Title: Data and Dasein – A Phenomenology of Human-Data
Relations.
Abstract: In contemporary society, data representation
is an important and essential part of many aspects of our daily lives.
In this talk Trevor will present how his doctoral research has
contributed to our understanding on how people experience data and what
role representational modality plays in the process of perception and
interpretation. This research is grounded in phenomenology – he aligns
his theoretical exploration to ideas and concepts from philosophical
phenomenology, while also respecting the essence of a phenomenological
approach in his choice and application of methods. Alongside offering a
rich description of people’s experience of data representation, the key
contributions of his research transcend four areas: theory, methods,
design, and empirical findings. From a theoretical perspective, besides
describing a phenomenology of human-data relations, he has defined, for
the first time, multisensory data representation and established a
design space for the study of this class of representation. In relation
to methodologies, he will describe how he deployed two elicitation
methods to investigate different aspects of data experience. He blends
the Repertory Grid technique with a focus group session and shows how
this adaption can be used to elicit rich design relevant insight. He
will also introduce the Elicitation Interview technique as a method for
gathering detailed and precise accounts of human experience.
Furthermore, he will describe how this technique can be used to elicit
accounts of experience with data. In his talk Trevor will present the
findings of a series of empirical studies, these show, for instance, how
certain representational modalities cause us to have heightened
awareness of our body, some are more difficult to interpret than others,
some rely heavily on instinct and each of them solicit us to reference
external events during the process of Interpretation.
Biography: Trevor Hogan is a Lecturer of Interaction
Design at the Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland. The aim of his
research is to describe and better understand how embodiment influences
and augments people’s experience of data representations. His work is
strongly interdisciplinary and may be situated in the field of
interactive design, but at the intersection of tangible computing,
human-computer interaction, information visualization and psychology. At
CIT Trevor leads the Human-Data Interaction Group, a multidisciplinary
research team, whose aim is explore novel ways of representing data –
through and beyond the visual modality. This group is also focused on
exploring methods and approaches that broaden the evaluation criteria of
data representation – beyond traditional measurements, such as
efficiency and effectiveness, towards novel aspects such as experience,
use qualities, hedonics, affect, empathy, and enchantment.
News
Title: Argument Technology and Argument Mining
Abstract: Argument Technology is that part of the overlap between theories of argumentation and reasoning and those of AI where an engineering focus leads to applications and tools that are deployed. One significant step in the past decade has been the development of the Argument Web — the idea that many of these tools can interact using common infrastructure, with benefits to academic, commercial and public user groups. More recently, there has been a move towards linguistic aspects of argument, with NLP techniques facilitating the development of the field of Argument Mining. Drawing on the academic success and commercial uptake of techniques such as opinion mining and sentiment analysis, argument mining seeks to build on systems which use data mining to summarise *what* people think by explaining also *why* they hold the opinions they do.
Biography: Chris Reed is Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Dundee in Scotland, where he heads the Centre for Argument Technology. Chris has been working at the overlap between argumentation theory and artificial intelligence for over twenty years, has won over £5.6m of funding from RCUK, government and commercial sources and has over 150 peer-reviewed papers in the area including five books. He has also been instrumental in the development of the Argument Interchange Format, an international standard for computational work in the area; he is spear-heading the major engineering effort behind the Argument Web; and he was a founding editor of the Journal of Argument & Computation.
Title: Recycled Resources and Learning Communities
Abstract: The concept of learning communities can be seen as central in higher education, especially. Learning is fostered by dialogue, which is implicated in processes of conceptual development and alignment. These rich and complex phenomena include learning through witnessing the learning experiences of others — “vicarious learning” (VL). We propose that VL can be exploited by using rich media (such as video) to capture and share learning experiences. But the potential of rich media is broad and seems to be curiously under-exploited in education. One can envisage learning communities that create and build around learning resources of diverse kinds, using new materials but also integrating many strands of existing materials. In a number of encouraging ways, the available technologies already support this, but are often not greatly used, which suggests a challenge for design. How can we make these technologies more usable for our learning communities? A couple of exploratory approaches are discussed, including an informal experiment upon which it is hoped to build further.
Biography: John Lee is Professor of Digital Media at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, from Edinburgh. He works jointly in the School of Informatics and the Edinburgh College of Art, where he directs the long-standing MSc programme in Design and Digital Media. His research interests centre around cognition and communication in design and learning. For some time, he has been investigating the paradigm of “vicarious learning” and the question of how rich media resources can be used more effectively in applications of learning technologies.
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss how deep learning can be applied to character animation. I will present a framework based on deep convolutional neural networks that allows for motion synthesis and motion editing in the same unified framework. Applications of this framework include fixing corrupted motion data such as that from the kinect, synthesis of character motion from high level parameters such as the trajectory, motion editing via arbitrary cost functions, and style transfer between two animation clips.
Biography: Daniel Holden is a PhD student at Edinburgh University studying how deep learning and data driven artistic tools can be used to save time in the production of high quality character animation. Outside of research he maintains several open source C projects and has a wide variety of interests including theory of computation, game development, and writing short fiction.
Abstract
As part of an EPSRC project into text entry for older adults we ran a series of workshops on the design of new keyboard for older adults. These workshops blew away some of the stereotypes of older adults – ours were well connected, adjusted text style for twitter vs email vs facebook and were more open to new keyboard layouts than our undergraduates. Error awareness was highlighted as a concern and we developed an Android keyboard that highlights errors and autocorrections. In this talk I’ll review some of our experimental keyboards, the main lessons from our highlighting keyboard, main lessons in study design for older adults and future directions.
Biography
Since 2000, Mark Dunlop has been a senior lecturer in computer science at Strathclyde. His research focuses on usability of mobile systems including mobile text entry, visualisation, sensor driven interaction and evaluation of mobiles. His first work on mobile text entry was published in 1999 and he’s been involved in the organisation of the MobileHCI conference series since it’s inception in 1998. Recent project involve text entry for older adults and mobile based driving crowdsourced braking alert system. His teaching is mainly in human computer interaction (HCI) and mobile/internet programming technologies. Prior to joining Strathclyde, Mark was a senior researcher at Risø Danish National Laboratory and a lecturer at Glasgow University. He completed his PhD in Multimedia Information Retrieval at Glasgow in 1991.
Abstract
Perhaps the term computer ‘memory’ has led people to believe that human memory has to be perfect and infallible. Many people worry when they realise they forget and some turn to recording and collecting as much as they can, e.g. photos or videos through life logging. Some people assume that by collecting they can avoid forgetting or at least have access to the information anytime later. And that is where they might be wrong. First of all, recordings are not equivalent to memories, and memories ‘can not be stored’. Secondly it has already been shown that people collect too much and organize too little for them to be able to find information later [1]. Thirdly, human memory works best when we forget… a lot.
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Abstract
There is a huge and complex social psychology to managing client engagements effectively. Merely presenting actionable solutions that have valid data to back them up is not enough for clients. They become lost with the simplest of justifications and proof often focusing factors of little importance to the end users. In this talk I will offer some meeting navigation concepts that will enable people to facilitate client meetings, establish and reach defined outcomes and establish clear dialog and interaction methods.
Abstract
Visualising dynamic graphs is important for many application areas. For social media networks, they can help us understand the interaction and interests of users online. In biology, they can illustrate the interactions between genes and biological processes. Understanding and designing effective visualisation methods for dynamic network data is fundamental to these areas as well as many others. In this talk, we focus on the effective presentation of dynamic networks. In particular, we summarise recent results on dynamic graph visualisation with respect to animation (presentation of interactive movies of the data), small multiples (presenting the data through several linked windows like a comic book), and drawing stability (the visual stability of the data presentation). We conclude with some recent work on scalable graph visualisation and in the visualisation of sets and their intersections.
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Abstract
In this talk I will present experiences and insights from our studies involving locative media, local history and community. Our work in the village of Wray has involved the longitudinal and ‘in the wild’ deployment of ‘digital noticeboard’ displays (conceived as technology probes) that support the sharing of photos/images. A significant portion of the submitted photo content relates to Wray’s local history and features of Wray’s landscape. Residents of the village have helped shape the system through involvement in co-design workshops. A key motivation of our current studies (as part of the SHARC project) is to explore issues around the co-curation of locative media experiences. A field trial (involving both residents and visitors) and a design workshop revealed both opportunities and challenges for the co-curation approach.
Abstract
Most experiences in life are punctuated by a closure experience. In the past these were profound; however, over generations we have distanced ourselves from meaningful closure experiences thanks to our lifestyles increasing in comfort, the church weakening and medicine advancing.
This has seemingly freed us from the shackles of the ultimate closure experience – death – and sanctioning our personal pursuit of heaven on earth in the form of consumption. We are now encouraged to drunkenly stumble from purchase to purchase, with any sense of longevity and responsibility removed.
Long term side effects of this are exampled in the Product, Service and Digital landscapes that we frequent. The consequences of our behaviour results in a changing climate, industries fined billions for mis-selling and individuals casually eroding their personal online reputations.
Many of us are active in the creation of services, products or digital products; making them attractive, engaging and usable for consumers, but we often overlook concluding these experiences for the user in a responsible way. Closure Experiences offers a model to frame this change.
Bio
Joe Macleod has been working in the mobile design space since 1998 and has been involved in a pretty diverse range of projects. At Nokia he helped develop some of the most streamlined packaging in the world, he created a hack team to disrupt the corporate drone of powerpoint, produced mobile services for pregnant women in Africa and pioneered lighting behavior for millions of phones. For the last four years he has been key to establishing ustwo as the UKs best digital product studio, with 180 people globally in London, New York, Sydney and Sweden, while also successfully building education initiatives, curriculums and courses on the back of the IncludeDesign campaign which launched in 2013. He now works independently on projects and has recently established established Closure Experiences, a new business looking at issues around consumption, consumerism and designing the end of things.