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.

As some of you probably know, we are a member of SICSA – The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance. SICSA will host a SICSA Networking Event at CHI 2011 in Vancouver, Canada.
SACHI faculty member Per Ola Kristensson will attend it in conjunction to attending the main program and a workshop on ‘App Store’ Ethics: Large Scale Trials & User Generated Content.

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.

Best wishes to Aaron who is travelling to Pordenone Italy next week as a member of the expert panel for the EU coordinating action BRAID. Prior to joining the University of St Andrews he was a member of the consortium which won the grant when he was working in Australia. Prior to this, while working in Ireland, Aaron was the coordinator for the CAPSIL project which fed into and led to BRAID’s formation. Along with developing and leading one of the workpackages in BRAID his guidance helped give the consortium an international dimension beyond the EU. An international view is crucially important in understanding when, where and how ICT can help address the problems ageing brings to the fore for people, society, government and other stakeholders. BRAID is a 24 month project which will develop a comprehensive RTD roadmap for active ageing by consolidating existing roadmaps and by describing and launching a stakeholder co‐ordination and consultation mechanism. It will characterise key research challenges and produce a vision for a comprehensive approach in supporting the well‐being and socio‐economic integration of increasing numbers of senior citizens in Europe.
“The Workshop is the second of five being held in a number of locations around Europe as part of the BRAID project. In order to successfully fulfil the objectives of the project, the consortium recognise and value the need to engage with members of relevant stakeholder groups in order to obtain their opinions and insights on how best to address the pertinent issues. The workshop will therefore benefit from the input of a number of experts, including Aaron, who will speak on topics related to their areas of expertise in order to generate discussion and collaboration amongst stakeholders. This will provide a backdrop for the interactive activities focusing on the vision for BRAID and the contents of the final roadmap being created.”
During this two day workshop Aaron will act as rapporteur in the Parallel Working Groups Session. His research interests in Ubiquitous Computing, Ambient Assisted Living, Surface User Interfaces, Human Computer Interaction are amongst the areas of expertise Aaron will draw from during this workshop. In the months ahead Aaron is working with colleagues in SICSA and across Europe on the formation of an EU Project Proposal in Ambient Assisted Living.
 

Aaron is giving a seminar at the HCI Group in the School of Computer Science in the University of Birmingham on the 28th of March. This talk will focus on Information Visulisation of Social-* data (where * are networks, media, streams, search activity and records of information dissemination etc). In addition he will discuss how we can infer patterns of individual or collective behaviour through analysis, data mining, confirmatory and exploratory visulisation.
This talk first overviews our research in SACHI before leading into an in depth exploration of one of our key topics, namely Information Visualisation and its application to Social-* data. Information Visualisation is a research area that focuses on the use of graphical techniques to present data in an explicit form. Such static (pictures) or dynamic presentations help people formulate an understanding of data and an internal model of it for reasoning about. Such pictures of data are an external artefact supporting decision making. While sharing many of the same goals of Scientific Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design and Computer Graphics, Information Visualisation focuses on the visual presentation of data without a physical or geometric form. As such it relies on research in mathematics, data mining, data structures, algorithms, graph drawing, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, cartography, interactive graphics, imaging and visual design.
In this talk I will present a brief history of social-* analysis and visualisation, introduce layout algorithms we have developed for visualising such data. I will complete with a detailed case study on the layout of evolving or “dynamic graphs” extracted through SNAP, our Social Network Assembly Pipeline. SNAP operates on the premise of “social network inference” and we have studied it experimentally with the analysis of 10,000,000 record sets without explicit relations.

Aaron is giving a seminar at the IDEAS Research Institute & School of Computing in Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen on the 11th of March at 14.00. This talk will focus on social network, their analysis, inference (of nodes, edges attributes) and their visualisation.
Title: Information Visualisation and Social Networks
Information visualisation is a research area that focuses on the use of graphical techniques to present data in an explicit form. Such static (pictures) or dynamic presentations help people formulate an understanding of data and an internal model of it for reasoning about. Such pictures of data are an external artifact supporting decision making. While sharing many of the same goals of Scientific Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design and Computer Graphics, Information Visualisation focuses on the visual presentation of data (or information within a frame of reference) without a physical or geometric form. As such it relies on research in mathematics, data mining, data structures, algorithms, graph drawing, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, cartography, interactive graphics, imaging and visual design

On the 11th of February SACHI hosted over 30 researchers from across SICSA for a MultiModal Interaction theme workshop here in St Andrews. Along with research overviews from many groups we were able to have a research poster session at lunch. This event gave us the opportunity to launch our new HCI lab which will form the basis of our experimental facilities here in St Andrews. Per Ola was also able to join us from Cambridge for the day which gave everyone a great opportunity to meet him. Others from St Andrews who attended included Mirco,Tristan, Alan, Colin, Jakub, Tom and Savio for the poster session.
A substantive outcome from the day was the identification and formation of five new strands of activity within the SICSA MMI theme (along with identified leadership).
5 Strands identified:

1. IxD/UX (interaction design/user experience)
2. Tourism
3. Health and Wellbeing
4. Social and Affective
5. Mobile Interaction

Email Aaron if you want a contact for any of these or the contact the SICSA MMI theme leader, Professor Stephen Brewster.
The agenda for the day was:
10.30am Informal morning coffee in Jack Cole Building
11.00 – 11.05 Introductions and Welcome from Aaron Quigley and Stephen Brewster
11.05 – 11.20 Heriot-Watt University
11.20 – 11.35 University of Abertay Dundee
11.35 – 11.50 Glasgow Caledonian University
11.50 – 12.05 University of St Andrews
12.05 – 1.00 Discussion Session A Jack Cole 1.33a Topics
1. Revisit 4 themes of
a. Tools and Techniques,
b. Evaluation,
c. Social and Affective MMI,
d. Whole Body Interaction
2. Schedule and goals for MMI workshops for Apr, Jul, Oct (GCal), Jan (’12)
3. MMI theme collaboration on special issue journals, workshops, events, conferences
4. Cross-site activities: internships, debates, PhD event, visitors, seminar series, exchange program
1.00 – 2.00 Lunch and Poster Session
SACHI: St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group, HCI Lab, John Honey Building
2.00 – 2.15 University of Glasgow
2.15 – 2.30 University of Edinburgh
2.30 – 2.45 Edinburgh Napier University
2.45 – 3.00 University of Dundee
3.00 – 4.00 Discussion Session B Jack Cole 1.33a Topics
1. Revisit 4 themes of Tools and Techniques, Evaluation, Social and Affective MMI,Whole Body Interaction
2. Funding opportunities (discussion on EU, national (EPSRC/TSB/SFC), industry funding groups in MMI could pursue)
Email Aaron if you have any questions on this day. We owe a great thanks to the administrative and technical support team here in Computer Science for their efforts behind the scenes and to Jakub and Tom for setting up a great many things, including the lunchtime poster session.

On Thursday 14th October 2010 at 6:30 pm Aaron will give a talk on Invisible Interfaces and the BCS Edinburgh Branch in the University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum.
Overview
The user interface represents the point of contact between a computer system and a human, both in terms of input to the system and output from the system. Ubiquitous Computing or UbiComp consists of hardware, software, systems and services which act as the computational edifice around which we need to build our user interfaces to afford natural or “invisible” interaction styles. This is driven by the evolution from the notion of a computer as a single device, to the notion of a computing space comprising personal and peripheral computing elements and services all connected and communicating as required. This presentation discusses research and developments in the realisation of User Interfaces for UbiComp systems. Examples are drawn from research and development groups around the world who are exploring mobile and embedded devices in almost every type of physical artefact including cars, toys, tools, homes, appliances, clothing and work surfaces.
BCS Edinburgh Website