Per Ola Kristensson who is arriving to St Andrews today and joins us next week has been selected for the Scottish Crucible 2011 Personal and Professional Leadership and Development programme. The programme is sponsored by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Scottish Funding Council and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). “The scheme enables 30 talented researchers from a variety of disciplines to come together to explore and expand their creative capacity and problem-solving potential. As well as its personal impact, NESTA’s Crucible programme has led to numerous interdisciplinary collaborations for its participants and has established itself as an innovative way of empowering researchers and adding value to their institutions.” Our congratulations to Per Ola on a great start here with SACHI.

Our new Android phone testbed, comprising 20 HTC Desire smartphones, has arrived. This equipment comes courtesy of Tristan’s Privacy Value Networks grant and will be used, amongst others, by Iain for his work on privacy-aware interfaces and systems for mobile opportunistic networks.

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 Per Ola Kristensson and Miguel Nacenta. Dr Per Ola Kristensson will be joining the University of St Andrews as a lecturer in March 2011 from his current position at the University of Cambridge. Per Ola is interested in creating interactive systems that enable people to be more creative, expressive and satisfied in their daily lives. He will become the second supervisor for Jakub Dostal a SICSA PhD student in SACHI. For more information visit his full website or follow him on twitter @pokristensson.

SACHI members are organising two workshops in conjunction with the 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction in Newcastle on July 5th 2011. Aaron and Miguel are co-organisers for the workshop on Coupled Multi-display Environments (MDEs) in Classrooms (PPD’11). Tristan is co-organising the Health, Wealth and Identity Theft: designing and evaluating usable privacy and security mechanisms for online happiness workshop.

Professor Aaron Quigley has been invited to join the IDEAS Executive Committee as the external member, and will contribute to guiding the strategic direction of IDEAS. IDEAS is a new multi-disciplinary research centre encompassing the disciplines of Engineering, Computing, Architecture & Built Environment and Art & Design.

Aaron Quigley from the SACHI research group has been appointed an expert board member for the EU FP7 coordinating action called BRAID. Prior to joining the University of St Andrews he was the director for the HITLab Australia one of the project partners in BRAID. He was part of the team which successfully applied for the BRAID grant in 2009. He was previously the coordinator for the EU FP7 project CAPSIL in the University of College Dublin in Ireland. You can read more about this project here or visit the BRAID website.

Professor Aaron Quigley has been invited to serve as the founding Editor-in-Chief for the Journal Computers. Computers is an international, open access journal which provides an advanced forum for computer sciences. Computers is an online journal, with its Editorial Office located in Basel, Switzerland and a branch office in Beijing. The preliminary aims and topics are given at http://www.mdpi.com/journal/computers/about/.