The iVoLVER system (iVoLVER.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk), created by Gonzalo Méndez and Miguel Nacenta from the SACHI group at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, received on Thursday 19 the ACM ISS Best Demo Jury Award during the conference, which took place at Brighton, UK.

iVoLVER is a web-based visual programming environment that enables anyone to transform visualizations that the find in-the-wild (e.g., in a poster or a newspaper) into new visualizations that are more useful for them.

The ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces conference takes place yearly in different locations. Next year it will take place in Tokyo, Japan. The conference is a premier venue for work that studies how people interact in smart spaces and surfaces and how to design and engineering solutions for novel interfaces.

To celebrate the remodelling of the lab space and our new space sharing with the Virtual Worlds team, we held a reception on Wednesday September 2nd.
Wine, cheese, some good conversation and a ribbon cutting moment by the Dean of Science made for a very interesting late afternoon. Thanks all for coming!
For more information (and pictures) you can visit the corresponding School Blogpost, SACHI and Virtual Worlds new space inauguration..

We are happy to welcome Johannes Lang to the SACHI lab. Johannes comes from Austria and is a typographer and type designer with top-level expertise in the digital aspects of text and type.
He will be working with Miguel Nacenta and Uta Hinrichs in the Infotypography project, funded by EPSRC, and helping further develop the FatFonts research program.
You can take a look at Johannes’ excellent work here in his studio webpage.

 
Dr Urška Demšar (School of Geography and Geosciences) and Dr Miguel Nacenta (SACHI) are looking for a doctoral student to carry out research in trajectory analysis and interaction. For more information see the position announcement.
For further queries feel free to e-mail Miguel or Urska.
 
 

3 presentations on the state of the art
Open to all public
Tue Oct 16 – 1:30pm to 2:30pm
School VI Lecture Theatre, St Salvator’s Quad
Visit http://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/activities/workshops/interactive-technologies-for-libraries-and-museums/ for more details.
 

Participants wanted for an experiment on gesture user interfaces  –  £20 in amazon vouchers. 
See the page of the study for more details!
 
 

The SACHI group (Human-Computer Interaction) at the University of St Andrews, Scotland’s first university, is offering a full scholarship to join the School of Computer Science as a doctoral researcher for 3.5 years. The scholarship covers tuition fees and provides a living-expenses stipend.
The work will focus on the creation of new forms of visualization with gaze-contingent displays (electronic displays that have access to the location of the person’s gaze), their evaluation through laboratory studies, and the implementation of new visualization and interaction techniques. The student will work closely with Dr. Miguel Nacenta and within the SACHI group.
Please, visit Dr. Nacenta’s site for more detail.

Last week (4-5 June, 2012) two papers from SACHI were presented at the Pervasive Displays international Symposium. The symposium took place in Porto, Portugal, and it was a great showcase of work on pervasive display systems from research groups in Europe, Japan and North America.
We presented two papers:
Factors Influencing Visual Attention Switch in Multi-Display User Interfaces: A Survey, which is part of the dissertation work of Umar Rashid, and
The LunchTable: A Multi-User, Multi-Display System for Information Sharing in Casual Group Interactions, which is part of collaborations with the ilab, at the University of Calgary.
Both papers were well-received and will be soon available through the ACM Digital Library, but the most interesting part was to share the energy of the pervasive displays community and the amazing discussions. We are hoping for a new edition next year, which will be in California.

The next TayViz meeting of the Tayside and Fife network for data visualisation will take place in St Andrews, (School of Computer Science), on Tuesday May 15th, at 6:30.
Read all the details in this page.
Sign up for the TayViz google group (it is free and everybody is welcome to join).
Send any questions and e-mail to miguel.nacenta@st-andrews.ac.uk

Next week, in the context of the Psychology-Computer Science collaboration grant (PSY/CS), Manuel Spitchan from Psychology will be giving a workshop on eye-movements and eye-tracking.
Please, check the details here:

Eye Movement and Eye-tracking Workshop