<!–Speaker: Mirco Musolesi,  Computer Science, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm July 26th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Mobile phones are increasingly equipped with sensors, such as accelerometers, GPS receivers, proximity sensors and cameras, that can be used to sense and interpret people behaviour in real-time. Novel user-centered sensing applications can be built by exploiting the availability of such technologies in these devices that are part of our everyday experience. Moreover, data extracted from the sensors can also be used to model people behaviour and movement patterns providing a very rich set of multi-dimensional data, which can be extremely useful for social science, marketing and epidemiological studies.
In this talk I will present some of my recent work in this area including the design and implementation of the CenceMe platform, a system that supports the inference of activities and other presence information of individuals using off-the-shelf sensor-enabled phones and of EmotionSense, a system for supporting social psychology research. Finally, I will discuss the issues related to the design of energy-efficient social sensing systems.
About Mirco:
Dr. Mirco Musolesi is a SICSA Lecturer at the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews. He received a PhD in Computer Science from University College London in 2007 and a Master in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna in 2002. From October 2005 to August 2007 he was a Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University College London. Then, from September 2007 to August 2008 he was an ISTS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Dartmouth College, NH, USA, and from September 2008 to October 2009 a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His research interests lie in the broad area of mobile systems and networking with a current focus on intelligent mobile systems, online social networks, application of complex network theory to networked systems design, mobility modelling and sensing systems based on mobile phones. More information about his research profile can be found at the following URL: http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mirco

<!–Speaker: Nava Tintarev, University of Aberdeen
Date/Time: 1-2pm July 19th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Story-telling, (including personal narrative), is a big part of our personal and social communication. This talk will identify challenges and solutions that look at the generation of narrative for social communication. We describe a way to “automatically” generate personal stories. The stories which are mix of natural language and multimedia, are based on sensor, and other data, collected with a mobile phone. This study will place a particular focus on the natural language generation task of document structuring: segmenting this data into meaningful and distinct events.
About Nava:
Nava Tintarev has worked on applied HCI projects with themes such as explanations in recommender systems, recommendations in a mobile travel scenario, and more recently, natural language generation for assistive technology. Currently, she is working as a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen where she is a member of the Natural Language Generation Group. She has been working on the “How was School today…?” project, which helps children with complex communication needs create and tell a story about their day at school (which will be the applied setting for the talk on the 19th of July). Before that, she was at Telefónica Research, Barcelona, working on user-centred issues in recommender systems.
Her doctoral thesis focused on explanations for recommender systems, and one of her papers on the topic won her the James Chen best student paper award at the International Conference on Hypermedia (2008). For the last three years she has also been co-organizing a workshop on explanation-aware computing (ExaCt) (http://exact2011.workshop.hm/).

<!–Speaker: Alistair Morrison, University of Glasgow
Date/Time: 1-2pm June 21st, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
The emergence of ‘app stores’ on a number of mobile platforms provides HCI researchers with a relatively easy means of recruiting very large numbers of participants from all over the world. As the practice of releasing research applications in this way is still relatively new, the HCI community has not yet developed a set of guiding principles or an understanding of what constitutes good practice. In this talk, I’ll share experiences from several ‘app store’ trials we’ve run in the University of Glasgow’s SUMgroup, covering issues such as capturing log data, identifying users, performing qualitative evaluation and the new ethical challenges raised by this approach. In outlining the benefits we’ve gained and the challenges faced I’ll offer recommendations for others seeking to conduct research trials in this way.
About Alistair:
Alistair Morrison is a postdoc researcher at the University of Glasgow, a member of SUMgroup (Social, Ubiquitous, Mobile) and GIST – Glasgow’s HCI group. His background is in information visualisation, and tools and techniques for analysing data collected from ubicomp systems. He has recently run several mass participation studies with tens of thousands of users, developing ways of analysing logged data and examining the various issues surrounding the release of trial software through public ‘App Store’-style software repositories. Recently he co-organised the CHI 2011 workshop on ethics in large-scale HCI research.

<!–Speaker: Iain Parris, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm June 7th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Opportunistic networks have been the study of much research – in
particular on making end-to-end routing efficient. Users’ privacy
concerns, however, have not been the subject of much research. The talk
will describe a user study, investigating how users’ privacy concerns
impact their willingness to participate in an opportunistic network.
Because deploying a very large-scale opportunistic network is infeasible
for a research study, participants will interact with a simulated
opportunistic application – but will be unaware that the application is
simulated. In the context of this simulated application, a decentralised
mobile advertising system, different participants will be introduced to
a range of privacy threats. We will then measure the participants’
willingness to use the application in the presence of different privacy
threats.
About Iain:
Iain is a third-year PhD student in the School of Computer Science,
University of St Andrews. His research focuses on privacy-enhancing
technologies for opportunistic networks. He holds an MA in Computer
Science from the University of Cambridge, and an MSc in Computer Science
from the University of Edinburgh.

<!–Speaker: Claus Lewerentz, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 31st, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:

In this talk Claus describes a systematic approach to utilize the city metaphor for the visualization of large software systems as evolving software cities. The main contribution is a new layout approach which explicitly takes the development history of software systems into account and makes history directly visible in the layouts. These layouts incrementally evolve in a very smooth and stable way during the development of the represented software system. They are used as a visualization platform for integrating a large variety of product and process data and thus create a coherent set of specialized visualizations. To illustrate this I present some example maps capturing specific development history aspects.
About Claus:
Claus is the program co-chair for the 6th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT2011) September 29-30, 2011 – Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
http://vissoft.iro.umontreal.ca

<!–Speaker: John Brosz, University of Calgary
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 27th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Generally, interactive computer graphics are limited to a small subset of possible projections known as linear projections. To address this limitation we have created the flexible projection framework; a framework designed to model a wide variety of linear, nonlinear, and hand-tailored artistic projections in a way that is supported by computer graphics hardware. This framework introduces a unified geometry for all of these types of projections using a parametric viewing volume. Through this parametric representation we obtain the ability to create projections that make use of curved projection surfaces and curved projectors. Several applications will be discussed including panoramas, re-creating projections used by artists, and dynamic projections that change over time.
About John:
John Brosz is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the University of Calgary Interactions Lab. His current research examines new techniques for controlling the display of information as well as 3D models and environments. John received his PhD in computer graphics at the University of Calgary and his past research has addressed computer graphics, non-photorealistic rendering, and 3D modelling.

<!–Speaker: Neil Hurley, University College Dublin, Ireland
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 16h, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Note: This seminar is organised by both SACHI and the Systems Group
 
Abstract:
The Clique research group in University College Dublin is focused on the analysis and visualisation of social networks. Computer scientists and computational statisticians are working together on problems including community-finding in social networks, influence propagation and detection of anomalous structure in networks. Research is driven by the analysis of large-scale networks provided by industrial partners, in particular, networks of mobile phone-calls containing more than a million nodes and tens of millions of links. In this talk, I will focus primarily on the community-finding problem, discussing initially the structure of real-world networks and on how this impacts on the communities that likely to be found in such networks. I will argue that the view of social networks as consisting of well-separated communities connected by weak links does not hold in many real-world networks and I will introduce algorithms that we have developed to detect overlapping community structure in networks with pervasive overlapping community structure.
About Neil:

Neil J. Hurley received an M.Sc. in mathematical science from University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland, in 1988. In 1989, he joined Hitachi Dublin Laboratory, a computer science research laboratory at the University of Dublin, Trinity College,from which he received the Ph.D. degree in 1995, for his work in knowledge-based engineering and high-performance computing. He joined the academic staff of UCD in 1999 where his present research activities lie in the areas of large-scale network analysis, robust information retrieval and data-hiding.

<!–Speaker: Paddy Nixon, University of Tasmania, Australia
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 3rd, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Note: This seminar is organised by both SACHI and the Systems Group
Abstract:
Human-computer interaction (HCI) is being exploited in many application domains to carry out tasks that were previously thought impossible or life-threatening, e.g., remote operation of mining equipment, robot- assisted search and rescue operations, and military operations. Regardless of the sophistication of the technology, these systems are operated with varying levels of intervention and control by humans, so successful HRI requires solving both human factors challenges such as maintaining situation awareness, managing cognitive load and establishing trust and computational challenges such as executable models of situation awareness and intention recognition. This project is concerned only with the computational perspective and specifically with understanding how autonomous a system can be and still remain resilient to failure.

<!–Speaker: Umer Rashid, SACHI, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm April 26th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:

While the portability of mobile devices makes them desirable for pervasive access to information, their small screen real estate and the lack of peripheral input devices often impose restriction on the amount of information to be displayed and manipulated on them. This talk provides an overview of our work that explores the ways the mobile screens can be used with large external displays to complement the inherent limitations of each device and create an enhanced user experience. This work is particularly focused on the analysis of visual attention switch and its impact on user performance for designing an interaction space distributed across heterogeneous display devices.
About Umer:
Umer Rashid is a PhD student in School of Computer Science, University of St. Andrews. He received his BS in computer systems engineering from GIK Institute, Pakistan and MS in Information & Communications from Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology, South Korea. His research interests include software engineering and human-computer-interaction in context-aware pervasive computing environments.

<!–Speaker: Per Ola Kristensson, SACHI, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm April 12th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:

Text entry methods are designed with attention to two objective functions above anything else: high entry rates and a low error rates. However, similar to most other user interfaces, it is likely that users’ satisfaction in using them and ability to use them effectively is the result of many more design traits. This point becomes particularly important to consider when we observe that, despite literally hundreds of mobile text entry methods being proposed in the literature, extremely few of these have gained wider user adoption. To understand why this is, we propose a framework for designing and analyzing mobile text entry methods. Using this framework we analyze the traits of mainstream text entry methods and find that two traits stand out: familiarity and a high effective entry rate. While familiarity is important to consider, too much emphasis on it may risk trapping us forever in a local optimum with multiple similarly performing text entry methods (the so-called path dependency phenomenon). Therefore it is also important to consider the high effective rate. However, what is a sufficiently high entry rate? We propose limiting the search for ever higher entry rates by targeting the inviscid entry rate: the entry rate in which users’ creativity rather than the text entry method is the bottle-neck for efficient text entry. Via a crowdsourcing experiment we have estimated the population mean of the inviscid entry rate to about 50 wpm. When mobile text entry methods have reached this point it may be more worthwhile to consider alternative design dimensions that are currently neglected, such as robustness, comfort and user engagement.
About Per Ola:
Per Ola Kristensson is a Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction at the University of St Andrews. Previously he was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.