Members of SACHI will be at the upcoming CHI’17 conference.
If you are looking to meet members of SACHI to discuss collaborations or research visits you can find us here. Likewise, if you are a company attending CHI and you wish to discuss working with us please get in touch. You can find us helping and involved throughout CHI 2017 with the presentation of 5 papers including 2 full papers, 1 late breaking work paper, 2 workshop papers and other activities.
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Congratulations to Hui-Shyong Yeo, who has been selected as both an ACM SIGCHI communication ambassador and to represent SIGCHI at the ACM 50 Years of the A.M. Turing Award Celebration.
Yeo is a 2nd year PhD student and is particularly interested in exploring and developing novel interaction techniques. Since joining us in SACHI, he has had work accepted at ACM CHI 2016 and CHI 2017, ACM MobileHCI 2016 and 2017 and ACM UIST 2016. His work has featured at Google I/O 2016, locally on STV news and he gave a talk at Google UK in 2016 about his research.  His work has also featured in the media including in Gizmodo, TheVerge, Engadget and TechCrunch., see his personal website for more details. MORE

Uta Hinrichs, Tevor Hogan, Eva Horneker

Overview

Information visualization has become a popular tool to facilitate sense-making, discovery and communication in a large range of professional and casual contexts. However, evaluating visualizations is still a challenge. In particular, we lack techniques to help understand how visualizations are experienced by people. In this paper we discuss the potential of the Elicitation Interview technique to be applied in the context of visualization. The Elicitation Interview is a method for gathering detailed and precise accounts of human experience. We argue that it can be applied to help understand how people experience and interpret visualizations as part of exploration and data analysis processes. We describe the key characteristics of this interview technique and present a study we conducted to exemplify how it can be applied to evaluate data representations. Our study illustrates the types of insights this technique can bring to the fore, for example, evidence for deep interpretation of visual representations and the formation of interpretations and stories beyond the represented data. We discuss general visualization evaluation scenarios where the Elicitation Interview technique may be beneficial and specify what needs to be considered when applying this technique in a visualization context specifically.

Publications

Trevor Hogan, Uta Hinrichs, Eva Hornecker. The Elicitation Interview Technique: CapturingPeople’s Experiences of Data Representations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2016.

Last year we were awarded a Microsoft Surface hub and funding by Microsoft Research and Microsoft. This was based on our Academic Research Request Proposal for the “Intelligent Canvas for Data Analysis and Exploration”. We are pleased to announce our Surface Hub Crucible program for the summer of 2017 here in SACHI in the University of St Andrews.
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A display of life-saving medical technology by University of St Andrews researchers stole the show at the annual Universities Scotland reception for MSPs in Scottish Parliament within the Garden Lobby at Holyrood last week.
Dr David Harris-Birtill, founder of Beyond Medics, and David Morrison had a steady stream of politicians eager to try out a working prototype of their ground-breaking Automated Remote Pulse Oximetry system which automatically displays the individual’s vital signs – heart rate and blood oxygenation level – through a remote camera, without the need for clips and wires.

Dr David Harris-Birtill (left) and David Morrison (centre) with Edinburgh South MSP Daniel Johnson (right), a St Andrews alumnus.

Congratulations to Hui-Shyong Yeo, Aaron Quigley and colleagues, who won best paper honorable mention award for the paper WatchMI at MobileHCI 2016.
Yeo also attended the Doctoral Consortium and demoed the WatchMI during the demo session.
The “WatchMI: pressure touch, twist and pan gesture input on unmodified smartwatches” paper which appears in the Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI’16) can be accessed via:

• Directly to the ACM Digital Library page for WatchMI
• The ACM SIGCHI OpenTOC page for the MobileHCI 2016 (search for WatchMI), for free until Sep 2017

The Doctor Consortium and Demo paper can be accessed via:

• Directly to the ACM Digital Library page for Single-handed interaction for mobile and wearable computing
• Directly to the ACM Digital Library page for WatchMI’s applications
• The ACM SIGCHI OpenTOC page for the MobileHCI 2016 (search for WatchMI), for free until Sep 2017

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Press

• Gizmodo: Students Hacked a Chip to Give Your Smartphone a Sense of Touch
• Engadget: Google’s mini radar can identify virtually any object
• TheVerge: Google’s miniature radars can now identify objects
• Fast Co Design: Google’s Project Soli Can Now Identify Any Object

Curated video by Futurism, with more than 1.2 million views!

Congratulations to Hui-Shyong Yeo, Aaron Quigley and colleagues, who won best poster at UIST2016.
The Sidetap and Slingshot paper which appears in the Adjunct Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’16) can be accessed via:

• The ACM SIGCHI OpenTOC page for the Adjunct Proceedings for UIST 2016 (search for SideTap), for free until Oct 2017
• Directly to the ACM Digital Library page for Sidetap and Slingshot
• Or via the University of St Andrews Research portal.

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RadarCat (Radar Categorization for Input & Interaction) was presented at UIST 2016 this week in Tokyo, Japan. RadarCat is a small, versatile radar-based system for material and object classification which enables new forms of everyday proximate interaction with digital devices.

The RadarCat paper which appears in the Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’16) can be accessed via:

• The ACM SIGCHI OpenTOC page for UIST 2016
  (search for RadarCat), for free until Oct 2017
• Directly to the ACM Digital Library page for RadarCat
• Or via the University of St Andrews Research portal.

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