Congratulations to Per Ola who has been awarded the RSE/Makdougall Brisbane Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in their Royal Prizewinners list for 2014. The Prize was founded in 1855 by Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, for particular distinction in the promotion of scientific research.
Professor Aaron Quigley said “We are all delighted at the rightful recognition of Per Ola and his world-leading achievements. Last year he was the only UK member of the TR35, the most prestigious annual list published by MIT Technology Review. And now the Royal Society of Edinburgh has recognised his research. Per Ola is an excellent colleague who brings real enthusiasm, insight and dedication to whatever he does. Be it supervising an honours student, teaching, leadership in SICSA or working with industry. His work in intelligent interactive systems is laying the ground work for how the world will interact with computation in the future.

RSE Medal Winners (Per Ola on the right) – credits

Later this month, Aaron Quigley has been invited to present at two conferences on digital tourism. The first is the signature conference of the Scottish Tourism Week in Edinburgh on the 12th of Mar 2014. And the second is a conference on Meeting the needs of the modern visitor, hosted by Interface – The knowledge connection on the 25th of Mar 2014 (see newspaper item).
Each talk will address the question of how to support the interaction between a visitor before, during and after their tourist experience. Some aspects are simply pointers to what we currently have with services and application in desktop or mobile computing. Some parts touch on what is possible with data science and data analytics. An finally, what the future might hold with new forms of human computer interaction which take us away from eyes down mobile interaction with “apps” and instead refocuses us on the world around us.
During these talks Aaron will discuss SMART, LADDIE and Palimpsest (website  | announcement), projects funded under the SFC Horizon (Smart Tourism) and AHRC: Big Data calls.
You can see a video from a similar talk Aaron gave in 2013 with Interface below.

Speaker: Yvonne Rogers, UCL
Date/Time: 2-3pm March 11th, 2014
Location: Maths Lecture Theatre B, University of St Andrews
Abstract:
We are increasingly living in our digital bubbles. Even when physically together – as families and friends in our living rooms, outdoors and public places – we have our eyes glued to our own phones, tablets and laptops. The new generation of ‘all about me’ health and fitness gadgets, that is becoming more mainstream, is making it worse. Do we really need smart shoes that tell us when we are being lazy and glasses that tell us what we can and cannot eat? Is this what we want from technology – ever more forms of digital narcissism, virtual nagging and data addiction? In contrast, I argue for a radical rethink of our relationship with future digital technologies. One that inspires us, through shared devices, tools and data, to be more creative, playful and thoughtful of each other and our surrounding environments.
Bio:
Yvonne Rogers is a Professor of Interaction Design, the director of UCLIC and a deputy head of the Computer Science department at UCL. Her research interests are in the areas of ubiquitous computing, interaction design and human-computer interaction. A central theme is how to design interactive technologies that can enhance life by augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities. This involves informing, building and evaluating novel user experiences through creating and assembling a diversity of pervasive technologies.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

<!–Speaker: Benjamin Cowan, University of Birmingham
Date/Time: 2-3pm Feb 25, 2014
Location: Maths Lecture Theatre B, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Dialogue is a dynamic social activity. Research has consistently shown that our dialogue partners impact our speech choices whereby we converge (or align) on aspects such as lexical choice and syntax. With the development of more natural computer dialogue partners and the increase of speech as an interaction modality in many devices and applications, it is important that we understand what impacts how we behave linguistically in such dialogue interactions wth computers. My talk will focus on my current work looking at how design choices and computer partner behaviours affect alignment in human-computer dialogue and how this can inform the theory-based debate over what leads to such a behaviour.
Bio:
Dr Benjamin Cowan is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham’s Human-Computer Interaction Centre, based in the School of Computer Science. His research is at the juncture between Psychology and Computer Science, studying how interface design affects user perceptions, emotions and behaviours in human-computer based interactions. Specifically he studies how design and system actions affect user linguistic behaviours as well as the causes and predictors of user anxiety towards social system contributions.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

In May of 2014 Aaron Quigley of SACHI, Victor M. R. Penichet of the Interactive Systems Everywhere research group (ISE), University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain and Harald Reiterer of the HCI Lab in the University of Konstanz, Germany are organising AVID’14 an AVI 2014 workshop on roadmapping advanced visual interface display ecosystems. Victor and Harald were both visitors to SACHI in 2013 and each has a long track record in display ecosystem research and in leading workshops, symposia, Dagsthul seminars, grants and other activities in the field.
The website for the workshop is: http://avid2014.iseresearch.com/ and position papers are due in one month, on March 12th, 2014.

At the end of February, Jakub Dostal and Per Ola Kristensson will be attending IUI 2014 in Haifa, Israel.
Jakub will be presenting the full paper SpiderEyes: Designing Attention and Proximity-Aware Collaborative Interfaces for Wall-Sized Displays by Jakub Dostal, Uta Hinrichs, Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron Quigley. This paper introduces the concept of collaborative proxemics: enabling groups of people to col- laboratively use attention- and proximity-aware applications. To help designers create such applications we have developed SpiderEyes: a system and toolkit for designing attention- and proximity-aware collaborative interfaces for wall-sized displays. SpiderEyes is based on low-cost technology and allows accurate markerless attention-aware tracking of multiple people interacting in front of a display in real-time. The paper discusses how this toolkit can be applied to design attention- and proximity-aware collaborative scenarios around large wall-sized displays, and how the information visualisation pipeline can be extended to incorporate proxemic interactions.
You will soon be able to read more about this work on its on designated project page: SpiderEyes.
Jakub is also a Student Volunteer for the conference. Per Ola is a member of the Senior Programme Committee for IUI 2014.

On Thursday 6 February 2014 the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willtts MP, announced funding of £4.6 million for 21 Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities projects as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) investment in Big Data.
Along with colleagues in the Department of English & Scottish Literature and the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh Aaron Quigley and Uta Hinrichs have been awarded one of largest of these grants for the project Palimpsest: an Edinburgh Literary Cityscape. In this project they aim to create a new, visualised literary cityscape, based on an extensive dataset of literary texts. This project has a focus on Edinburgh but the plan is for the techniques, methods and tools to apply to other UNESCO World Cities of Literature or indeed any literary city.
Palimpsest will be available to an online community of remote visitors, those with an interest in the literature of Scotland and its constituent places who explore the city and its culture from a distance. Palimpsest arises out of the idea of creating an innovative way of engaging people with literature, and drawing on literature’s own dependence on, and engagement with, place and space. Exploration of the relation between urban places and literature first arose in sociology in the mid 19th century. This project represents an excellent example of SICSA academics working together with colleagues in the humanities in making voluminous and varied data accessible for all.
Professor James Loxley from the University of Edinburgh said “We are looking forward to working with expert colleagues at St Andrews on this project. Palimpsest is all about learning to look at the literary writing of Edinburgh in ways that reveal collective imaginative investments in place and patterns within the work of individual authors. Visualisation is key to this – we want to be able to see the literary city, and the city in literature, in new and exciting ways that are also intuitively comprehensible to users coming to the resource for the first time.”
Of the overall funding, Universities and Science Minister David Willetts said: “Getting quality data out of the hands of a few and into the public domain is an important goal for this Government. This funding will help to overcome the challenge of making vast amounts of rich data more accessible and easier to interpret by the public. These 21 projects promise to come up with innovative long-lasting solutions.”
Professor Andrew Prescott the Digital Transformation theme Leadership Fellow commented; “The exciting projects announced by the Arts and Humanities Research Council illustrate how the arts and humanities can help exploit the opportunities offered by these vast data resources. They cover an amazing range of subject areas, from classical history and more efficient retrieval of information about music to the use of online gambling data for more accurate political analysis. By developing better tools for the visualisation and analysis of data, these projects will have significant impact beyond the arts and humanities and will assist the UK in grasping the economic and social opportunities offered by big data.” [1]
 

1. AHRC announcement 06/02/2014.

This March, Anne-Marie Mann will attend the Workshop on the Impact of Pen and Touch Technology in Education (WIPTTE 2014) in College Station, Texas. This conference focuses on the potential of pen and touch-based computing in education environments. Now in its 8th year, approximately 150 participants from industry, academia and education travel to WIPTTE to share their tools, experiences and ideas using this new hands-on technology.  This year the Keynote Speakers are Barbara Tversky (Columbia University) and Randall Davis (MIT) .
Anne-Marie has been awarded a registration scholarship and will present her paper “Digital Pen Technology’s Suitability to Support Handwriting Learning“, co-authored with Uta Hinrichs and Aaron Quigley, during the conference. Anne-Marie hopes that  the conference will provide an opportunity for open discussion regarding her recent study and research interests that will prove useful during future projects.

<!–Speaker: Hans Gellersen, Lancaster University
Date/Time: 2-3pm Feb 11, 2014
Location: Maths Lecture Theatre B, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Touch input and two-handed interaction were intensively studied in the mid 80’s but it’s taken 20 years for these ideas to emerge in the mainstream, with the advent of multi-touch interfaces. Gaze has been studied for almost as long as interaction modality and appears on the brink of wider use. This talk will present recent work that reconsiders touch and gaze to address challenges in ubiquitous computing: interaction across personal devices and large displays, and spontaneous interaction with displays using our eyes only.
Bio:
Hans Gellersen is a Professor of Interactive Systems in the School of Computing & Communications at Lancaster University. His research interests are in ubiquitous computing and systems and technologies for human-computer interaction. He has contributed on topics including location, context and activity sensing, device association and cross-device interaction, and interfaces that blend physical and digital interaction. In his recent work, he is particularly interested in eye movement analysis: as a source of contextual information on human activity, interest and well-being; and as a resource for interaction beyond the lab. Hans is closely involved with the UbiComp conference series which we founded in 1999, and served on the Editorial Boards of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, and IEEE Pervasive Computing. He holds a PhD from Karlsruhe University.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

There are many experiments in Computer Science, from eye tracking to mobile security or gestural interaction to navigation in virtual worlds. Such experiments are particularly common in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and we are continually looking for people willing and interested in participating in our studies.

To make it easier for us to reach and contact interested people, and for you to stay informed about our exciting experiments, we are launching our new participant database. If you are interested in participating in our studies, get a chance to interact with the newest toys and technical equipment and would like to stay informed about the ongoing experiments in Computer Science you can sign up using our registration form.

We will try to contact you only for relevant experiments. We aim to restrict the messages you receive based on the data you provide. Should you decide that you don’t want be in our database any more, you can be removed anytime, no questions asked. If you like the idea of staying up to date on our ongoing user studies and know others that might find this useful, please share this announcement with them.

Researchers from the School of Computer Science that are interested in contributing to our database or using the database to promote your experiments should contact Michael Mauderer or look into the CS Wiki.