This week we welcomed another new face to SACHI. David Morrison is a computer programmer, with a strong industry background, originally in the games industry but more recently mobile app development. David was also a technology fellow on the Code for Europe project in 2014.

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We are happy to welcome Johannes Lang to the SACHI lab. Johannes comes from Austria and is a typographer and type designer with top-level expertise in the digital aspects of text and type.
He will be working with Miguel Nacenta and Uta Hinrichs in the Infotypography project, funded by EPSRC, and helping further develop the FatFonts research program.
You can take a look at Johannes’ excellent work here in his studio webpage.

Congratulations to Professor Aaron Quigley who had been appointed the office holder for the ACM SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for Specialized Conferences by the ACM SIGCHI President Loren Terveen.
Aaron will take over from Philippe Palanque later this month and is looking forward to working with the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee, Conference Management Committee and ACM staff over the next three years.
 

SACHI and the School of Computer Science in the University of St Andrews are delighted to welcome Dr Uta Hinrichs as a new lecturer. Uta has been a postdoctoral research fellow with SACHI since 2012 and she now co-leads SACHI along with her colleagues. During her time as a post-doc, Uta served on the program committee for CHI 2015 and she was the ACM ITS 2013 and ACM UIST 2013 volunteer co-chair. MORE

New Lectureship | RSE/Makdougall Brisbane Medal | AHRC funding for Palimpsest Project
General Chair MobileHCI’14 | Program Chair ITS’14 | Program Chair PerDis’14 | New SICSA theme
Best paper and honorable mention at CHI 2014 | Best paper at AVI 2014 | Best paper at DIS 2014
JISC funded Trading Consequences Launch | 9 papers and other works at CHI 2014.
Our newsfeed has details of these all these activities and research.

Looking for a gift for a visualization aficionado? We are happy to announce that the first ever FatFonts World Population Map is now available in the Axis Maps store. All proceeds from the maps will be used to fund more FatFont-related research.
The map shows how the population of the world is distributed. It uses a typographic visualization technique–FatFonts–which allows you to read the exact number of people living in a particular area with a precision within 100,000 people. Each number in the world map corresponds to the population in an area of approx. 40,000 km².

FatFonts – first conceived and designed by Miguel Nacenta and Uta Hinrichs – are digits that can be read as numbers, but also encode the information visually in the amount of ink that each digit uses. For example, digit eight 8 has eight times the amount of ink of digit one 1, digit seven 7 seven times and so on and so forth. This technique turns a table of numbers into a graphical representation where darker areas (with thicker numbers) represent higher population density. Stepping away from the map gives you an overview of which areas are heavily populated, coming closer lets you read the exact values.
To represent population densities from the tens of millions in a square (e.g., in New York City or Istanbul) to the hundreds of thousands, we use two layers: the FatFont numbers with orange backgrounds represent tens of millions of people. For example, the square that contains Buenos Aires shows you that fourteen million people live in that square of the world (the smaller 4 within the larger 1 represents the smaller order of magnitude). Tiles without an orange background represent populations between 9.9 million people to 100,000 (one order of magnitude lower).
This is an effective way to represent several orders of magnitude. The effect is quite mesmerising, and it gives you a good idea of where people actually live. Although it is possible to represent the same data with colours (i.e., colour scales), it is something different to see also the number itself. With the number you can easily make comparisons, calculate proportions, and relate what you see with the knowledge that you have already.
After a few minutes of looking at the map it starts to really sink in how empty some areas of the planet really are (Australia!), and how the real population centroid of the world is clearly in South East Asia. The map uses an equal-area projection; the numbers that you read are, therefore, also population densities. The representation is derived from the 2005 estimations for 2015 of the GPWFE dataset made available by SEDAC, Columbia University. 15 insets highlight interesting areas of high and low population in more detail, such as Northern China, Mexico City, Egypt, Western Japan, Bangladesh and Africa’s Great Lakes region.

As part of a joint initiative to better understand pen+touch interaction in multi-touch devices, the SACHI lab has started a collaborative research endeavour with Wacom Co., Ltd. As a result, we recently welcomed some new arrivals to our lab: a  Cintiq 24HD touch display and a Cintiq Companion Hybrid tablet.
This equipment has an ergonomic design with a high resolution screen which combines multi-touch and pen capabilities. We intend to use them to explore new interaction possibilities and provide insights that can be incorporated in the design process of new multi-touch devices. Specifically, we will study user interaction within the creative space of Complex Graphic Manipulations, and with children in the context of handwriting.
SACHI looks forward to keeping you up to date with our discoveries.

 

We are happy to announce that Dr Miguel Nacenta was appointed as co-leader of the SICSA Human-Computer Interaction research theme.
In his new position as SICSA HCI theme co-leader Miguel will, together with Professor Stephen Brewster of the University of Glasgow, take responsibility for the academic coordination of the theme and organize events such as the pre-CHI day, the All Hands Meeting and the SICSA HCI Doctoral Consortium.
If you are interested in the theme and its related events you can have a look at the SICSA HCI website, join the theme mailing list, or contact Miguel or Stephen for further information.

 

In late September 2014 a number of members from SACHI were involved with MobileHCI 2014 in Toronto Canada. Aaron Quigley was the general co-chair for this conference and Daniel Rough was the registration chair. Per Ola Kristensson, an external member of SACHI, presented a paper and was a session chair during the conference. MobileHCI brings together people from diverse areas which provides a multidisciplinary forum for academics, hardware and software developers, designers and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with and through mobile devices, applications, and services. This year MobileHCI was able to have a single track for the entire program which allowed everyone to see all the papers, posters, demos, design contest, panels etc. without trying to change sessions. Some images from this conference can be found here. Aaron is now the chair of the MobileHCI conference series steering committee until August 2015.
In early October a number of SACHI members were again involved with or attended UIST 2014, the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. We organised this conference, UIST 2013 here in St Andrews last year. In 2014, Per Ola Kristensson was the demo co-chair and  Jakub Dostal was the registration co-chair. Per Ola was also awarded a lasting impact award during UIST 2014. Aaron Quigley will be the keynote chair for UIST 2015 in Charlotte, NC Nov 8-11, 2015. The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) is the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces. UIST brings together people from diverse areas including graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, and CSCW.
You can read Aaron’s full blog post about the papers he noted to SACHI here.

Dr Per Ola Kristensson, one of the cofounders of SACHI, has become a University Lecturer in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. In his time at St Andrews he helped to establish the teaching and research footprint for HCI across the School of Computer Science. Speaking to SACHI Per Ola said, “I have enjoyed my time in St Andrews tremendously. It is an incredibly stimulating and vivid research environment and the growth and international visibility of the St Andrews Human Computer Interaction (SACHI) group is a testament to this.” The students here will miss him as will his colleagues. Working with students is clearly close to Per Ola’s heart, as he noted that “both the undergraduate students and the MSc students I have been teaching have been fantastic. It is incredibly rewarding to teach HCI to motivated students.”
Per Ola helped establish SACHI in many ways, from bringing leading researchers to our seminar program to new funded research projects. Professor Aaron Quigley said, “We will all miss Per Ola very much. His energy and razor sharp intellect helped in our research, teaching and in developing new insights into challenging problems”.  Per Ola went on to say that, “the collegial atmosphere is superb and the intellectual environment in the SACHI group has resulted in many papers at CHI, AVI, IUI, etc. co-authored together with colleagues, PhD students or undergraduate students. Some of these papers have also been featured in the international press or won best paper prizes.”
During his time with St Andrews, Per Ola had many successes from being awarded the RSE/Makdougall Brisbane Medal  to being the only UK member of the TR35, the most prestigious annual list published by MIT TechnologyReview in 2013.  Speaking of Per Ola as an academic Aaron said , “While Per-Ola has some serious business credentials under his belt, he is a true academic scholar, in every meaning of that term. He values academia deeply and understands that high quality research with impact doesn’t come overnight. Instead, it comes with deep thought, studious application of suitable methodology and care in reporting research results”.
Speaking about the School of Computer Science and the University Per Ola said, “people here have a genuine belief in academic values and the importance of ensuring teaching and research is of the highest calibre.” Dr Miguel Nacenta, another of Per Ola’s colleagues added, “Per Ola has been a great colleague and a friend. Working with him has enriched all of us at SACHI and we hope that the strong ties that we keep with him result in many more fruitful collaborations.”
Dr Per Ola Kristensson is now a Honorary Reader in the School of Computer Science and continues to be a member of SACHI. Looking back on his time in St Andrews Per Ola noted, “these years I have spent in St Andrews have helped me develop as a researcher and a teacher and I will remember my years here fondly”. We all wish Per Ola well on the next step in his career, it has been our great pleasure to work together for these past few years.