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

Investigating the effects of tactile feedback

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

Experiment setup for Combining Touch and Gaze for Distant Selection

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.
 
 

Two SACHI members, Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron Quigley are organizing with other colleagues workshops at the CHI 2013 the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris in April 2013. These workshops are called Blended Interaction: Envisioning Future Collaborative Interactive Spaces and Grand Challenges in Text Entry.
Once the workshop websites are online, we will link from them here. (click on the CHI 2013 logo above to visit the main conference website).

Aaron Quigley, Judy Kay and Tsvi Kuflik are guest editors for a UMUAI special issue on Ubiquitous and Pervasive User Modelling. You can see the full call for papers for this special issue here.
 

Today’s logo at slashdot.org was created by Jason Jacques, a new PhD student in the SACHI group!
From slashdot.org: Artist Jason Jacques says: “While the main text itself is “obvious” in its fully animated form this logo provides additional challenge in that the remainder of the message must be decoded. Can you figure it out? If so, mail answer to logo15@slashdot.org. How did he do it? After calculating the necessary sizes and bit patterns on paper, the static image of the entire message was generated using Pixlemator on Mac OS X (Lion). This image was then processed using ImageMagick (and a short shell script) using Ubuntu. Additional editing was done to the logo portion in Pixelmator (OS X). These frames were then assembled into an animated gif using Jasc Animation Shop on Windows XP. Finally, the images were optimized to minimise their size using ImageOptim, back on OS X.”

Welcome to Uta Hinrichs who has joined the SACHI group from the University of Calgary, Canada as a Research Fellow. Uta holds a Diplom (equiv. to MSc) in Computational Visualistics from the University of Magdeburg in Germany and is in the process of finishing her PhD in Computer Science with a specialization in Computational Media Design. Uta’s PhD research, that she conducted at the InnoVis Group of the University of Calgary, focuses on how to support open-ended information exploration on large displays in public exhibition spaces, combining information visualization with direct-touch interaction techniques. As part of this research, she has designed and studied large display installations in the context of a museum and art gallery, library, and an aquarium.
To learn more about Uta’s work here see her SACHI biography page or visit her own website here to get an overview of her previous research projects. Everyone in SACHI welcomes Uta!
 

Participants wanted for an experiment on gesture user interfaces  –  £20 in amazon vouchers. 
See the page of the study for more details!
 
 

The SACHI group (Human-Computer Interaction) at the University of St Andrews, Scotland’s first university, is offering a full scholarship to join the School of Computer Science as a doctoral researcher for 3.5 years. The scholarship covers tuition fees and provides a living-expenses stipend.
The work will focus on the creation of new forms of visualization with gaze-contingent displays (electronic displays that have access to the location of the person’s gaze), their evaluation through laboratory studies, and the implementation of new visualization and interaction techniques. The student will work closely with Dr. Miguel Nacenta and within the SACHI group.
Please, visit Dr. Nacenta’s site for more detail.

As part of his work in the School of Computer Science, from the start of August 2012 Aaron is joining the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) executive as the deputy director for knowledge exchange for two years. As a result, he is stepping down as  theme leader for Multimodal Interaction.  Aaron has enjoyed his time working with Professor Stephen Brewster and is looking forward to joining the executive next month.

Last week (4-5 June, 2012) two papers from SACHI were presented at the Pervasive Displays international Symposium. The symposium took place in Porto, Portugal, and it was a great showcase of work on pervasive display systems from research groups in Europe, Japan and North America.
We presented two papers:
Factors Influencing Visual Attention Switch in Multi-Display User Interfaces: A Survey, which is part of the dissertation work of Umar Rashid, and
The LunchTable: A Multi-User, Multi-Display System for Information Sharing in Casual Group Interactions, which is part of collaborations with the ilab, at the University of Calgary.
Both papers were well-received and will be soon available through the ACM Digital Library, but the most interesting part was to share the energy of the pervasive displays community and the amazing discussions. We are hoping for a new edition next year, which will be in California.