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).
News
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.
Tristan Henderson is co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies on Privacy Methodologies in HCI.
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-of-human-computer-studies/call-for-papers/special-issue-of-international-journal-of/
Topic:
Privacy has become one of the most contested social issues of the information age. For researchers and practitioners of human-computer interaction (HCI), interest in privacy is not only sparked by these changes in the scale and scope of personal information collected and stored about people, but also because of the increasing ubiquity, sociability and mobility of personal technology. However, privacy has proven to be a particularly difficult construct to study. As a construct, privacy is also open to investigation from multiple perspectives and ontological approaches, with key research coming from law, psychology, computer science and economics.
The special issue on privacy methodologies in HCI invites high quality research papers that use a variety of methods where the author(s) reflect on and evaluate the method itself, both as applied in their specific context, and more widely, as well as the privacy aspect under consideration.
Authors are asked to consider these key questions in their papers:
- What was the privacy context being researched?
- Why was the particular methodology chosen for a given context?
- What selection criteria were used? What were the advantages and disadvantages of the methodology?
- How was bias and priming avoided? Was there evidence of a ‘measurement problem’?
- How did the researcher ensure the sample was representative, avoiding sample-based biases?
- What were the results? How could this method be used to study other aspects of HCI and privacy?
Submission instructions:
Manuscripts should generally not exceed 8000 words. Papers should be prepared according to the IJHCS Guide for authors, and should be submitted online according to the journal’s instructions. The IJHCS Guide for authors and online submission are available at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhcs.
Important dates:
- Submission deadline: October 15, 2012
- Notify authors: January 5, 2013
- Publication date: late 2013
Guest Editors:
- Dr. Asimina Vasalou (University of Birmingham)
- Dr. Tristan Henderson (University of St Andrews)
- Dr. Adam Joinson (University of Bath)
Professor Aaron Quigley has been invited to attend and present at a research workshop of the Israel Science Foundation on Ubiquitous User Modeling (U2M’2012) – State of the art and current challenges in Haifa, Israel later this month (June 25th – June 28th).
Based on his research work with colleagues and current students Umer Rashid and Jakub Dostal along with former student Dr. Mike Bennett he will be presenting a talk entitled “You lookin’ at me? ‘Eyes, Gaze, Displays and User Interface Personalisation'”.
This presentation draws on different yet related strands of research from four research papers, three published and one under review for a Journal. The three research papers have appeared in UMAP, AVI, and the Second Workshop on Intelligibility and Control in Pervasive Computing. Aaron’s overarching vision on bridging the digital-physical divide is embodied in this work to ensure we have more seamless interaction with computers.
The abstract for this talk is as follows:
Our bodies shape our experience of the world, and our bodies influence what we design. How important are the physical differences between people? Can we model the physiological differences and use the models to adapt and personalise designs, user interfaces and artefacts? Can we model, measure and predict the cost of users altering their gaze in single or multi-display environments? If so, can we personalise interfaces using this knowledge. What about when moving and while the distance between user and screen is varying. Can this be considered a new modality and used to personalise the interfaces along with physiological differences and our current gaze. In this talk we seek to answer some of these questions. We introduce an Individual Observer Model of human eyesight, which we use to simulate 3600 biologically valid human eyes. We also report on controlled lab and outdoor experiments with real users. This is to measure both gaze and distance from the screen in an attempt to quantify the cost of attention switching along with the use of distance as a modality. In each case, for distance, gaze or expected eyesight we would like to develop models which can allow us to make predictions about how easy or hard it is to see visual information and visual designs, along with altering the designs to suit individual users based on their current context.
Prior to this workshop Professor Quigley was asked to comment on some of the grand challenges he saw for User Modelling and Ubiquitous Computing. The following are the challenges he posed:
- Are user models and context data so fundamental that future UbiComp operating systems need to have them built in as first order features of the OS? Or in your opinion is this the wrong approach? Discuss.
- There are many facets of a ubiquitous computing system from low-level sensor technologies in the environment, through the collection, management, and processing of context data through to the middleware required to enable the dynamic composition of devices and services envisaged. Where do User Models reside within this? Are they something only needed occasionally (or not at all) for some services or experiences or needed for all?
- Ubicomp is a model of computing in which computation is everywhere and computer functions are integrated into everything. It will be built into the basic objects, environments, and the activities of our everyday lives in such a way that no one will notice its presence. If so, how do we know what the system knows, assumes or infers about us in its decision making.
- Ubicomp represents an evolution from the notion of a computer as a single device, to the notion of a computing space comprising personal and peripheral computing elements and services all connected and communicating as required; in effect, “processing power so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se effectively disappear” or the so-called Calm Computing. The advent of ubicomp does not mean the demise of the desktop computer in the near future. Is Ubiquitous User Modelling the key problem to solve in moving people from desktop/mobile computing into UbiComp use scenarios? If not, what is?
- Context data can be provided, sensed or inferred. Context includes information from the person (physiological state), the sensed environment (environmental state) and computational environment (computational state) that can be provided to alter an applications behaviour. How much or little of this should be incorporated into individual UbiComp User Models?