This week Aaron has been attending a research workshop of the Israel Science Foundation on Ubiquitous User Modeling (U2M’2012) – State of the art and current challenges in Haifa Israel. Aaron’s talk at this event was entitled Eyes, Gaze, Displays: User Interface Personalisation “You Lookin’ at me?”. In this he covered work with Mike Bennett, Umar Rashid, Jakub Dostal, Miguel A. Nacenta and Per Ola Kristensson from SACHI. The talk was a good way to show the interlocking and related research going on in SACHI.
His talk included references to a number of recent papers which include:

• Factors Influencing Visual Attention Switch in Multi-Display User Interfaces: A Survey, Umar Rashid, Miguel A. Nacenta, Aaron J. Quigley, International Symposium on Pervasive Displays, 2012
• The cost of display switching: a comparison of mobile, large display and hybrid UI configurations, Umar Rashid, Miguel A. Nacenta, Aaron J. Quigley, International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, AVI ’12: Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
• Workshop on Infrastructure and Design Challenges of Coupled Display Visual Interfaces: in conjunction with Advanced Visual Interfaces 2012 (AVI’12)
  Aaron Quigley, Alan Dix, Miguel Nacenta, Tom Rodden, AVI ’12: Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
• Designing Mobile Computer Vision Applications for the Wild: Implications on Design and Intelligibility, Jakub Dostal, Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron J. Quigley at Pervasive Intelligibility, the Second Workshop on Intelligibility and Control in Pervasive Computing.
• Creating Personalized Digital Human Models of Perception for Visual Analytics, Mike Bennett, Aaron J. Quigley, UMAP 2011 – 19th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 25-37, Girona, Spain, 2011.
• A taxonomy for and analysis of multi-person-display ecosystems, Terrenghi L,  Quigley A. and Dix A., 
Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2009) 13:583–598

The alternative yet related viewpoints in this work made for a stimulating presentation and fruitful views for the international audience.
 

This week Aaron Quigley and Tristan Henderson attended Pervasive 2012, the Tenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, at Newcastle University.
On Monday Aaron attended Pervasive Intelligibility the Second Workshop on Intelligibility and Control in Pervasive Computing. Here he presented a paper entitled Designing Mobile Computer Vision Applications for the Wild: Implications on Design and Intelligibility (PDF) by
Per Ola Kristensson, Jakub Dostal and Aaron Quigley. Later, he was a panelists with Judy Kay and Simone Stumpf where they discussed the research challenges of intelligibility with pervasive computing along with all participants.
On Tuesday Tristan attended the First Workshop on recent advances in behavior prediction and pro-active pervasive computing where he presented the paper Predicting location-sharing privacy preferences in social network applications by Greg Bigwood, Fehmi Ben Abdesslem and Tristan Henderson.
On Tuesday Aaron chaired the Doctoral Consortium with Elaine Huang from the University of Zurich with five panellists and nine students. The panellists were Adrian Friday, University of Lancaster, UK, Jin Nakazawa, Keio University, Japan and AJ Brush, Microsoft Research Seattle, USA.
The Pervasive 2012 doctoral consortium provided a collegial and supportive forum in which PhD students could present and defend their doctoral research-in-progress with constructive feedback and discussion. The consortium was guided by a panel of experienced researchers and practitioners with both academic and industrial experience. It offered students a valuable opportunity to receive high-quality feedback and fresh perspectives from recognised international experts in the field, and to engage with other senior doctoral students.
The day ended with a career Q&A session with an extended panel including Tristan Henderson from SACHI and Rene Mayhofer. Following this the panellists and students were able to have dinner together to continue active research and career discussions.
Along with work as a member of the joint steering committee of pervasive and UbiComp Aaron was a session chair for the HCI session on Thursday.

This week three members of SACHI, Aaron Quigley, Miguel Nacenta and Umar Rashid are attending the 11th Advanced Visual Interfaces International Working Conference in Italy. “AVI 2012 is held on the island of Capri (Naples), Italy from May 21 to 25, 2012. Started in 1992 in Roma, and held every two years in different Italian towns, the Conference traditionally brings together experts in different areas of computer science who have a common interest in the conception, design and implementation of visual and, more generally, perceptual interfaces.”
We are presenting two full papers.
FatFonts: Combining the symbolic and visual aspects of numbers, Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale.
Abstract: “In this paper we explore numeric typeface design for visualization purposes. We introduce FatFonts, a technique for visualizing quantitative data that bridges the gap between numeric and visual representations. FatFonts are based on Arabic numerals but, unlike regular numeric typefaces, the amount of ink (dark pixels) used for each digit is proportional to its quantitative value. This enables accurate reading of the numerical data while preserving an overall visual context. We discuss the challenges of this approach that we identified through our design process and propose a set of design goals that include legibility, familiarity, readability, spatial precision, dynamic range, and resolution. We contribute four FatFont typefaces that are derived from our exploration of the design space that these goals introduce. Finally, we discuss three example scenarios that show how FatFonts can be used for visualization purposes as valuable representation alternatives.”
Read the FatFonts paper here. And also FatFonts features in the New Scientist.
and
The cost of display switching: A comparison of mobile, large display and hybrid UI configuration, Umar Rashid, Miguel Nacenta and Aaron Quigley
Abstract: “Attaching a large external display can help a mobile device user view more content at once. This paper reports on a study investigating how different configurations of input and output across displays affect performance, workload and subjective preferences in map, text and photo search tasks. Experimental results show that a hybrid configuration where visual output is distributed across displays is worst or equivalent to worst in all tasks. A mobile device-controlled large display configuration performs best in the map search task and equal to best in text and photo search tasks (tied with a mobile-only configuration). After conducting a detailed analysis of the performance differences across different UI configurations, we give recommendations for the design of distributed user interfaces.”
Read the Cost of Display Switching paper here.
Along with our colleagues in Nottingham and Birmingham we are chairing and organising the Workshop on Infrastructure and Design Challenges of Coupled Display Visual Interfaces PPD’12. The proceedings can be downloaded here. Finally, Aaron is the session chair for the Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality papers at AVI.

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

Miguel Nacenta is currently in Switzerland, participating as a keynote speaker in the Swiss Workshop on Multi-display Environments, 2012. During the workshop participants will have the opportunity to discuss on the issues of designing and building Multi-display Environments. The workshop includes another two key-note speakers (Prof. Streitz and Prof. Reiterer) and a presentation of the Interactive Collaborative Environment (ICE) research project that is currently being undertaken by the Pervasive and Artificial Intelligence research group at the Department of Informatics of the University of Fribourg.

Aaron Quigley and Per Ola Kristensson from SACHI are the Short Papers chairs for the BCS HCI 2012 conference. HCI 2012 is the 26th Annual Conference of the Specialist HCI group of the BCS and the short papers track has a submission date of June 15, 2012. The full paper track for HCI 2012 has a deadline of the 30th March 2012.
From the main call:
We invite submissions for short papers that address any area of HCI. Authors are encouraged to submit late-breaking research results that show timely and innovative ideas. Short paper submissions should report original work and must not have been published previously or be a condensed version of previously published papers.
This year we have returned to the founding theme of the conference: “People and Computers”. This is to encapsulate and highlight the growing diversity of our field of HCI in one event. Technology is now common in all walks of life and HCI practitioners and researchers have more areas of impact than ever before. We want the conference to reflect this growing importance and diversity.
Submission Tracks
The conference will have usual tracks of high-quality research papers, written as either Full or Short papers. Full papers should be a maximum of 10 pages in length. These submissions should be of original work and should not have been previously published. Short papers should be a maximum of 6 pages and should be compact short pieces of original work. There is also a ‘work-in-progress’ category. We strongly encourage participants to reflect the spirit of the track by submitting early-stage, surprising or incomplete results that may be of relevance and interest to the community. The submission dates for the tracks are below.
Following on from last year we have also included an alt-HCI track. This track is for work that highlights a more extreme, unusual and less mainstream side of HCI. The more alternative the work is, the better. We are looking for high quality contributions that might be highly contentious, using atypical methodologies, critical of established ideas or focused in an unconventional domain. If your work is alternative, controversial and interesting, then alt-HCI is the track for you.
The conference will also host a variety of workshops and a doctorial consortium. These will be held on the leafy campus of the University of Birmingham, in Edgbaston. A redbrick University and member of the Russell group, it offers a pleasant green environment.
Submissions
We encourage submissions that focus on human interaction with technology and computer systems. Whether your work is at the fundamental end of the spectrum (theory, design, or principle), or at the practical end (evaluation, product, or impact) we are interested in encouraging high-quality submissions to the conference.
The dates for submission for each paper track are:
Full Papers:- 30th March 2012 (Notification:- 31st May 2012)
Short Papers, WiP & Alt-HCI:- 15th June 2012 (Notification:-27th July 2012)
Relevant topics areas include but are by no means limited to:

• Persuasive Technology
• Mobile Interactions
• User Experience
• Touchtable interactions
• Affective Computing/Interactions
• Usability Engineering
• Accessibility
• Child Computer Interaction
• Interaction Design
• UCD4D
• Recommender Systems
• Annotation
• Brain Computer Interfaces
• Technology and Culture
• E-Government

The SACHI group and the University of St Andrews will be running the Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference in 2013 (ITS 2013). This is the leading international conference on research in interactive tabletops and surfaces. This conference at St Andrews will be a proud continuation of the excellent experiences of past ITS conferences from Banff, Saarbrücken and Kobe. In due course we will be publishing a full website at http://www.its2013.org where you can learn more about the Workshops,  Keynote , Industrial Keynote, calls for Tutorials, papers and posters, along with demos, a doctoral colloquium, social events.
Our current Conference Committee includes:
General Chairs
Aaron Quigley
Giulio Jacucci, HIIT, Finland
Program Co-Chairs
Yoshifumi Kitamura, Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University
Miguel Nacenta
Local Conference Chair
Per Ola Kristensson
Local Organising Committee
Tristan Henderson
Per Ola Kristensson
Miguel Nacenta
Aaron Quigley
We look forward to welcoming the ITS community to St Andrews which is celebrating its 600th anniversary during 2013.

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.

Aaron is giving a seminar at the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh) on Wednesday the 18th of May 2011 at 15:15. This talk will be unlike his colloquium talk in March as it focuses on the particular challenges and research questions when dealing with a dynamic source of data (and hence information).
Title: Dynamic Information Visualisation

SNAP: Social Network Assembly Pipeline and Visualisation

Societies continued reliance on information and communications technologies has resulted in organizations generating, gathering, and storing “raw data” at a rate growing each year. The ability for even a mid-sized organization to store tens to hundreds of terabytes of data is already within reach.