We are pleased to announce and welcome Uta Hinrichs who will be joining us in SACHI in the School of Computer Science in the University of St Andrews from August of this year as a research fellow. Originally from Lübeck in Germany, Uta is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary in Canada. She is working at the Innovis Group under supervision of Sheelagh Carpendale. Her research interests include interaction with large displays in public spaces, information visualization, graphic design, and art.
She will be working with Professor Quigley on a number of projects including our JISC project (Trading Consequences) and SFC Smart Tourism project (SMART), and with Dr Nacenta on the LADDIE project. In addition to many other fun and new projects in time!
We are looking forward to Uta coming and we wish her well on her final months as a graduate student.

Everyone in SACHI would like to congratulate Miguel was being awarded a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant on Gaze-Based Perceptual Augmentation called DeepView. Miguel will be recruiting a PhD student on this project, so please contact him if you are interested in a position on this.
The analysis and visualisation of increasing amounts of data is pervasive and indispensable in many of the crucial activities for a countless number of professions. Moreover, the amount and types of data that is available for visual inspection and analysis keeps growing. The DeepView project proposes the use of gaze-tracking technology (i.e., hardware and software that can judge where the user is looking at within a screen) to extend the basic perceptual abilities of the user. The project will iterate on prototypes and empirical evaluations to explore the space of gaze-contingent manipulations that can improve perceptual performance in common tasks such as colour differentiation, visual search, and maxima finding. The project will also seek to apply the results of the initial phases to applied scenarios in other disciplines other than Human Computer Interaction and Information Visualisation.
We all wish Miguel as this project starts later this year. If you are interested in this research please contact him directly or keep an eye on this page for future blog posts.

The current issue of the New Scientist features an article called “Font for digits lets numbers punch their weight” on Miguel’s work on FatFonts which says, “The symbols we use to represent numbers are, mathematically speaking, arbitrary. Now there is a way to write numbers so that their areas equal their numerical values. The font, called FatFonts, could transform the art of data visualisation, allowing a single infographic to convey both a visual overview and exact values.
‘Scientific figures might benefit from this hybrid nature because scientists want both to see and to read data,’ says Miguel Nacenta, a computer scientist at the University of St Andrews, UK, who developed the concept with colleagues at the University of Calgary, Canada.”
Congratulations to Miguel and his colleagues on having their work highlighted in this venue.

Congratulations to Per Ola and his co-author who won an Honourable Mention (for Best Paper) at the Eye Tracking Research & Applications Symposium 2012. Only 3 of the 101 submitted papers received an honorable mention.
Kristensson, P.O. and Vertanen, K. 2012. The potential of dwell-free eye-typing for fast assistive gaze communication. In Proceedings ofthe 7th ACM Symposium on Eye-Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA2012). ACM Press: 241-244.
“The Seventh ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012) was held in Santa Barbara, California on March 28th-30th, 2012. The ETRA conference series focuses on all aspects of eye movement research and applications across a wide range of disciplines. The symposium presents research that advances the state-of-the-art in these areas, leading to new capabilities in gaze tracking systems, gaze aware applications, gaze based interaction, eye movement data analysis, etc. For ETRA 2012, we invite papers in all areas of eye tracking research and applications.” [ETRA 2012 website]
 

Per Ola Kristensson will give two presentations at IUI 2012: 17th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in Lisbon, Portugal on February 14-17, 2012.

The first presentation is on Wednesday and is entitled “Performance comparisons of phrase sets and presentation styles for text entry evaluations”. This paper describes how we used crowdsourcing to empirically compare five different publicly-available phrase sets in two large-scale text entry experiments. We also investigated the impact of asking participants to memorise phrases before writing them versus allowing participants to see the phrase during text entry. This paper is co-authored with Keith Vertanen, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Montana Tech in USA.

The second presentation is on Thursday and is entitled “Continuous recognition of one-handed and two-handed gestures using 3D full-body motion tracking sensors”. This paper is co-authored with SACHI members Thomas Nicholson and Aaron Quigley. In this paper we present a new bimanual gesture interface for the Kinect. Among other things, our evaluation shows that the system recognises one-handed and two-handed gestures with an accuracy of 92.7%–96.2%.
Per Ola will also introduce the keynote speaker Chris Bishop from Microsoft Research Cambridge on Thursday. Chris will talk about “…the crucial role played by machine learning in the Kinect 3D full-body motion sensor, which has recently become the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history.”
Per Ola is a Workshop Co-Chair for IUI 2012 together with Andreas Butz, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Munich in Germany.

A new paper from SACHI in collaboration with the Interactions Lab (The HapticTouch Toolkit: Enabling Exploration of Haptic Interactions) will be presented at this year’s TEI conference (#tei2012, www.tei-conf.org/12/). The paper describes work on an API to facilitate the fast programming of haptic tabletop application prototypes.

As part of the launch of the Trading Consequences project site Aaron has written the first blog post in which he says that the question is key in this project. “To understand the consequences of our trading history, historians need to ask difficult, subtle, multifaceted and challenging questions. Questions which aren’t polluted by knowledge of the limitations of the methods and technologies we have today. These insightful questions won’t come from a focus on what the tools of today can support, what the analysis or visualisation methods can do or what data is available. ” see the full blog post here.

Aaron Quigley will be delivering a week long summer school on information visulisation of UbiComp data during the 3rd International UBI Summer School in Oulu, Finland on May 28 – June 2 2012. You can see full details of this summer school here.

 

“The summer school provides young researchers with an opportunity to gain hands on experience and insight on selected topics on the multidisciplinary fields of ubiquitous computing and urban informatics under the tutelage of distinguished experts. The summer school is targeted primarily to doctoral students, but M.Sc. students and postdocs are also welcome to attend.”
The 2012 UBI Summer School comprises of four parallel workshops:
A: Information Visulisation for UbiComp Data by Professor Aaron Quigley,
University of St. Andrews, Scotland;
B: Supporting Community Through Interactive Public Displays by Dr. Keith
Cheverst, Lancaster University, UK;
C: Civic Technology: Mobility, Democracy and Civic Engagement by Professor
Eric Gordon, Emerson College, USA;
D: Urban Sensoria: Human-Centered Computing in Practice by Dr. Alejandro
(Alex) Jaimes, Yahoo! Research.

Congratulations to Miguel Nacenta and Aaron Quigley and their colleagues Alan Dix from Lancaster University and Tom Rodden from the University of Nottingham on having their PPD12 workshop accepted to the Advanced Visual Interfaces International Working Conference in Capri Italy, May 21-25, 2012.
PPD12 is a workshop on infrastructure and design challenges of coupled display visual interfaces.

Please see their PPD12 workshop website if you are interested in research on display ecosystems, distributed user interfaces, ubiquitous user interfaces and coupled displays visual interfaces in general. This workshop follows up on PPD’08 and PPD’10.
 

The EPSRC and the University of St Andrews, through their Strategic Partner Projects have awarded funding for an interdisciplinary program that will allow four students and several researchers from both the School of Computer Science and the School of Psychology to work on advanced perception and human-interface related projects. If you are still interested, please check this document: Further_information_PSYCSS_scholarship_0.2
The scholarships are designed to kick start research collaboration between the two Schools and to enrich the student’s backgrounds with multidisciplinary collaboration experience.