Vacancy Advertisement:  (http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AHX243/research-fellow/)
We wish to recruit a Research Fellow in Information Visualisation and Human Computer Interaction to support a number of new and ongoing research projects. The post will be based in the School of Computer Science so particular expertise and background experience in programming, interface design, evaluation or novel user interface development would be an advantage.
SACHI (http://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk) has over twenty members, is strongly active in the international community organising conferences such as UIST 2013, ITS 2013 and MobileHCI 2014. We regularly publish in the leading international HCI venues including CHI, UIST, IUI, AVI, ITS, PerDis etc. As a group we have several funded projects, organise an international seminar series, host visitors regularly and maintain a HCI lab with a wide range of equipment.
As a HCI group we encourage group-wide collaborative research so there are opportunities to participate in in other projects, be involved with undergraduate and postgraduate supervision, in addition to working on emerging topics of interest in the group.
In addition, demonstrated experience in information visualisation, intelligent user interfaces, web applications or ubiquitous and pervasive computing would be highly advantageous.
You should have a good honours degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, and preferably have, or be about to obtain, a PhD in Computer Science. It is essential that you have strong software development and evaluation skills. In addition you must demonstrate that you are able to manage work across a number of projects with competing deadlines while leading the day-to-day work and development.
The post is available for 2 years in the first instance, with possible extension, starting as soon as possible.
Informal enquiries should be directed to Professor Aaron Quigley aquigley@st-andrews.ac.uk or +44 (0) 1334 461623
Please quote ref: SB1190
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AHX243/research-fellow/
Closing Date: 31 January 2014
Further Particulars: SB1190AR FPs.doc
Salary: £30,728 – £33,562 per annum
Start: As soon as possible
Fixed term for 2 years

Professor John Stasko and the Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has been appointed as an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science. Professor Stasko will be joining SACHI as an adjunct faculty member. You can find a complete blog post on our school’s website.

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.