This summer we are delighted to host Chhavi Sharma from The University of Hong Kong. Chhavi is the first international Laidlaw scholar the University of St Andrews has hosted and as a result she will also be the first international Laidlaw scholar in Computer Science. She will be supervised by Professor Aaron Quigley. Together they will be working on Blended Reality and Discreet Computing using the Magic Leap system for digital/physical interactions. MORE

Congratulations to Dr Daniel Rough who has been awarded a 24-month Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral Fellowship in Ireland as part of the EDGE Programme. The prestigious MSCA EDGE Fellowships are based within 10 academic institutions across Ireland and affiliated with one of three Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centres. The EDGE Programme also incorporates training and development in research, with a strong focus on industry engagement and impact, including a secondment with a relevant industry partner.
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Professor Aaron Quigley will take up the role of SICSA Director from July 2019. SICSA is the Scottish Funding Council Research Pool in Informatics and Computer Science comprising all 14 Scottish Higher Education Computer Science & Informatics Schools and Departments. SICSA promotes international excellence in University-led research, education, and knowledge exchange for Scottish Informatics and Computer Science and acts to cohere communities to help increase critical mass and to enable cooperation in research, teaching and Knowledge Exchange. The SICSA Director provides academic leadership for SICSA, working with the SICSA Directorate and the SICSA Executive.

“SICSA funding has enabled SICSA members to recruit over 90 high-quality Ph.D. students from across the world through our Prize Studentship Programme. Similarly, SICSA has provided SICSA member institutions with the opportunity to recruit some of the world’s best researchers to their Schools. SICSA delivers a range of programmes and activities to support Computing Science researchers at all levels in Scotland.”

As CHI 2019 is held just around the corner in Glasgow, SACHI will be in full force at the conference, and keen to engage and speak about collaborations and research visits at St Andrews.

Alongside 5 full papers, 2 workshop presentations and 4 student volunteers, we’ve also put together a SICSA poster that we will be giving away at CHI that represents and summarises HCI research in Scottish Universities!
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Last year Dr Daniel Rough attended VL/HCC 2018 to present two papers. Daniel recently published a guest blog post which is now on the SoftVis site on this experience.
The papers Daniel presented were:

• Rough, DJ & Quigley, AJ 2018, Towards end-user development for chronic disease management. in Designing Technologies to Support Human Problem Solving: A Workshop in Conjunction with VL/HCC 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, Oct. 1, 2018.IEEE Computer Society, Designing Technologies to Support Human Problem Solving (DTSHPS 2018), Lisbon, Portugal, 1/10/18.
• Rough, DJ & Quigley, AJ 2018, End-user development in social psychology research: factors for adoption. in J Cunha, JP Fernandes, C Kelleher, G Engels & J Mendes (eds), IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2018)., 8506573, IEEE, pp. 75-83, 2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), Lisbon, Portugal, 1/10/18. https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2018.8506573

SACHI’s Iain Carson has led a team to cinematographic success at this year’s 60 Hour Film Blitz, a competition run by the School of Film Studies where participants have to make a film within a 60 hour timeframe. Alongside Iain, Fionnghuala Paterson, Zac Chave-Cox and Arthur Bassas, made up the “Salted Feathers”, and swept up 4 of the 9 available gala awards with their 3-minute short, “SALT”.
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The Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies at the University of Primorska (UP FAMNIT) is offering one fully-unded PhD scholarship for a planned Joint PhD (co-tutelle) in computer science with University of St Andrews (UK).

The selected candidate will receive a 36-48 month scholarship which includes:

• Monthly payments of 1,544 € before tax + expenses
• Research equipment and a working desk.
• Yearly budget for other research costs for covering fieldwork and conference attendance.
• Tuition fees at University of Primorska.

NOTE: St. Andrews tuition fees are not covered by this scholarship. For possible exemptions and height of tuition fees visit follow this link. Fees need to be paid during the time at St. Andrews (minimum one year). MORE

As an ACM Distinguished Speaker, Professor Quigley was recently invited to deliver a series of lectures in New Zealand on “Novel Interactions in Augmented Reality” and “Discreet Computing” at the “Magic Leap Workshop” (a.k.a. Augmented Reality Summer School February 11th – 15th, 2019 in Auckland, New Zealand). To thank the summer school participants, SACHI sponsored a prize (from the Weta Workshop), which Aaron gave to three teams at the AR Summer School.
 
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The St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group (SACHI) was established in 2011. Each year our members have been involved in summer or winter schools, either as organisers or participants. Starting from 2011 we organised, with our colleagues across Scotland, the SICSA Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism summer school here in St Andrews. In 2012, Professor Quigley taught a summer school in Oulu Finland “UbiOulu” on UbiComp and Big Data. In early 2013, Dr. Anne-Marie Mann attended the “Tiree Tech Wave” and later that year we organised another school here in St Andrews called the SICSA summer school on Big Data, Information Visualisation with Professor Adam Barker the director of the Systems Research Group. SICSA further supported this event with a distinguished visiting fellowship for Professor John Stasko, of Georgia Tech, who is now a visiting Professor here in St Andrews.
 
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On February 1st, Professor Quigley delivered an invited talk as part of the ACM Distinguished Speaker Program during the HCI@KAIST International Workshop in KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea.
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