Aaron will be giving a seminar in the School of Informatics in the Univeristy of Edinburgh on October 7th 2011 on the topic of:

Challenges in Social Network Visualisation

A big thank you to Timothy Sheridan an undergrad working in the SACHI group for editing down and polishing up the videos of the MMI summer school final project presentations. Thanks also to Miguel and Jakub for handling and arranging the video equipment. The video presentations are from the final project presentations at the SICSA MMI Summer School in June 2011. In addition you can see the final projects page here with images, text and links to other resources.

The project descriptions from the five project teams we had in St Andrews during our summer school on multimodal systems for digital tourism are now available. Congratulations to all the teams on a great job. The project teams included, The Sonic Wanderer, Ubrella, The Living Souvenir, Time Walker and the Tourist Tricorder.

<!–Speaker: Mirco Musolesi,  Computer Science, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm July 26th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Mobile phones are increasingly equipped with sensors, such as accelerometers, GPS receivers, proximity sensors and cameras, that can be used to sense and interpret people behaviour in real-time. Novel user-centered sensing applications can be built by exploiting the availability of such technologies in these devices that are part of our everyday experience. Moreover, data extracted from the sensors can also be used to model people behaviour and movement patterns providing a very rich set of multi-dimensional data, which can be extremely useful for social science, marketing and epidemiological studies.
In this talk I will present some of my recent work in this area including the design and implementation of the CenceMe platform, a system that supports the inference of activities and other presence information of individuals using off-the-shelf sensor-enabled phones and of EmotionSense, a system for supporting social psychology research. Finally, I will discuss the issues related to the design of energy-efficient social sensing systems.
About Mirco:
Dr. Mirco Musolesi is a SICSA Lecturer at the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews. He received a PhD in Computer Science from University College London in 2007 and a Master in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna in 2002. From October 2005 to August 2007 he was a Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University College London. Then, from September 2007 to August 2008 he was an ISTS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Dartmouth College, NH, USA, and from September 2008 to October 2009 a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His research interests lie in the broad area of mobile systems and networking with a current focus on intelligent mobile systems, online social networks, application of complex network theory to networked systems design, mobility modelling and sensing systems based on mobile phones. More information about his research profile can be found at the following URL: http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mirco

You can see some of the Arduino and Kinect equipment we have for the summer school here starting on June 26th with an Arduino workshop. 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. 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.

Aaron is giving a seminar at the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh) on Wednesday the 18th of May 2011 at 15:15. This talk will be unlike his colloquium talk in March as it focuses on the particular challenges and research questions when dealing with a dynamic source of data (and hence information).
Title: Dynamic Information Visualisation

Members of SACHI have had a number of research papers accepted at both national and leading international venues. These include the following conference papers:

1. Jameson, A., Gabrielli, S., Kristensson, P.O., Reinecke, K., Cena, F., Gena, C. and Vernero, F., How can we support users’ preferential choice? In the Extended Abstracts of the 29th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011). (alt.chi), May 2011, Vancouver, Canada
2. Kristensson, P.O., Design dimensions of intelligent text entry tutors. In the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2011). June-July 2011, Auckland New Zealand
3. Parris I. and Henderson T., Practical privacy-aware opportunistic networking, in the Proceedings of the British HCI Doctoral Consortium, July 2011, Newcastle, UK
4. Bennett M. and Quigley A., Creating Personalized Digital Human Models Of Perception For Visual Analytics, in the Proceedings of UMAP 2011 the 19th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, July 2011, Girona, Spain
5. Farrugia M., Hurley N. and Quigley A., SNAP: Towards a validation of the Social Network Assembly Pipeline, in the Proceedings of ASONAM 2011 the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, July 2011, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan
6. Rashid U., Kauko J., Hakkila J. and Quigley A., Proximal and Distal Selection of Widgets: Designing Distributed UI for Mobile Interaction with Interactive TV, in the Proceedings of MobileHCI 2011 the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, August – September 2011, Stockholm Sweden
7. Vertanen, K. and Kristensson, P.O., A versatile dataset for text entry evaluations based on genuine mobile emails, in the Proceedings of MobileHCI 2011 the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, August – September 2011, Stockholm Sweden.

An upcoming book chapter we are involved with is by:

1. Farrugia M., Hurley N., Payne D. and Quigley A., Social Network Construction in the Information Age: Views and Perspectives in the book, Social Network Mining, Analysis and Research Trends: Techniques and Applications to be published in late 2011.

Dr Miguel Nacenta will be joining the University of St Andrews as a lecturer in May 2011 from his current position as at the Interactions Lab in the University of Calgary, Canada. Miguel’s research is focused on developing input and output technology that can extend human capabilities. He is interested in applying perceptual and social principles to novel multi-display, haptic, and multi-modal interfaces. Miguel will become the second supervisor for Umer Rashid a PhD student in SACHI. For more information see his full website or follow him on twitter @miguelnacenta. The February 2011 SICSA Newsletter highlighted details on the establishment of SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group along with details of our two new SICSA lecturers in SACHI Miguel Nacenta and Per Ola Kristensson.

Good luck to Aaron who is travelling to Oulu in Finland next month to co-chair the Doctoral Colloquium at GPC 2011 the Grid and Pervasive Computing conference. He will spend a few days in Oulu and looks forward to attending GPC as well as seeing the work being undertaken in Ubiquitous Oulu. Ubiquitous Oulu is a prototype of a future ubiquitous city which is being built by the multidisciplinary UBI (UrBan Interactions) program, coordinated by the University of Oulu, and the City of Oulu.

The doctoral colloquium itself offers a chance for PhD students to receive high-quality feedback from external reviewers including Aaron and to directly interact with peers, to exchange ideas, discuss concepts, and establish informal cooperation between researchers and research groups.
Grid and Pervasive Computing (or Ubiquitous Computing) covers research issues and challenges in the field of computer science and engineering in areas of grid and pervasive computing. Grid computing connects computer resources from multiple domains for solving computationally complex scientific, technical or business problems in a distributed fashion. Pervasive or Ubiquitous Computing aims at creating computational devices and systems that will blend into environment to support everyday human activities via natural human computer interaction.