We are delighted to see Xu, Pireh, and Abd graduated this week! Congratulations!
News
Dr Jason Jacques (St Andrews) and Dr Kristin Williams (Emory) have been awarded the Emory – St Andrews Collaborative Research Grant for their project ‘Considering Household Division of Labor when Engaging Civic Participation in Environmental Stewardship’
Climate change and environmental policy research often focuses on planetary scale changes, that are challenging for individuals to contextualise in their own environment. The project focuses on exploring and understanding how individuals engage with environmental stewardship on a hyper-local level: how do individual households understand their environment and are they able to draw connections between their actions, the activities in their community, and the environment around them?
In answering these questions, the project will connect households and communities together, combining this network of citizen scientists and environmental sensors, to enhance their understanding through bespoke visualisations customised for these communities.
“It great that the St Andrews is willing to take the initiative to support international collaboration on big questions, including environmental policy and sustainability. Connecting with Kristin, and others at Emory, for this project has offered unique opportunities to build capabilities and contrast the unique needs of communities on both sides of the Atlantic.”
See more information about the Global Partnerships at St Andrews.
Many photos of St Andrews are missing from open-access maps. WikiShootMe allows anyone to add an image to places on Wikimedia and Wikipedia that doesn’t already have one. So we took the initiative to take photos of St Andrews’ historic buildings and upload them to Wikicommons using WikiShootMe. However, WikiShootMe is currently only a desktop website and is difficult to use when out and about. Many usability challenges emerged, leading us to turn this into a User-Centred Interaction Design project.
Pireh Pirzada has developed and validated a first rPPG system (Automated Remote Pulse Oximetry System, or ARPOS) that measures both heart rate and blood oxygenation levels remotely within participants’ home environments (real-life scenarios).
The research shares the first data set collected from real life scenarios which includes various factors such as skin pigmentations, illuminations, beard, makeup, and glasses. The research also shares its experiment protocol and source code used to collect and analyse the data.
Abstract:
Current methods of measuring heart rate (HR) and oxygen levels (SPO2) require physical contact, are individualised, and for accurate oxygen levels may also require a blood test. No-touch or non-invasive technologies are not currently commercially available for use in healthcare settings. To date, there has been no assessment of a system that measures HR and SPO2 using commercial off-the-shelf camera technology that utilises R, G, B, and IR data. Moreover, no formal remote photoplethysmography studies have been performed in real-life scenarios with participants at home with different demographic characteristics. This novel study addresses all these objectives by developing, optimising, and evaluating a system that measures the HR and SPO2 of 40 participants. HR and SPO2 are determined by measuring the frequencies from different wavelength band regions using FFT and radiometric measurements after pre-processing face regions of interest (forehead, lips, and cheeks) from colour, IR, and depth data. Detrending, interpolating, hamming, and normalising the signal with FastICA produced the lowest RMSE of 7.8 for HR with the r-correlation value of 0.85 and RMSE 2.3 for SPO2. This novel system could be used in several critical care settings, including in care homes and in hospitals and prompt clinical intervention as required.
Keywords: remote health monitoring; heart rate measurement; blood oxygenation level measurement; rPPG system
The research outputs also include:
Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6522389
Experiment protocol: dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.n2bvj6zkxlk5/v1
Code: https://github.com/PirehP/ARPOSpublic
Researchers:
Pireh Pirzada
Students were invited to collaborate on researching digitised archival information about St Andrew’s first female alumni and thus expand the limited amount of information we have about these front-running women.
Description:
The Postgraduate Development Officer collaborated with Tomas Vancisin, a SACHI Group researcher focusing on visualising historical university records, and the Inclusion Diversity Equity Accessibility (IDEA) network to host a pilot event to raise awareness about the University’s first female students.
The University of St Andrews is over 600 years old, but women have only been allowed to study here for the past 145 years. In 1877, 15 years before women were officially allowed to study at universities around Scotland, St Andrews started offering women the Lady Literate in Arts qualification, which was equivalent to an MA degree. Despite the significance of this qualification for gender equality and beyond, the amount of information we have about these pioneering women is sparse. The event aimed to spark a discussion and encourage attendees to become “knowledge activists” by looking for additional information about these women. In addition to filling information gaps about underrepresented women, the session also showcased opportunities to develop skills in digital media, research, public engagement, and team collaboration.
The long-term goal is to run Wikipedia training as a means to encourage writing Wikipedia Biographical articles about LLA’s we identify as notable.
Here is what one of the attendees said about their experience:
“I really enjoyed searching for information about the LLA graduates. It was exciting to try and uncover what information is out there, and it was good fun. I also enjoyed hearing more about the IDEA network, and I am keen to get involved as a ‘knowledge activist.”
More information:
- Find out more about the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Accessibility in Open Research Network (IDEA Network for short).
- More about the Lady Literate in Arts Scheme
Come and join our group! We are currently advertising for a new staff member to join our HCI group at the School of Computer Science.
Supporting the expansion and development of the SAHCI group, topics of interest include but are not limited to: tangible computing, digital fabrication, ubiquitous computing, information visualization, human-centered artificial intelligence, augmented reality, novel software and hardware interactions, and critical HCI. Expertise in the field of HCI and technical expertise in the creation of hardware and or software interactions is of particular interest.
For more details: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CRS296/lecturer-senior-lecturer-reader-in-human-computer-interaction-ac7180gb
Closing Date: 17th August 2022
Please share far and wide
Understanding How People Approach Constraint Modelling and Solving – University of St Andrews and University of Victoria
Ruth Hoffmann will be presenting the paper on “Understanding How People Approach Constraint Modelling and Solving” at the 28th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2022) taking place between July 31 to August 5, 2022 in Haifa, Israel.
This paper is a joint collaboration between SACHI (Human Computer Interaction) and Constraint Programming groups, in both the University of St Andrews, Scotland and the University of Victoria, BC.
Abstract
Research in constraint programming typically focuses on problem solving efficiency. However, the way users conceptualise problems and communicate with constraint programming tools is often sidelined. How humans think about constraint problems can be important for the development of efficient tools that are useful to a broader audience. For example, a system incorporating knowledge on how people think about constraint problems can provide explanations to users and improve the communication between the human and the solver.
We present an initial step towards a better understanding of the human side of the constraint solving process. To our knowledge, this is the first human-centred study addressing how people approach constraint modelling and solving. We observed three sets of ten users each (constraint programmers, computer scientists and non-computer scientists) and analysed how they find solutions for well-known constraint problems. We found regularities offering clues about how to design systems that are more intelligible to humans.
Researchers
- Ruth Hoffmann
- Xu Zhu
- Özgür Akgün
- Miguel Nacenta
- Personal website: https://nacenta.com/
- Research website: https://vixi.cs.uvic.ca/
The paper can be found at: https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2022.28
Conference
Ruth will be presenting the paper in the main conference and giving an invited talk at ModRef 2022 to raise awareness of the benefits of understanding how people represent, model and solve constraint problems.
CP 2022 Conference link: https://easychair.org/smart-program/FLoC2022/CP-2022-08-03.html#talk:197219
ModRef 2022 link: https://easychair.org/smart-program/FLoC2022/ModRef-2022-07-31.html#talk:197355
More ModRef info: https://modref.github.io/ModRef2022.html#invtalks
The paper is open access: Representational transformations: Using maps to write essays.
Summary of the paper and its findings
We built a tool to study how writers move between map and text to write essays. The main takeaway is that important cognitive work happens in the transformation process between map and text representations.
There are lots of existing tools for building representations to support complex cognitive tasks – e.g. argument maps, text, notes, slides, sketches, and so on. But tool support for the transformations *between* representations is much more neglected – and we think it’s crucial!
We built Write Reason, a tool which combines a text editor and a mapping interface. You can drag parts of the map into the text, and parts of the text into the map, and it helps you keep them in sync.
We then studied how 20 students used Write Reason to write essays. You can interactively explore the maps and essays built by participants. We identified key properties of transformations: change in representation type, cardinality, and explicitness. And we found that most used an all-at-once batch translation, while a few used bit-by-bit interleaving.
We think understanding transformations is crucial for building the next generation of multi-representational tools. How can we better support multi-transformation pipelines like these? Can automation unlock more complex + powerful workflows, which would be tedious to do manually?
Our findings revealed and falsified some of the key implicit assumptions that we baked into the design of Write Reason. We hope that these reflections will help other designers and researchers start one step ahead of us and avoid these mistakes!
Thrilled to see Iain and Guilherme graduating this week. Congratulations on your well-deserved success Dr. Carneiro & Dr. Carson!
Abstract:
In an ACM Interactions column and an Irish HCI keynote I have explored Deep Digitality, an approach to the radical re-imagination of large scale systems of society: manufacturing, healthcare, government and healthcare. Deep Digitality takes the counter-factual premise asking what these systems would be like of digital technology had preceded the industrial revolution, the Medicis or even Hippocrates. Paradoxically, in some of these digital-first scenarios, digital technology is sparse and yet there is clearly a digital mindset at play. It is the kind of thinking that underlies some of the more radical digital apps and products, and builds on the assumptions of a world where computation and sensing are cheap, communication and information are pervasive, and digital fabrication is mainstream. This digital thinking connects with other ‘thinkings’ (computational, design, management, systems) and but appears distinct – less focused on decomposition and engineering than computational thinking, but more principle rather than process driven than design thinking. I have been trying to distill some of the defining features and heuristic principles of Digital Thinking and this talk captures some of this nascent work in progress.
Bio:
Alan Dix is Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University. Previously he has spent 10 years in a mix of academic and commercial roles. He has worked in human–computer interaction research since the mid 1980s, and is the author of one of the major international textbooks on HCI as well as of over 450 research publications from formal methods to design creativity, including some of the earliest papers in the HCI literature on topics such as privacy, mobile interaction, and gender and ethnic bias in intelligent algorithms. For ten years Alan lived on Tiree, a small Scottish island, where he engaged in a number of community research projects relating to heritage, communications, energy use and open data and organised a twice-yearly event Tiree Tech Wave that has now become peripatetic. In 2013, Alan walked the complete periphery of Wales, over a thousand miles. This was a personal journey, but also a research expedition, exploring the technology needs of the walker and the people along the way.
Alan’s role at the Computational Foundry has brought him back to his homeland. The Computational Foundry is a 30 million pound initiative to boost computational research in Wales with a strong focus on creating social and economic benefit. Digital technology is at a bifurcation point when it could simply reinforce existing structures of industry, government and health, or could allow us to radically reimagine and transform society. The Foundry is built on the belief that addressing human needs and human values requires and inspires the deepest forms of fundamental science.
Event details
- When: 18th February 2020 14:00 - 15:00
- Where: Cole 1.33b