discuss my most recent work on developing a recolouring tool based on situation-specific models of colour differentiation.
About David:
David Flatla is a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada under the supervision of Dr. Carl Gutwin. His research focusses on the field of accessibility, particularly on how to help individuals with colour vision deficiency (CVD – commonly called colour blindness). To do this, he invented situation-specific models of colour differentiation that utilize in-situ calibration to accurately capture how people differentiate colors. He publishes at conferences like CHI and ASSETS. At UIST this year, he presented research exploring how to make boring calibrations fun by turning them into games.
The SACHI group and the University of St Andrews will be running the Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference in 2013 (ITS 2013). This is the leading international conference on research in interactive tabletops and surfaces. This conference at St Andrews will be a proud continuation of the excellent experiences of past ITS conferences from Banff, Saarbrücken and Kobe. In due course we will be publishing a full website at http://www.its2013.org where you can learn more about the Workshops, Keynote , Industrial Keynote, calls for Tutorials, papers and posters, along with demos, a doctoral colloquium, social events.
Our current Conference Committee includes:
General Chairs
Aaron Quigley
Giulio Jacucci, HIIT, Finland
Program Co-Chairs
Yoshifumi Kitamura, Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University
Miguel Nacenta
Local Conference Chair
Per Ola Kristensson
Local Organising Committee
Tristan Henderson
Per Ola Kristensson
Miguel Nacenta
Aaron Quigley
We look forward to welcoming the ITS community to St Andrews which is celebrating its 600th anniversary during 2013.
November 2011 – Editorial: Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science
Aaron Quigley
Editorial: Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science Computers 2011, 1(1), 1-2; doi:10.3390/computers1010001
– published online 10 November 2011
For the past seven decades, computers have radically changed the world we live in. From machines for calculation, computers are now platforms for information processing and computation, supporting the entire spectrum of human endeavour. While computer science is a relatively young field, it is shaping how people live in our modern world. There is not an area of human society that has not been affected by computers and the power they afford us. Computer science touches on every facet of science, art, engineering and economics. Its impact ranges from electronic commerce to improved medical devices; and from enhanced communication to new forms of media and entertainment. The future, with ubiquitous computational power and natural user interfaces, will extend and enhance all human capabilities. To reach this future we need to quickly and freely disseminate our cutting edge research results globally, and this journal aims to help us achieve that.
See full welcome to this new journal here –