Our paper introducing the new field of what we term “Human-Data Interaction” won the best paper award at DE2013: Open Digital – The Fourth Annual Digital Economy All Hands Meeting. We are currently building a research agenda and community around this topic; if you are interested then please visit the HDI website.

The special issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies on Privacy Methodologies in HCI (edited by Mina Vasalou, Tristan Henderson and Adam Joinson) is now available online. Please take a look if you are interested in conducting studies about privacy.

Tristan Henderson is serving as workshop co-chair for ACM MobiSys 2014. MobiSys is the premier conference for researchers working in mobile systems, with a particular focus on actual deployed implementations rather than analytical or simulation results. 2014 sees the twelfth instance of the MobiSys conference, to be held in historic Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA.

The call for workshops is available on the MobiSys website. We are particularly interested in reaching out to the HCI community, since there is a long tradition of implementing and deploying real systems for usability and interface studies that might not be known to the traditional MobiSys community. So if anyone reading this is interested in running a workshop, please get in touch!

The annual 35 Innovators Under 35, published by the MIT Technology Review identifies young individuals who are pushing forward the boundaries of technology and driving the next generation. This year, SACHI’s Dr Per Ola Kristensson was recognised in the prestigious Visionaries category.
Per Ola was recognised for his breakthrough work on text input and gesture recognition originally successfully commercialised as ShapeWriter, later purchased by Nuance Communications. The technology is a highly influential precursor to the gesture keyboards seen in today’s Android mobile telephone handsets and tablet computers.
Joining tech luminaries already honoured, including Jonathan Ive, Jerry Yang, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, Per Ola was also recognised for his work to aid people with disabilities, such as speech impediments or limited dexterity, expanding the use of statistical language modelling to significantly speed their communication from an unaided one or two words per minute.
SACHI congratulates Per Ola on this prestigious honour.
Read More: MIT Technology Review, University of St Andrews News

The St Andrews Human Computer Interaction research group is involved in the organisation of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2013, UIST 2013 and ITS 2013, the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2013 conferences. Today a number of important things happened worthy of note and thanks. We are organising UIST with our colleagues Microsoft Research in Cambridge and ITS with our colleagues in the University of Helsinki.
The program for UIST 2013 went online. Our PC chairs Ivan and Takeo along with our general chairs Shahram and Aaron put this together. Our own Per Ola Kristensson was a member of the PC along with 30 others from around the world. Miguel Nacenta from SACHI has a paper in the final program. He will be posting more details on this paper and demo closer to the conference date.
The registration for UIST 2013 and for ITS 2013 opened today. Our own Jakub Dostal is one of the ITS and UIST registration chairs along with Merve and they have been hard at work getting this system up and running, ready for today, and the months leading upto the conference.
Miguel Nacenta is the local chair for UIST 2013 and he has been putting in enormous effort with the local arrangements from what the hotels should be, to how the student innovation contest can operate in the Kinkell Byre.  Per Ola Kristensson is the local chair for ITS 2013 and has likewise been very busy looking after many aspects of the program from getting our USB keys to ensuring the WiFi holds up. Per Ola is also busy as demonstrations co-chair with Scott from Microsoft for UIST 2013. This UIST demo event will be held in the Hall of Champions at the Old Course hotel. These aren’t things academics should be spending their time on but it’s what’s called of us when we agree to host a conference as a service to our research community. Miguel has put together a wonderful website with details on how to get to St Andrews for ITS and UIST. It’s a website released today and I know we in SACHI will be using for many years to come!
Finally, our own Uta Hinrichs who along with Eve are the student volunteer chairs for ITS and UIST. Thanks also to our local student volunteers who are already busy making the program layout, arranging shipping of incoming sponsor material etc. Of course, there are many other people from reviewers to other chairs to thank but I’ll leave that for a future post. For now, this post is to thank all of my local colleagues for their efforts in organising ITS and UIST this year.
It might take a village to raise a child but I can tell you it takes a research group with connections to the global research community to host two international conferences!

We are looking for participants willing to participate in an experiment on depth perception using a gaze contingent display.

 
Details of the study:

• Sessions: One session of about 45 minutes.
• Task: Use a gaze contingent display to perceive objects in a 3D scene.
• Location: School of Psychology, Room 1.36
• Times: 6.5.2013 – 19.5.2013, Mo to Fr from 9.00 to 18.00
• Reward: £5 Amazon voucher per session
• Contact: If you are interested, please send an e-mail to: mm285@st-andrews.ac.uk
• Supervisor: Dr. Miguel Nacenta

 

Jakub Dostal and Per Ola Kristensson are at IUI 2013 in Santa Monica, California.
On Thursday morning Jakub presented the full paper Subtle Gaze-Dependent Techniques for Visualising Display Changes in Multi-Display Environments by Jakub Dostal, Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron Quigley. You can read more about this work on its on designated project page: Diff Displays.
Jakub also participated in the IUI Doctoral Consortium and as a Student Volunteer for the conference. Per Ola Kristensson is a member of the Senior Programme Committee for IUI 2013.

On the 4th March, the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland welcomed 50 new members, among them Dr Per Ola Kristensson acknowledging his contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, and specifically mobile text entry.
Dr Kristensson, and the 49 other appointees, joins the inaugural 68 members in what is expected to be a limited group of around 150 members. In addition to the special recognition, membership entitles Dr Kristensson to apply for funding from many of the Royal Society’s grants.
SACHI, and the entire School of Computer Science, wishes to congratulate Dr Kristensson on this prestigious honour.
 

CHI is the premier international conference on human computer interaction, and this year’s event is looking to be the most exciting yet for the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction (SACHI) research group.

Contributions to this year’s event come from several group members, and SACHI will be well represented with seven researchers in attendance: Professor Aaron Quigley, Dr Per Ola Kristensson, Dr Miguel Nacenta, Jakub Dostal, Michael Mauderer, Shyam Reyal, and Jason T. Jacques.
SACHI group members co-authored three full papers this year, on topics as broad as gesture-based interaction, tactile feedback, and text entry.

Papers

• Memorability of Pre-designed and User-defined Gesture Sets
  Miguel A. Nacenta, Yemliha Kamber, Yizhou Qiang, and Per Ola Kristensson
• The Effects of Tactile Feedback and Movement Alteration on Interaction and Awareness with Digital Embodiments
  Andre Doucette, Regan Mandryk, Carl Gutwin, Miguel Nacenta, and Andriy Pavlovych
• Improving two-thumb text entry on touchscreen devices.
  Antti Oulasvirta, Anna Reichel, Wenbin Li, Yan Zhang, Myroslav Bachynskyi, Keith Vertanen, and Per Ola Kristensson

In addition, Miguel Nacenta and Per Ola Kristensson will have their note published regarding the perfomance and ergonomics of multi-touch rotation manipulations.

Note

• Multi-Touch Rotation Gestures: Performance and Ergonomics
  Eve Hoggan, John Williamson, Antti Oulasvirta, Miguel Nacenta, Per Ola Kristensson, and Anu Lehtiö

In a collaborative work, three SACHI group members will present their work in progress, demonstrating an innovative method to improving the estimation of user distance.

Work In Progress

• The Potential of Fusing Computer Vision and Depth Sensing for Accurate Distance Estimation
  Jakub Dostal, Per Ola Kristensson, and Aaron Quigley

Engaging with the research community is also central to SACHI’s goals, and CHI will be no exception with SACHI members hosting a special interest group and two separate workshops.

Special Interest Group

• Visions and Visioning in CHI: A CHI 2013 Special Interest Group Meeting
  Organisers: Aaron Quigley, Alan Dix, Wendy E. Mackay, Hiroshi Ishii, and Jürgen Steimle

Workshops

• Grand challenges in text entry
  Organisers: Per Ola Kristensson, Stephen Brewster, James Clawson, Mark Dunlop, Strathclyde, Leah Findlater, Poika Isokoski, Benoît Martin, Antti Oulasvirta, Keith Vertanen, and Annalu Waller
• Blended Interaction, Envisioning Future Collaborative Interactive Spaces: A CHI 2013 Workshop
  Organisers: Hans-Christian Jetter, Raimund Dachselt, Harald Reiterer, Aaron Quigley, David Benyon, and Michael Haller

SACHI’s will be also be well represented in many of these community meetings with five co-authored workshop papers.

Workshop Papers

• Visual Focus-Aware Applications and Services in Multi-Display Environments. In CHI 2013 Workshop on Gaze Interaction in the Post-WIMP World
  Jakub Dostal, Per Ola Kristensson, and Aaron Quigley
• Do we need a standard for
  evaluating text entry methods? In CHI 2013 Workshop on Grand Challenges in Text EntryAntti Oulasvirta and Per Ola Kristensson.
• Combining Touch and Gaze for Distant Selection in a Tabletop Setting. In CHI 2013 Workshop on Gaze Interaction in the Post-WIMP World
  Michael Mauderer, Florian Daiber, and Antonio Krüger
• Developing Efficient Text Entry Methods for the Sinhalese Language. In CHI 2013 Workshop on Grand Challenges in Text Entry
  Shyam Reyal, Keith Vertanen, and Per Ola Kristensson
• Authorship in Art/Science Collaboration is Tricky. In CHI 2013 Workshop on Crafting Interactive Systems
  Lindsay MacDonald, David Ledo, Miguel A. Nacenta, John Brosz, and Sheelagh Carpendale

Academic service is important to the research community and SACHI will be giving back at this year’s CHI. Professor Quigley is serving as an associate chair in the Interaction Using Specific Capabilities or Modalities subcommittee, as well as serving as a session chair during the event, and Dr Kristensson serves as an associate chair for the Interaction Techniques and Devices subcommittee. After the event, Professor Quigley will staying on for the Program Committee meeting of the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2013). Finally, to assist in the smooth running of this year’s conference, SACHI will also provide two student volunteers, Jakub Dostal and Jason T. Jacques.

 
Dr Urška Demšar (School of Geography and Geosciences) and Dr Miguel Nacenta (SACHI) are looking for a doctoral student to carry out research in trajectory analysis and interaction. For more information see the position announcement.
For further queries feel free to e-mail Miguel or Urska.