Research Fellow –  £30,122 – £35,938 per annum
Start: As soon as possible, Fixed Term for 3 years – deadline for applications 17th February 2012
We wish to recruit a Research Fellow in Human Computer Interaction to support a number of new and ongoing research projects in Ubiquitous User Interface development. In addition we seek someone wishing to develop original research ideas and to collaborate on new projects with industry and academics across SICSA in Scotland. The post will be based in the School of Computer Science so particular expertise and background experience in programming, interface design, evaluation, mobile application development or novel user interface development would be an advantage.
For full details of the advertisement see here for more details.

Academics in SACHI are now actively recruiting PhD students. The School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews has funding for students to undertake PhD research in any of the general research areas in the school. If you are interested in postgraduate research in the area of Human Computer Interaction then please visit our scholarship page on this site for further details and links.

Congratulations to Aaron Quigley and his colleagues in the Univeristies of Edinburgh and York for their recent grant success with JISC. Their project “Trading Consequences” (Universities of Edinburgh, York and St Andrews) will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents. The project will have a global scope while using Canadian natural resource flows as a way of testing the reliability and efficacy of the data produced. The sources for our study will be a large collection of digitised documents from the period in question, and we will use text mining – more specifically, information extraction – to transform unstructured text into structured data. This innovative digital resource will allow historians to discover novel patterns and to explore new hypotheses, both through structured query and through visualisation.
“This is one of 11 projects funded by eight international research organisations from four countries – including JISC, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the arts and humanities research council (AHRC) from the UK – the successful 14 teams are mixed groups of researchers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States. The projects will receive grants of over £3m in total to investigate how computational techniques typically applied to the sciences can also be applied to change humanities and social sciences research.”
For now, you can see more on the JISC website “Eight international research funders announce winners of 2011 Digging into Data challenge“.

Congratulations to Miguel Nacenta, Aaron Quigley and colleagues from ADS and Historic Scotland who have been awarded a Smart Tourism Grant named LADDIE or Large Augmented Digital Displays for Interactive Experiences of Historic Sites. LADDIE is an interactive display with spatially connected and temporally situated content for visitors. In this project we build on our research and industrial experience with situated, public, multi-touch, adaptive and augmented reality user interfaces. LADDIE provides layered accessible interpretation while at the same time gathering richer information on visits, interests and visitor intent.
Congratulations also to Aaron Quigley and colleagues from MUSA in St Andrews and Interface3 who have been awarded a Smart Tourism Grant named SMART or Scotland’s Museums Augmented Reality Tourism. The Museum of the University of St Andrews(MUSA) opened in October 2008. MUSA puts on display to the public hundreds of the finest treasures from the University’s collection of over 112,300 artifacts. However, do to space limits what you can see during a visit to the museum is less than 1% of their collection. This is commonplace in Museums which have more artefacts than space to display everything. Consider the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) which displays 8,000 historical artifacts out of an entire collection of over 4 million objects or the thousands of objects from the Smithsonian Collection on display out of 136,000,000 objects! SMART provides a new and novel interface to museum content which might be out of sight but not out of access.

 
Aaron Quigley, SACHI and Jeff Pierce, IBM Research Almaden are chairing the tutorial program at MobileHCI 2012. MobileHCI 2012 continues to build on the tradition of previous conferences with a high quality tutorial program. They are inviting proposals for 1, 2 or 3 hour tutorials on emerging and established areas of research and practice. Tutorials will be held on the first day of the conference and are expected to provide participants with new insights and skills relevant to the area.
A MobileHCI tutorial is an in-depth presentation of one or more state-of-the-art topics presented by researchers or practitioners within the field of Mobile HCI. The scope for tutorials is broad and includes topics such as new technologies, research approaches and methodologies, design practices, user/consumer insights, investigations into new services/applications/interfaces, and much more. For more details see Aaron’s blog (where you can leave comments suggesting tutorial topics) here Call for MobileHCI 2012 Tutorials.
 
 

Aaron Quigley wrote an article on the future of HCI in the Interfaces magazine of Interaction, a specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society (BCS). Founded in 1984, Interaction formerly known as The British HCI Group, is the longest-established and largest national group in Europe devoted to HCI. It provides an organisation for all those working on human-computer interaction – the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of technologies for human use.
Aaron Quigley is the Scottish Chair of Interaction and his article is a “view from the Scottish Chair”.
“For the past seven decades, computers have radically changed the world we live in, as have our interactions with them. Today, people require more sophisticated interfaces as computers are platforms supporting the entire spectrum of human activity. There is not an area of human society that has not been affected by computers and the power they afford us. Computing and hence human computer interaction touches on every facet of science, art, engineering and the economy as a whole. Desktop and mobile computing have evolved as advanced interactive technologies change our view of applications, services, gaming and computing. Today we have many researchers in HCI looking at gestures, haptics, large surface interaction, touch and sensing beyond the classical desktop system.

Congratulations to Per Ola Kristensson who was recent conferred with the the title of Docent (Honorary Associate Professor) in Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University in Sweden. Per Ola has been in the University of St Andrews since early 2011 but before coming to St Andrews Per Ola was the Schlumberger Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge and held personal Marie Curie and EPSRC fellowships at the Cavendish and Computer Laboratories at the University of Cambridge.
Per Ola’s research has been widely reported in the international press, including The Economist, Die Zeit and BBC World News. In 2005 he won the Best Doctoral Consortium Contribution Award at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, a premier publication venue in human-computer interaction. Together with Dr Shumin Zhai he pioneered gesture keyboard technology for touch-screens and co-founded ShapeWriter, Inc. to commercialise this technology in 2007. He was the Director of Engineering of this company (2007-2010) and worked fulltime in Beijing, China in 2007-2008 to set up and manage the engineering office with about ten employees. The company was acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc. in 2010. ShapeWriter was selected as the 8th best iPhone application in the world by Time magazine in 2008 and won a Google Android ADC50 developer award the same year. Per Ola did his doctoral work at the Institute of Technology at Linköping University, Sweden and at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA (Ph.D. Computer Science 2007).

November 2011 – Editorial: Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science

Aaron Quigley
Editorial: Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science Computers 2011, 1(1), 1-2; doi:10.3390/computers1010001
– published online 10 November 2011
For the past seven decades, computers have radically changed the world we live in. From machines for calculation, computers are now platforms for information processing and computation, supporting the entire spectrum of human endeavour. While computer science is a relatively young field, it is shaping how people live in our modern world. There is not an area of human society that has not been affected by computers and the power they afford us. Computer science touches on every facet of science, art, engineering and economics. Its impact ranges from electronic commerce to improved medical devices; and from enhanced communication to new forms of media and entertainment. The future, with ubiquitous computational power and natural user interfaces, will extend and enhance all human capabilities. To reach this future we need to quickly and freely disseminate our cutting edge research results globally, and this journal aims to help us achieve that.

See full welcome to this new journal here –

Aaron will be giving a seminar in the School of Informatics in the Univeristy of Edinburgh on October 7th 2011 on the topic of:

Challenges in Social Network Visualisation

The University of St Andrews has a story about how SACHI researcher Per Ola Kristensson and his collaborator Keith Vertanen used crowdsourcing, Twitter, and other online sources to create better statistical language models for AAC devices. These devices enable users with communication difficulties to speak via a predictive keyboard interface. The new language models are by far the largest that have been built so far and they provide a 5-12% reduction in the average number of keystrokes that users have to type to communicate.
The research paper is open access and you can read it for free in the Association for Computational Linguistics’s digital library.
Reference:
Vertanen, K. and Kristensson, P.O. 2011. The imagination of crowds: conversational AAC language modeling using crowdsourcing and large data sources. In Proceedings of the ACL Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011). ACL: 700-711.