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.

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.

Rapid Prototyping with .net Gadgeteer in St Andrews, July 24, 2013 from 9:30 AM to 5:00 PMWe are pleased to host a hardware workshop on “Rapid Prototyping with .Net Gadgeteer“. Tilman and Thomas will give an introduction to the .NET Gadgeteer Platform and show some prototypes. Over the first part of the course they show how to build a digital camera, followed by group projects where they ask participants to come up with ideas that are relevant to their fields of research/studies.
Tilman and Thomas are two researchers from the University of Stuttgart and they are interested in the design space as well as limitations of building smart artifacts using .NET Gadgeteer. The workshop is kindly supported by Microsoft Research in Cambridge which is why there is no cost for hosts or participants. .NET Gadgeteer was developed for Open Source usage in Cambridge.
We thanks the SICSA MMI theme for their support in bringing this workshop here along with it’s sister workshop in Glasgow. If you are a SICSA student you can signup to this event here.
 
 
 
 

Information retrieval document analysis tasks, such as those conducted by search engines are ideal Big Data tasks, as they are often embarrassingly parallelisable using techniques such as MapReduce. However, while a large portion of the document sets such as the Web are static in nature, social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook generate document streams comprised of hundreds of millions of posts each day. The easy availability, high volume and tendency of such streams to reflect real-world events make them ideal sources of information to drive applications such as event detection or real-time search. However, the scale of these data streams mean that distributed parallel processing is needed, while traditional distributed processing paradigms such as MapReduce are unsuited to streaming data due to their batch-orientated nature. In this presentation, we will provide a brief overview of Big Data analysis within IR, before moving onto the challenges that real-time streaming data streams pose, discussing the new generation of distributed steam processing platforms currently under development and illustrating how one specific use-case, namely real-time search can be accomplished using one such platform.

This week Aaron is attending the Second International Symposium on Pervasive Displays at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. He is attending to present a paper co-authored with Jakub Dostal and Per Ola Kristensson in SACHI, along with being a session chair on the second day of the conference. The paper is titled.
Dostal, J., Kristensson, P.O. and Quigley, A. 2013. Multi-view proxemics: distance and position sensitive interaction. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis 2013). ACM Press: forthcoming.

The paper presents SACHI research from these three authors at the intersection of proxemic interaction and multi-view display technologies. This work relies on underlying technologies to determine the viewers, their distance and angle to the display. Knowledge of these factors allows us to design interactive systems which exploits it for novel forms of interaction. We explore this in two studies that are based on two real-world scenarios of a departure board and a video player (with subtitles). Our results show that multi-view proxemic systems are accurate and that users find them useful and would use them if they were available.

The Tiree Tech Wave (TTW), is run twice a year, and is billed as ‘a hands-on making and meeting event ‘. This Spring, thanks to SICSA funding, SACHI member Anne- Marie Mann was given the privilege of attending.

The Tiree Tech Wave (TTW), organised by Alan Dix and Graham Dean, those who participate are lured by the promise of time to step out, to experiment, play, make things with others and discuss what brings us all together – our new digital maker culture.
The first challenge to all participants of the Tech Wave is getting to Tiree, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. The short flight from Glasgow challenges even the most intrepid participants and appears to be a rite of passage. For the duration of the stay Tech Wavers ask ‘Did you come in the tiny plane?’ a feat of pure courage that bonds us all to Tiree and its inhabitants.
Safe and sound on the island, it’s straight down to business. The Tiree Rural Centre becomes home to the 30+ participants of TTW5. This year, saw an eclectic mix of people from across the country enjoying the island and the projects they worked on. This was an exciting opportunity to meet a wide range of people and develop projects and ideas with them.
Whilst everyone was busy working away, I had the pleasure to work on a project with Ruth Aylett, from Heriot Watt University and Steve Forshaw, from HighWire at Lancaster University . The project was based on an art installation by Gordon Pask called Colloquy of Mobiles that had intrigued Ruth. The original artwork, deemed a form of Cybernetic Serendipity was a reactive, computer-based system composed of five large mobiles. Our task was to honour the artwork using only what we could scrounge from the electronic artefacts in front of us. The resultant piece, which we loosely named Cybernetic Fecundity, was run by 3 arduinos, a ‘male’, a ‘female’ and a constant , which represented time and rhythm. Completing the work took time, patience and a lot of ‘iterative design’. For me, it provided a demonstration of design – from conception to realisation, and it’s achievement drew on everyone’s strength and experience and was an excellent learning opportunity. A video of the project in action can be viewed here.
Other projects such as those brought by Cardiff School of Art and Design, included various wearable technologies, building a 3D printer, and a ceramic representation of its artist with an embedded RFID tag. The University of Lancaster consisted of two contingents of people, those from HighWire  and a group from the Catalyst project, working on an app to help raise Autism awareness. Another project worth mentioning was conducted by Alessio Malizia and Alan Chamberlain, who both worked hard to implement a gesture aware table top in the Tiree Rural Centre, using a Kinect and a projecter.
Whilst busy by day, the evenings were a more social affair. The events organised included a meal at the Scarinish hotel, the launch of the Tiree mobile heritage app, and a meal hosted by Marie-Angela, Tim, Will and Sam from Catalyst.
The true success of TTW5 was the fellowship and ingenuity of the participants. The Tech Wave allows a chance for creativity and networking in a relaxed, informal atmosphere that fosters strong bonds between those taken part. On that note I would like to thank everyone involved with my Tiree Tech Wave experience and it is fair to say that I hope to see them all again.

SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group and the Big Data Lab St Andrews are pleased to announce that we will jointly run a SICSA supported “Big Data Information Visualisation” summer school on July 8th-12th 2013. 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 school we take a blended theory and application approach here with hands on work with data, big data systems and information visualisation toolkits.
The first round of applications closes on March 15th, 2013.  If there are places remaining, the second round of applications will close on Apr 19th 2013.
More details can be found here.
 

This SIG meeting provides a forum for visionaries; researchers and practitioners looking to consider the place and importance of visions within CHI. Can visions, the process of visioning and forming new visions help us refine, advance or develop new research or forms of interaction. And if visions are important to us, then are they part of the regular academic process? If so, should CHI provide venues for publishing new visions?
To support the planning for this Special Interest Group meeting we have setup a Wiki called Visions Of Computing. If you would like to contribute contact Aaron Quigley for an account.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Aaron Quigley and Dr. Sara Diamond the President of the Ontario College of Art and Design University are the general co-chairs for MobileHCI 2014 the 16th International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction in Toronto,  Canada. Associate Professor Pourang Irani, University of Manitoba invited Aaron to join this Canadian organising committee as an international member.
The chairs, Dr. Sara Diamond and Professor Aaron Quigley, have extensive experience organizing and managing academic conferences. Sara Diamond is President of the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U), Canada’s premiere university institution targeted at Art and Design and based in Toronto, proposed home for MobileHCI 2014. Aaron is the Chair of Human Computer Interaction at the School of Computer Science, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He directs the St. Andrews Computer Human Interaction Research Group. Building upon a vast repertoire of resources available locally, nationally and internationally, both chairs look forward to delivering a successful and exciting MobileHCI 2014 event in Toronto.