On Thursday a large proportion of the SACHI lab and many in the School of Computer Science department headed South to Edinburgh’s SICSA Demofest. The Demofest is a yearly meeting of the Scottish Computer Science community in which students and academics showcase the latest research to a varied audience of industry and academics.
<!–Speaker: Andrew Manches, University of Edinburgh
Date/Time: 2-3pm November 24, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Most of us might agree that ‘hands-on learning’ is good for children in the early years. But why? Is it simply more fun and sociable, or are there any more direct cognitive benefits? And what determines definitions of ‘hands-on’? Can we include iPads? This talk will draw upon an ESRC-funded project to examine the educational implications of recent theoretical arguments about the embodied nature of cognition. Video data from the project will be used to illustrate the methodological significance of the way children gesture when describing mathematical concepts and evaluate a hypothesis that numerical development is grounded upon two particular embodied metaphors. If correct, this presents a serious challenge to traditional approaches to the types of learning materials we offer children. The talk then demonstrates two embodied technologies to consider the potential of new forms of digital interaction to further our understanding of embodied cognition as well as support early learning.
Bio:
Dr Andrew Manches is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Education and leads the Children and Technology group at the University of Edinburgh. He has 20 years experience working with children, first as a teacher, then as an academic. His recent research, funded by an ESRC Future Research Leader grant, focuses on the role of interaction in thinking, and the implications this has for early learning and new forms of technology. When not being an academic, Andrew is a parent of two young children and directs an early learning technology start-up that was awarded a SMART grant this year to build an early years maths tangible technology.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.
Dr David Harris-Birtill gave a talk at the 6th Edition of the International Conference on Transforming Healthcare with IT, held on 16th – 17th October 2015 at the Lalit Ashok in Bangalore, India. David’s research presentation was titled “Remote Sensing of Heart Rate and Blood Oxygenation Level Using Gaming Camera-based Technology”, and was presented to 800 delegates who attended the session in person, as well as the 8,216 who virtually attended the meeting, streaming his talk in 32 countries.
After the session, David was presented with a commemorative plaque for his research, as shown in the photo above.
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Friday night was games night at SACHI, this week featuring a couple of scary games for Halloween! The night began with pizza followed by three rounds of social deduction game One Night Ultimate Warewolf. The main event was the Cthulhu themed Elder Sign from the designers of Arkham Horror.
Fortunately the team was able to stave off the imminent return of the Ancient Ones to enjoy the delicious range of cakes and other treats provided by or own Fearn Bishop. Thanks Fearn!
Photo by Hui-Shyong Yeo
This week we have added a new member to the group. Hui-Shyong Yeo is a 1st year PhD student in the SACHI research group, supervised by Prof. Aaron Quigley. Hui-Shyong is particularly interested in exploring and developing novel interaction techniques that transcend the barrier between human and computers, especially on topics such as gestural/mid-air interaction, mobile/wearable interaction, Augmented/Virtual reality and text entry.
Before he came here, he was a researcher at UVR lab, KAIST. He worked on several projects such as on-body clothing design system using projection mapping and Mixed Reality remote collaboration system.
In October 2015 we attended two IEEE conferences in the USA. Daniel Rough presented a full paper at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, October 18–22, in Atlanta, Georgia. Uta Hinrichs presented a full paper at the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) conference as part of VizWeek, October 25-30 in Chicago, Illinois. You can find details of these and all our papers on the publications page.
On November 10th, Daniel and Uta will reprise their talks here in St Andrews and everyone is welcome to attend. You can find the details for the two talks below along with links to the papers via the University of St Andrews research portal.
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On Friday the 23rd of October, Aaron Quigley presented a keynote talk at the 9th annual Irish HCI conference (iHCI 2015) in Dublin. The talk was entitled “Trapped in AppLand: Archipelagos of Interaction”. The conference was hosted at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin and organised by the NCAD+UCD Creative Technology Network and was sponsored by the ACM SIGCHI Chapter Ireland and the NCAD+UCD Project. The conference showcased leading research by researchers in Ireland, and by Irish researchers working internationally, through poster and curated presentation sessions. The overall theme for this year was creative technology and the future of HCI in Ireland.
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Last week, Atlanta hosted the annual IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). This brought researchers in various fields of Computer Science, particularly those in human-computer interaction and software engineering. Established in 1984, the mission of the conference is to support the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing technologies and languages for programming, modelling, and communicating, which are easier to learn, use, and understand by people.
Daniel Rough, a PhD student in SACHI attended this conference to present his research called “Jeeves”, a visual language to facilitate ESM application creation, which was accepted as a full paper. (You can find details of this paper via our publications page).
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Critical Mass at Lunchtime is an interdisciplinary meeting to chew over research methods and approaches in a digital world. Starting on Monday the 5th of October, this regular seminar series will cover collections & data, analysis methods and tools, teaching approaches and challenges and pitfalls. Please contact either of the organisers Konrad Lawson or Uta Hinrichs for more details.
Starting, Monday 5th October, 1-2 pm in the Old Class Library, St John’s Lodge, South St, St Andrews
On Wednesday October 7th we had a series of short talks by final year students supervised by SACHI supervisors, explaining what they are working on (and why) for their final year dissertations.
Alexander Blundell presenting an early prototype of his mobile system
