New Lectureship | RSE/Makdougall Brisbane Medal | AHRC funding for Palimpsest Project
General Chair MobileHCI’14 | Program Chair ITS’14 | Program Chair PerDis’14 | New SICSA theme
Best paper and honorable mention at CHI 2014 | Best paper at AVI 2014 | Best paper at DIS 2014
JISC funded Trading Consequences Launch | 9 papers and other works at CHI 2014.
Our newsfeed has details of these all these activities and research.

 

In late September 2014 a number of members from SACHI were involved with MobileHCI 2014 in Toronto Canada. Aaron Quigley was the general co-chair for this conference and Daniel Rough was the registration chair. Per Ola Kristensson, an external member of SACHI, presented a paper and was a session chair during the conference. MobileHCI brings together people from diverse areas which provides a multidisciplinary forum for academics, hardware and software developers, designers and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with and through mobile devices, applications, and services. This year MobileHCI was able to have a single track for the entire program which allowed everyone to see all the papers, posters, demos, design contest, panels etc. without trying to change sessions. Some images from this conference can be found here. Aaron is now the chair of the MobileHCI conference series steering committee until August 2015.
In early October a number of SACHI members were again involved with or attended UIST 2014, the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. We organised this conference, UIST 2013 here in St Andrews last year. In 2014, Per Ola Kristensson was the demo co-chair and  Jakub Dostal was the registration co-chair. Per Ola was also awarded a lasting impact award during UIST 2014. Aaron Quigley will be the keynote chair for UIST 2015 in Charlotte, NC Nov 8-11, 2015. The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) is the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces. UIST brings together people from diverse areas including graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, and CSCW.
You can read Aaron’s full blog post about the papers he noted to SACHI here.

This June, Honorary Professor and SACHI external faculty member Professor John Stasko delivered the capstone talk at EuroVis 2014 on The Value of Visualization…and Why Interaction Matters

EuroVis 2014: Capstone: The Value of Visualization…and Why Interaction Matters from VGTCommunity on Vimeo.

This year Aaron Quigley was the program chair for PerDis’14 the 3rd ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. This year’s symposium extends the two previous successful symposia PerDis’13 in Google, Mountain View, California, USA and PerDis’12 at the University of Minho in Porto, Portugal.
This year we brought together researchers and practitioners from various disciplines with a common interest in the opportunities and challenges raised by the emergence of pervasive display systems as a new communication medium for public and semi-public spaces. The continued emergence of media facades, pervasive displays as art installations, 3D and in-air display, mobile and display networks gives rise to many new innovations and explorations.
Along with his role as program chair and session chair Aaron presented work on CSCT – Computer Supported Cooperative Teaching authored with Adam Buckland. The overall program included 30 papers, 4 posters, 4 demos and 3 videos which have helped lay the foundation for this emerging research community.

<!–Speaker: Johannes Schöning, Hasselt University
Date/Time: 2-3pm April 8th, 2014
Location: Maths Lecture Theatre B, University of St Andrews–>
Title: Highly Deformable Mobile Devices & Future Mobile Phones
Abstract:
In the talk I will present the concept of highly deformable mobile devices that can be transformed into various special-purpose controls in order to bring physical controls to mobile devices (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLe52PFZrtc). I will present different interaction techniques enabled by this concept and present results from an in-depth study. Our findings show that these physical controls provide several benefits over traditional touch interaction techniques commonly used on mobile devices. In addition we will give insights on a large-scale study that logged detailed application usage information from over 4,100 users of Android-powered mobile devices.
Bio:
Johannes Schöning is a professor of computer science with a focus on HCI at Hasselt University, working within the Expertise centre for Digital Media (EDM) – the ICT research Institute of Hasselt University. In addition, he is a visiting lecturer at UCL London within the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Cities.
His research interests are new methods and novel mobile interfaces to navigate through spatial information. In general, he develops, designs and tests user interfaces that help people to solve daily tasks more enjoyable and/ or effectively. This includes the development of mobile augmented reality applications, interactive surfaces and tabletops and other “post desktop” interfaces. His research and work was awarded with several prices and awards, such as the ACM Eugene Lawler Award or the Vodafone Research Award for his PhD.  In addition, Johannes serve as a junior fellow of “Gesellschaft für Informatik”.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Two weeks ago Aaron Quigley, Jakub Dostal and Max Nicosia attended a Schloss Dagstuhl on Proxemics in Human-Computer Interaction which Saul Greenberg, Kasper Hornbæk, Aaron and Harald Reiterer organised. The topic relates to ongoing research here eg. (DiffDisplays) in SACHI and in other groups around the world.
In disciplines like architecture and interior design, knowledge about proxemics has been used for decades to model use of space for face-to-face interactions, urban planning, and environmental design. In human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI), however, the use of proxemics is fairly new, and both disciplines just started to employ proxemics and related theories and models (e.g., Hall’s theory of proxemics in his book “The Hidden Dimension”) to design new interaction concepts that act on proxemics features. However, work on understanding how proxemics can be used for HCI (and HRI) has only just begun (e.g., Proxemic Interactions). We started with the use of Greenberg et al.’s dimensions on Proxemic Interactions and Pedersen et al.’s Egocentric Interaction Paradigm and a keynote from Saul and Nic flowing from their paper you can see here Proxemic interactions: the new ubicomp.
The structure of the seminar started with the four pillars of application, technology, vision, and theory that were equally exposed in early stage break-out seminar activities. Following from 16 mini-talks we had numerous breakout sessions on each of the pillars and other topics which emerged over the week.
The week was quite excellent to discuss research ideas, new directions and plans for the future.

At the start of last month we hosted UIST 2013, the 26th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology and ITS 2013 the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference (ITS) here in the University of St Andrews. Around 500 delegates came to St Andrews from around the world. We have just written to the Principal to express our thanks to the staff across the University who went beyond the call of duty to help us make these memorable and world-class events.
You can see a selection of photos from UIST 2013 here

Created with flickr slideshow.And you can see a selection of photos from ITS 2013 here

Created with flickr slideshow.

Title: London and the 19th Century Global Commodity Trade: Industrialists and Economic Botanists
 
<!–Speaker: Jim Clifford, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada (@jburnford,
Date/Time: Thursday, August 15; 1-2pm,
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Greater London’s industry relied on overseas ghost acres for economic expansion. Britain did not have enough land to support the massive growth in industries such as soap making and it could not grow tropical and sub-tropical plants, such as sugarcane or cinchona, on an economic scale. This project explores the environmental consequences of London’s industrial development during the long nineteenth century. For example, the soap industry’s transnational fat supply shifted from Russian tallow at the start of the century, to animal fats from around the world, supplemented by palm oil from West Africa, coconut oil from Ceylon, and cottonseed oil from Egypt. This one industry’s supply chain represents a wider trend where British industrialists increasingly relied on plantations, farms, forest, mines and oceans all over the world to supply essential raw materials. Along with finding new supplies to expand existing industries, London’s industrialists, and economic botanists at Kew Gardens, also searched the world for new economically viable plants, and both groups played a role in the transfer of seeds and living plants to establish new plantations throughout the British Empire. For example, the British created neo-South American landscapes in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) with cinchona and rubber plantations.
This presentation will discuss how I’m combining archival research on the soap industry and economic botany with a text mined database created by the Trading Consequence research project. Our research team extracts a database of information about commodity flows throughout the British World during the nineteenth century by using computer algorithms to text-mine millions of pages of digitized historical documents. We then develop a range of visualizations to explore this large database. This new methodology allows us to explore a much wider range of commodity flows throughout the British World in the nineteenth century than traditional archival research.
Bio:
Jim Clifford is an environmental historian of Britain and the British World during the long-19th century. He uses digital methods to explore the global environmental consequences of Britain’s growing industrial economy. Jim is interested in the intersections between environmental, social and political history. In particular, he researches how communities responded to worsening environmental conditions.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

The St Andrews Human Computer Interaction research group is involved in the organisation of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2013, UIST 2013 and ITS 2013, the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2013 conferences. Today a number of important things happened worthy of note and thanks. We are organising UIST with our colleagues Microsoft Research in Cambridge and ITS with our colleagues in the University of Helsinki.
The program for UIST 2013 went online. Our PC chairs Ivan and Takeo along with our general chairs Shahram and Aaron put this together. Our own Per Ola Kristensson was a member of the PC along with 30 others from around the world. Miguel Nacenta from SACHI has a paper in the final program. He will be posting more details on this paper and demo closer to the conference date.
The registration for UIST 2013 and for ITS 2013 opened today. Our own Jakub Dostal is one of the ITS and UIST registration chairs along with Merve and they have been hard at work getting this system up and running, ready for today, and the months leading upto the conference.
Miguel Nacenta is the local chair for UIST 2013 and he has been putting in enormous effort with the local arrangements from what the hotels should be, to how the student innovation contest can operate in the Kinkell Byre.  Per Ola Kristensson is the local chair for ITS 2013 and has likewise been very busy looking after many aspects of the program from getting our USB keys to ensuring the WiFi holds up. Per Ola is also busy as demonstrations co-chair with Scott from Microsoft for UIST 2013. This UIST demo event will be held in the Hall of Champions at the Old Course hotel. These aren’t things academics should be spending their time on but it’s what’s called of us when we agree to host a conference as a service to our research community. Miguel has put together a wonderful website with details on how to get to St Andrews for ITS and UIST. It’s a website released today and I know we in SACHI will be using for many years to come!
Finally, our own Uta Hinrichs who along with Eve are the student volunteer chairs for ITS and UIST. Thanks also to our local student volunteers who are already busy making the program layout, arranging shipping of incoming sponsor material etc. Of course, there are many other people from reviewers to other chairs to thank but I’ll leave that for a future post. For now, this post is to thank all of my local colleagues for their efforts in organising ITS and UIST this year.
It might take a village to raise a child but I can tell you it takes a research group with connections to the global research community to host two international conferences!

We are looking forward to welcoming all of the summer school participants and instructors to St Andrews this week. We have nearly 40 students and over a dozen instructors and other visitors attending this SICSA sponsored summer school on big data information visualisation.
This summer school is concerned with the processing, management and hence presentation of “big data”, in an intelligible form with information visualisation techniques and methods. In this summer school we aim to demystify the concept of big data by introducing a systematic, scientific and rigorous approach to tackling it. We take a blended theory and practice approach here, by providing both theoretical underpinnings and practical use of the infrastructure to process big-data and the means to understand it with information visualisation.
Students are getting access to industrial scale datasets, research datasets, open datasets along with the accounts on the Amazon infrastructure. Thanks to Amazon for providing us with a grant of thousands of dollars worth of credits and to brightsolid and Skyscanner for datasets.
The final team presentations are now going online.