A big thank you to Timothy Sheridan an undergrad working in the SACHI group for editing down and polishing up the videos of the MMI summer school final project presentations. Thanks also to Miguel and Jakub for handling and arranging the video equipment. The video presentations are from the final project presentations at the SICSA MMI Summer School in June 2011. In addition you can see the final projects page here with images, text and links to other resources.

Several SACHI members are presenting papers at leading international conferences in the upcoming months.
Aaron Quigley presented a paper co-authored with Mike Bennett at Stanford University entitled “Creating Personalized Digital Human Models Of Perception For Visual Analytics” at UMAP 2011 in Girona, Spain, on Thursday July 14th. Umer Rashid and Aaron Quigley co-authored a paper with Jarmo Kauko and Jonna Häkkiläat at Nokia Research Center entitled “Proximal and Distal Selection of Widgets: Designing Distributed UI for Mobile Interaction with Large Display”. It will be presented by Umer Rashid at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden on Friday September 2nd. Aaron Quigley also co-authored a paper with Michael Farrugia and Neil Hurely entitled “SNAP: Towards a validation of the Social Network Assembly Pipeline” which was presented by Michael Farrugia at the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, on Monday July 25th.
Miguel Nacenta is a keynote speaker at the Integrating multi-touch and interactive surfaces into the research environment workshop in Oxford, UK, in September 16-17. He has also co-authored a paper with Sean Lynch and Sheelagh Carpendale which will be presented by Sean Lynch at Interact 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal. The talk is entitled: “ToCoPlay: Graphical Multi-touch Interaction for Composing and Playing Music”.
Per Ola Kristensson presented a paper on Thursday July 28th at the Association for Computational Linguistics‘s Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011) in Edinburgh, UK. The talk was entitled “The Imagination of Crowds: Conversational AAC Language Modeling using Crowdsourcing and Large Data Sources”. On Monday August 29th he will present a paper at Interspeech 2011 in Florence, Italy. This talk will be in the multimodal signal processing session and it is entitled: “Asynchronous Multimodal Text Entry using Speech and Gesture Keyboards”. Shortly thereafter, on Thursday September 1st, he will present a paper at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden. This talk is entitled “A Versatile Dataset for Text Entry Evaluations Based on Genuine Mobile Emails”. These papers were co-authored with Keith Vertanen at Princeton University. He also co-authored a paper which was presented on Saturday August 6th by Leif Denby at the 8th Eurographics Symposium on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling (SBIM 2011) in Vancouver, Canada. The talk was entitled: “Continuous Recognition and Visualization of Pen Strokes and Touch-Screen Gestures”.

The project descriptions from the five project teams we had in St Andrews during our summer school on multimodal systems for digital tourism are now available. Congratulations to all the teams on a great job. The project teams included, The Sonic Wanderer, Ubrella, The Living Souvenir, Time Walker and the Tourist Tricorder.

You can see some of the Arduino and Kinect equipment we have for the summer school here starting on June 26th with an Arduino workshop. The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are proving a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a MERL Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.

 

Two papers with SACHI authors have been recently highlighted for their value.
Our own Aaron Quigley, in colaboration with Michael Farrugia (first author) and Neil Hurley presented the paper: Exploring temporal ego networks using small multiples and tree-ring layouts, which has won the best paper award at ACHI.

Simultaneously, on the Canadian side, Miguel Nacenta co-authors (with Robert Xiao -first author-, Regan Mandryk, Andy Cockburn and Carl Gutwin) the paper: Ubicursor: A Comparison of Direct and Indirect Pointing Feedback in Multi-Display Environments, which has won the Michael A. J. Sweeney Award at this year’s Graphics Interface conference. The paper’s success is also reported in Canada’s Surfnet Newsletter, and will be presented next week.

 

Dr Miguel Nacenta will be joining the University of St Andrews as a lecturer in May 2011 from his current position as at the Interactions Lab in the University of Calgary, Canada. Miguel’s research is focused on developing input and output technology that can extend human capabilities. He is interested in applying perceptual and social principles to novel multi-display, haptic, and multi-modal interfaces. Miguel will become the second supervisor for Umer Rashid a PhD student in SACHI. For more information see his full website or follow him on twitter @miguelnacenta. The February 2011 SICSA Newsletter highlighted details on the establishment of SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group along with details of our two new SICSA lecturers in SACHI Miguel Nacenta and Per Ola Kristensson.

Applications to attend our SICSA Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism to be held in St Andrews from June 27th – July 1, 2011 are now open. Full details can be found on our Summer School website at sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt. Thanks to all our guest lecturers who are coming from far and wide and to everyone in SACHI for helping out with this summer school (and we mean everyone!).
The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation.
We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are proving a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a MERL Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.
In addition, Ben Arent a leading interaction designer based in Dublin has agreed to host (subject to sufficient interest) a day long Arduino workshop for interested participants on Sunday June 26th.
Seminar Topics
– Multimodal Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Multimodal Interaction with the Android platform
– Creating Engaging Visitor Experiences in Museums and Heritage sites
– Multimodal Interaction with spatial data
– Speech-driven, hands-free, eyes-free navigation
– Haptic Tabletop Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Natural language generation for Multimodal Interaction
– Mobility as a challenge for interaction design, Tourism as a special case
– Multimodal Augmented-Reality Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Designing context aware-systems
Speakers
– Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow
– Tristan Henderson, University of St Andrews
– Eva Hornecker, University of Strathclyde
– Antonio Krüger, Saarland University
– William Mackaness, University of Edinburgh
– Miguel Nacenta, University of Calgary
– Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
– Antti Oulasvirta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
– Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews
– Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart
The deadline for applications to attend is May 3rd, with notifications by May 9th. Participation is limited to 30 and we expect a mix of both national and international participants. The registration fee is £450, which covers four nights of accommodation (Mon – Fri) in St Andrews, breakfast, lunch, dinner and summer school materials. Also included is a welcome reception and farewell dinner. An optional Arduino workshop (with Sunday night accommodation) is an additional £70.
The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) is providing 16 grants to cover the £450 registration fee for PhD students from most Scottish Universities. See SICSA website for details: http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/
See the summer school website for a full programme, biographies of speakers and full details for applications: http://sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt
The school is directed by Aaron Quigley (University of St Andrews), Eva Hornecker (University of Strathclyde), Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh) and Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow).

Aaron is the current chair of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Pervasive Computing and today, on behalf of this committee he published a call for proposals to host Pervasive 2012 the Tenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing. You can find full details of this call here.
Aaron has also been busy working with his counterpart James Scott the Chair of the Steering Committee of the UbiComp Conference Series in the formation of a new Joint Steering Committee which begins its work in late April of 2011. Good luck to Aaron who will be attending Pervasive 2011 the Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, in San Francisco in June 2011.

Congratulations to Aaron and his colleagues from across SICSA on being awarded a grant valued at up to £600,000 from the Horizon Fund by the Scottish Funding Council towards the cost of the SMART Tourism project on digital tourism translational research. There are many academic and industry partners involved in this project and we hope this is a first step towards a more sustained and broad based engagement between industry and academia in this area. Within SACHI this programme will closely align with our upcoming summer school of multi-modal interfaces for digital tourism and ongoing digital tourism related research.
The 13 SMEs in the project are technology SMEs with an interest in tourism challenges around Scotland’s visitor attractions. They range from AmbieSense in Aberdeen to Eagle Gardens in Kelso, and from SymetrIQ in Glasgow to Loc8 Solutions in Edinburgh. Commenting on the project, the lead academic Professor Jon Oberlander noted, “The project is built around challenges identified by key stakeholders who operate significant visitor attractions, especially Historic Scotland, Festivals Edinburgh, and Glasgow City Museums. Global ICT players are partnering with us, providing cash and in-kind support: NCR, Microsoft and Google are all on engaged.”  The academics involved in this project are from across the SICSA (Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance) SFC-funded research pool.
SICSA is a collaboration of leading Scottish Universities. Our aim is to work together to consolidate and develop Scotland’s position as an international research leader in informatics and computer science (ICS). In Scotland, we have one of the five biggest top-quality research clusters in ICS in the world, with more than 200 world-class academic researchers. We are the foremost cluster of  ICS research in the UK: about a sixth of the very best research output comes from Scotland. Smart Tourism helps implement our Knowledge Exchange strategy, which aims to inspire, equip and nurture researchers in Scotland, at all levels, so that they can make a greater economic and social impact.
A dedicated website for this project will come online in due course.