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

<!–Speaker: Anselm Spoerri, Rutgers University, USA
Date/Time: 2-3pm August 28, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews–>
 
Abstract:
Conflicts occur in the peer-production process of Wikipedia and can culminate in “edit wars” for specific topics. This talk will present visualizations of the similarities and differences between the most controversial topics that have been identified in 10 different language versions of Wikipedia and discuss the dominant and shared themes of the controversies across languages and cultures. In addition, it will present visualizations of the most popular topics over time in the English version of Wikipedia and visually analyze the relationship between most controversial and popular topics. MORE

<!–Speaker: Pam Briggs, Northumbria University
Date/Time: 2-3pm Sept 29, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews–>
 
Abstract:
Patients now generate a significant amount of online material about health.  This raises questions about how we should design websites featuring patient knowledge and experience in order to ensure those sites provide a good match to patient needs.  In this presentation I describe a structured participatory methodology for the development and evaluation of a set of patient experience websites that took place over three phases, consistent with experience based co-design:  (1) a capture phase in which we worked with patients to understand their reactions to existing websites; (2) an understand phase in which we translated this information into a patient-engagement framework and accompanying set of design guidelines and (3) an improve phase, where we used these guidelines to create three new health websites that were then assessed as patient experience interventions in a range of empirical studies.   MORE

<!–Speaker: Miranda Anderson, Bea Alex, Claire Grover, Uta Hinrichs and David Harris-Birtill
Date/Time: 2-3pm October 13, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews–>
 
Abstract:
Today, many web services personalize their content, including Netflix (movie recommendations), Amazon (product suggestions), and Yelp (business reviews). In many cases, personalization provides advantages for users: for example, when a user searches for an ambiguous query such as “router,” Amazon may be able to suggest the woodworking tool instead of the networking device. However, personalization is rarely transparent (or even labeled), and has the potential be used to the user’s disadvantage. For example, on e-commerce sites, personalization could be used to manipulate the set of products shown (price steering) or by customizing the prices of products (price discrimination). Unfortunately, today, we lack the tools and techniques necessary to be able to detect when personalization is occurring, as well as what inputs are used to perform personalization.
In this talk, I discuss my group’s recent work that aims to address this problem. First, we develop a methodology for accurately measuring when web services are personalizing their content. While conceptually simple, there are numerous details that our methodology must handle in order to accurately attribute differences in results to personalization (as opposed to other sources of noise). Second, we apply this methodology to two domains: Web search services (e.g., Google, Bing) and e-commerce sites (e.g., BestBuy.com, Expedia). We find evidence of personalization for real users on both Google search and nine of the popular e-commerce sites. Third, using fake accounts, we investigate the effect of user attributes and behaviors on personalization; we find that the choice of browser, logging in, and a user’s previously content can significantly affect the results presented.
Bio:
Alan Mislove is an Associate Professor at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 2009. Prof. Mislove’s research concerns distributed systems and networks, with a focus on using social networks to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of newly emerging systems. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award (2011), and his work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the CBS Evening News.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

<!–Speaker: Andruid Kerne, Texas A&M, USA
Date/Time: 2-3pm June 26, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews–>
 
Abstract:
Centuries ago, the technology of movable type vaulted human consciousness and expression from oral performance—improvisational— to writing, fixed by letters and words. The Interface Ecology Lab investigates new technologies that transform human expression. We engage the human body with the digital. We use cloud and web to maximize impact. We investigate how curation, exploration, and body-based interaction support expression and ideation. MORE

<!–Speaker: Gavin Doherty, Trinity College Dublin
Date/Time: 2-3pm June 16, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Mental illness is one of the greatest social and economic challenges facing our society.
The talk will consider at some of the different ways in which technology (and HCI research) can help, with a particular focus on the problem of engagement. Taking examples from a series of projects to develop novel technologies for use in the mental health space, we will see some of the unique issues and challenges which come from working in this domain, and the steps which can be taken to address them. The SilverCloud platform, designed to deliver range of engaging and effective clinician-supported mental health interventions, will be used as a specific example to discuss the topics of evaluation and dissemination. Development of a suite of programmes and a number of partnerships based on the platform have enabled the delivery of supported online interventions to tens of thousands of patients in a range of public and private healthcare services worldwide.
Bio:
Dr. Gavin Doherty is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, and co-founder of SilverCloud Health. He completed his doctorate at the University of York, before undertaking postdoctoral work at CNR in Pisa and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK before moving to TCD. He is interested in design for specific application areas, and has led a number of interdisciplinary projects in a number of different domains. A major focus of his work over the last decade has been on the design of technologies for mental health. The aim has been to develop systems which can increase access to, increase engagement with, and assist in improving the outcomes of mental health interventions.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

<!–Speaker: John Stasko, Georgia Institute of Technology
Date/Time: 2-3pm June 2, 2015
Location: CS1.33a, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
As the field of information visualization matures, researchers are able to reflect on, and perhaps even question, some long-accepted notions from the area. In this talk, I focus on three such notions:
* Representing network data through force-directed node-link diagrams
* Focusing on visual representation first and foremost
* Evaluating visualizations through user studies and experiments
Although these ideas clearly have value as evidenced by their acceptance and longevity, I have begun to question the wisdom of each. In this talk I’ll explain my concerns about these notions and I’ll suggest a new, alternative approach to each as well. To support these arguments, I will describe a number of research projects from my lab that illustrate and exemplify the new approach.
Bio:
John received the B.S. degree in Mathematics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (1983) and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (1985 and 1989). He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1989, and he is presently a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. His primary research area is human-computer interaction, with a focus on information visualization and visual analytics. John is a senior member of the ACM and IEEE. He was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2011 and an IEEE Fellow in 2014. He also received the 2012 IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award. In 2013 John served as General Chair of the IEEE VIS conferences in Atlanta, and he was named an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

We are proud to announce that Dr David Harris-Birtill, leader of the SICSA Medical Imaging theme, is an invited speaker at the Collaboration Technologies and Systems conference (CTS 2015), held in Atlanta, Georgia from 1st – 5th June 2015.
He will be presenting a tutorial entitled ‘Improving patient care: zero-touch technologies in the clinical environment’ on Monday 1st June, which will explore the potential for remote sensing, interactive, and collaborative computational tools for the clinical environment.

The tutorial will discuss how zero-touch devices can improve interaction in surgical settings and how camera-based technology can be utilised in the clinic to monitor vital signs, speed diagnosis and improve the patient experience. It will cover an overview of how computation is used in the clinic, explaining the technologies used, the clinical workflow and how current scientific research can lead to future improvements in patient care.
The tutorial will also use a worked example, highlighting the uses of the Microsoft Kinect to discuss this technology’s potential, demonstrating how it can be used to collaboratively control selection of medical images in a surgical environment, showcasing its potential to monitor the patient’s heart rate and blood oxygenation level before, during, and after treatment.
Dr Harris-Birtill’s tutorial will cover the following topics:

• Background and history of technology in medicine.
• State of the art technology in healthcare, including collaborative and embedded systems.
• Worked example of gesture-based control, and monitoring of patients using the Microsoft Kinect and related technologies.

Visualizing and writing variable-free compositional relational programs.
<!–Speaker: Gorkem Pacaci, Uppsala University
Date/Time: 2-3pm May 20, 2015
Location: JC1.33a, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Representing argument binding in compositional relational programs is an issue due to the syntactic problems. We first present our former research on using visualization to overcome this problem, and relevant user studies, and go on to discuss our recent work on syntactic improvements in solving the same problem. We are looking forward to feedback on this early stage research.
Bio
Gorkem studied his masters degree in Abertay Dundee in Computer Games Technology, delivering a thesis on Optimizing collision detection in games. After working in games for a while, he started studying towards a doctorate degree in Uppsala University, Sweden. His study focuses on the representation of relational programming languages