<!–Speaker: Sean Lynch, Innovis group/Interactions lab, University of Calgary, Canada
Date/Time: 1-2pm September 28th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Information visualization and new paradigms of interaction are generally applied to productive processes (i.e., at work) or for personal and entertainment purposes. In my work, I have looked instead at how to apply new technologies and visualization techniques to art. I will present mainly two projects that focus on multi-touch music composition and performance, and the visual analysis of the history and visual features of fine paintings.
About Sean:
Sean Lynch is a Master’s Student in Computer Science at the Interactions Lab at the University of Calgary. Sean’s research interests span interactive technologies (e.g., multi-touch), interactive art, and information visualization.

<!–Speaker: Mark Shovman, University of Abertay, Dundee
Date/Time: 2-3pm September 13th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
In natural and social sciences, novel insights are often derived from visual analysis of data. But what principles underpin the extraction of meaningful content from these visualisations? Abstract data visualisation can be traced at least as far back as 1801; but with the increase in the quantity and complexity of data that require analysis, standard tools and techniques are no longer adequate for the task. The ubiquity of computing power enables novel visualisations that are rich, multimodal and interactive; but what is the most effective way to exploit this power to support analysis of large, complex data sets? Often, the lack of fundamental theory is pointed out as a central ‘missing link’ in the development and assessment of efficient novel visualisation tools and techniques.
In this talk, I will present some first steps towards the theory of visualisation comprehension, drawing heavily on existing research in natural scene perception and reading comprehension. The central inspiration is the Reverse Hierarchy Theory of perceptual organisation, which is a recent (2002) development of the near-centennial Laws of Gestalt. The proposed theory comes complete with a testing methodology (the ‘pop-out’ effect testing) that is based on our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in visualisation comprehension.
About Mark:
Mark Shovman is a SICSA Lecturer in Information Visualisation in the Institute of Arts, Media and Computer Games Technology in the University of Abertay Dundee. He is an interdisciplinary researcher, studying the perception and cognition aspects of information visualisations, computer games, and immersive virtual reality. His recent research projects include the application of dynamic 3D link-charts in Systems Biology; alleviating cyber-sickness in VR helmets; and immersive VR as an art medium. Mark was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lived in Jerusalem, Israel since 1990. He can be found on LinkedIn

<!–Date/Time: 1-2pm August 30th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Speaker: Yemliha Kamber, , University of St Andrews
Title: Empirical Investigation of The Memorability of Gesture Sets
Abstract:
As technology is becoming increasing advanced and sophisticated, various input technologies and new experimental input technologies allow for large numbers of gestures types and new ways in controlling software. However very little is
known about the eects they have and how people learn and remember the various gestures. This presentation will briefly talk about what gestures are, the related work, our experimental study and the results which we analysed.
Speaker: Asset Nurboluly, University of St Andrews
Title: Multi touch transparent input output device
Abstract:
In recent years multi-touch interfaces have become popular. They have been giving a new way of human interaction. Multi-touch interfaces can be used in various aspects of human lives, such as medicine, education, military, science etc. The main aim of this project is to build a transparent display device, which uses multi-touch interface. Transparent display is a future trend in a technology world, setting out first in sci-fi movies and turning into reality nowadays. Usage of such devices is significant. They can be used in cars as a windshield, where a driver can see the GPS information as well as watching what happens on the road. In everyday life we can integrate them in mirrors, so in the morning during tooth-brushing we can check out the news, weather etc.
Regarding medicine and military areas, transparent displays can be used to show real-time interactive information for soldiers and surgeons.
The Prototype has been built by using laser light plane technology for multi touch sensing. An image projected from a projector, IR camera was used to capture the touches. The built-in system is a transparent multi-touch display.

Several SACHI members are presenting papers at leading international conferences in the upcoming months.
Aaron Quigley presented a paper co-authored with Mike Bennett at Stanford University entitled “Creating Personalized Digital Human Models Of Perception For Visual Analytics” at UMAP 2011 in Girona, Spain, on Thursday July 14th. Umer Rashid and Aaron Quigley co-authored a paper with Jarmo Kauko and Jonna Häkkiläat at Nokia Research Center entitled “Proximal and Distal Selection of Widgets: Designing Distributed UI for Mobile Interaction with Large Display”. It will be presented by Umer Rashid at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden on Friday September 2nd. Aaron Quigley also co-authored a paper with Michael Farrugia and Neil Hurely entitled “SNAP: Towards a validation of the Social Network Assembly Pipeline” which was presented by Michael Farrugia at the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, on Monday July 25th.
Miguel Nacenta is a keynote speaker at the Integrating multi-touch and interactive surfaces into the research environment workshop in Oxford, UK, in September 16-17. He has also co-authored a paper with Sean Lynch and Sheelagh Carpendale which will be presented by Sean Lynch at Interact 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal. The talk is entitled: “ToCoPlay: Graphical Multi-touch Interaction for Composing and Playing Music”.
Per Ola Kristensson presented a paper on Thursday July 28th at the Association for Computational Linguistics‘s Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011) in Edinburgh, UK. The talk was entitled “The Imagination of Crowds: Conversational AAC Language Modeling using Crowdsourcing and Large Data Sources”. On Monday August 29th he will present a paper at Interspeech 2011 in Florence, Italy. This talk will be in the multimodal signal processing session and it is entitled: “Asynchronous Multimodal Text Entry using Speech and Gesture Keyboards”. Shortly thereafter, on Thursday September 1st, he will present a paper at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden. This talk is entitled “A Versatile Dataset for Text Entry Evaluations Based on Genuine Mobile Emails”. These papers were co-authored with Keith Vertanen at Princeton University. He also co-authored a paper which was presented on Saturday August 6th by Leif Denby at the 8th Eurographics Symposium on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling (SBIM 2011) in Vancouver, Canada. The talk was entitled: “Continuous Recognition and Visualization of Pen Strokes and Touch-Screen Gestures”.

<!–Speaker: Peterri Nurmi,  Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT
Date/Time: 12pm-1pm July 29th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Contemporary mobile phones readily support different positioning techniques. In addition to integrated GPS receivers, GSM and WiFi can be used for position estimation, and other sensors such as accelerometers and digital compasses can be used to support positioning, e.g., through dead reckoning or the detection of stationary periods. Selecting which sensor technologies to use for positioning is, however, a non-trivial task as available sensor technologies vary considerably in terms of their energy demand and the accuracy of location estimates. To improve the energy-efficiency of mobile devices and to provide as accurate position estimates as possible, novel on-device positioning technologies together with techniques that select optimal sensor modalities based on positioning accuracy requirements are required. In this talk we first introduce novel GSM and WiFi fingerprinting algorithms that run directly on mobile devices with minimal energy consumption [1]. We also introduce our recent work on minimizing the power consumption of continuous location and trajectory tracking on mobile devices [2].
[1] P. Nurmi, S. Bhattacharya, J. Kukkonen: “A grid-based algorithm for on-device GSM positioning.” Proc. 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2010). ACM Press, 2010, 227-236.
[2] M. B. Kjaergaard, S. Bhattacharya, H. Blunck, P. Nurmi, “Energy-efficient Trajectory Tracking for Mobile Devices”, Proc. 9th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys, June-July, 2011).
About Petteri:
Dr. Petteri Nurmi is a Senior Researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki in 2009. He is currently co-leading the Adaptive Computing research group at HIIT together with Doc. Patrik Floréen. His research focuses on ubiquitous computing, user modeling and interaction with a view of making the life of ordinary people easier through easy-to-use mobile services. He regularly serves as Program Committee Member and reviewer for numerous leading conferences and journals. More information about his research can be found from the webpage of the research group: http://www.hiit.fi/adapc/

<!–Speaker: Nava Tintarev, University of Aberdeen
Date/Time: 1-2pm July 19th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Story-telling, (including personal narrative), is a big part of our personal and social communication. This talk will identify challenges and solutions that look at the generation of narrative for social communication. We describe a way to “automatically” generate personal stories. The stories which are mix of natural language and multimedia, are based on sensor, and other data, collected with a mobile phone. This study will place a particular focus on the natural language generation task of document structuring: segmenting this data into meaningful and distinct events.
About Nava:
Nava Tintarev has worked on applied HCI projects with themes such as explanations in recommender systems, recommendations in a mobile travel scenario, and more recently, natural language generation for assistive technology. Currently, she is working as a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen where she is a member of the Natural Language Generation Group. She has been working on the “How was School today…?” project, which helps children with complex communication needs create and tell a story about their day at school (which will be the applied setting for the talk on the 19th of July). Before that, she was at Telefónica Research, Barcelona, working on user-centred issues in recommender systems.
Her doctoral thesis focused on explanations for recommender systems, and one of her papers on the topic won her the James Chen best student paper award at the International Conference on Hypermedia (2008). For the last three years she has also been co-organizing a workshop on explanation-aware computing (ExaCt) (http://exact2011.workshop.hm/).

In March of 2011, Jakub Dostal, a member of SACHI, participated in a unique retreat-style research event called Tiree Tech Wave. In the summer issue of Interfaces, the BCS Interaction Group magazine, he and Prof. Alan Dix describe the event and their experiences.
Link to the magazine issue/article.
Link to the event website.

<!–Speaker: Alistair Morrison, University of Glasgow
Date/Time: 1-2pm June 21st, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
The emergence of ‘app stores’ on a number of mobile platforms provides HCI researchers with a relatively easy means of recruiting very large numbers of participants from all over the world. As the practice of releasing research applications in this way is still relatively new, the HCI community has not yet developed a set of guiding principles or an understanding of what constitutes good practice. In this talk, I’ll share experiences from several ‘app store’ trials we’ve run in the University of Glasgow’s SUMgroup, covering issues such as capturing log data, identifying users, performing qualitative evaluation and the new ethical challenges raised by this approach. In outlining the benefits we’ve gained and the challenges faced I’ll offer recommendations for others seeking to conduct research trials in this way.
About Alistair:
Alistair Morrison is a postdoc researcher at the University of Glasgow, a member of SUMgroup (Social, Ubiquitous, Mobile) and GIST – Glasgow’s HCI group. His background is in information visualisation, and tools and techniques for analysing data collected from ubicomp systems. He has recently run several mass participation studies with tens of thousands of users, developing ways of analysing logged data and examining the various issues surrounding the release of trial software through public ‘App Store’-style software repositories. Recently he co-organised the CHI 2011 workshop on ethics in large-scale HCI research.

<!–Speaker: Iain Parris, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm June 7th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Opportunistic networks have been the study of much research – in
particular on making end-to-end routing efficient. Users’ privacy
concerns, however, have not been the subject of much research. The talk
will describe a user study, investigating how users’ privacy concerns
impact their willingness to participate in an opportunistic network.
Because deploying a very large-scale opportunistic network is infeasible
for a research study, participants will interact with a simulated
opportunistic application – but will be unaware that the application is
simulated. In the context of this simulated application, a decentralised
mobile advertising system, different participants will be introduced to
a range of privacy threats. We will then measure the participants’
willingness to use the application in the presence of different privacy
threats.
About Iain:
Iain is a third-year PhD student in the School of Computer Science,
University of St Andrews. His research focuses on privacy-enhancing
technologies for opportunistic networks. He holds an MA in Computer
Science from the University of Cambridge, and an MSc in Computer Science
from the University of Edinburgh.

<!–Speaker: Claus Lewerentz, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 31st, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:

In this talk Claus describes a systematic approach to utilize the city metaphor for the visualization of large software systems as evolving software cities. The main contribution is a new layout approach which explicitly takes the development history of software systems into account and makes history directly visible in the layouts. These layouts incrementally evolve in a very smooth and stable way during the development of the represented software system. They are used as a visualization platform for integrating a large variety of product and process data and thus create a coherent set of specialized visualizations. To illustrate this I present some example maps capturing specific development history aspects.
About Claus:
Claus is the program co-chair for the 6th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT2011) September 29-30, 2011 – Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
http://vissoft.iro.umontreal.ca