Vacancy Advertisement:  (http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AHX243/research-fellow/)
We wish to recruit a Research Fellow in Information Visualisation and Human Computer Interaction to support a number of new and ongoing research projects. The post will be based in the School of Computer Science so particular expertise and background experience in programming, interface design, evaluation or novel user interface development would be an advantage.
SACHI (http://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk) has over twenty members, is strongly active in the international community organising conferences such as UIST 2013, ITS 2013 and MobileHCI 2014. We regularly publish in the leading international HCI venues including CHI, UIST, IUI, AVI, ITS, PerDis etc. As a group we have several funded projects, organise an international seminar series, host visitors regularly and maintain a HCI lab with a wide range of equipment.
As a HCI group we encourage group-wide collaborative research so there are opportunities to participate in in other projects, be involved with undergraduate and postgraduate supervision, in addition to working on emerging topics of interest in the group.
In addition, demonstrated experience in information visualisation, intelligent user interfaces, web applications or ubiquitous and pervasive computing would be highly advantageous.
You should have a good honours degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, and preferably have, or be about to obtain, a PhD in Computer Science. It is essential that you have strong software development and evaluation skills. In addition you must demonstrate that you are able to manage work across a number of projects with competing deadlines while leading the day-to-day work and development.
The post is available for 2 years in the first instance, with possible extension, starting as soon as possible.
Informal enquiries should be directed to Professor Aaron Quigley aquigley@st-andrews.ac.uk or +44 (0) 1334 461623
Please quote ref: SB1190
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AHX243/research-fellow/
Closing Date: 31 January 2014
Further Particulars: SB1190AR FPs.doc
Salary: £30,728 – £33,562 per annum
Start: As soon as possible
Fixed term for 2 years

Faculty, postdocs and graduate students from across SACHI are involved with a number of ACM conferences in 2014.

Aaron Quigley is the general co-chair for MobileHCI 2014 and Daniel Rough is the registration chair. MobileHCI 2014 is the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. It is the premier forum for innovations in mobile, portable and personal devices and with the services to which they enable access. MobileHCI will be held in Toronto, Canada from September 23-26, 2014.

Miguel Nacenta is the program co-chair for ITS 2014. ITS 2014 is the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference. It is a premiere venue for research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies. ITS 2014 will be held in Dresden, Germany from November 16-19, 2014.

Per Ola Kristensson is the demo co-chair for UIST 2014 and Jakub Dostal is the registration chair. UIST 2014 is the 27th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. It is the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces and brings together people from diverse areas including graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, and CSCW. UIST will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA from October 5-8, 2014.

Tristan Henderson is the workshops co-chair for MobiSys 2014. MobiSys 2014 is the 12th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. MobiSys 2014 seeks to present innovative and significant research on the design, implementation, usage, and evaluation of mobile computing and wireless systems, applications, and services. MobiSys will be held in Bretton Woods, NH, USA from June 16-19, 2014.

Uta Hinrichs will serve as a program committee member for AVI 2014. AVI 2014 is the 12th edition of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces. AVI brings together a wide international community of experts with a broad range of backgrounds who share the interest in the investigation, design, development, and evaluation of  innovative interactive solutions. AVI will be held in Como, Italy from May 27-29, 2014.

Professor John Stasko and the Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has been appointed as an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science. Professor Stasko will be joining SACHI as an adjunct faculty member. You can find a complete blog post on our school’s website.

<!–Speaker: Ingi Helgason, Edinburgh Napier University
Date/Time: 2-3pm Jan 21, 2013
Location: 1.33b Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
This talk will present the work of the UrbanIxD project’s interdisciplinary summer school that took place in Croatia in August 2013. The goal of the summer school was the production of fictional concepts that explored the active role of citizens as designers, users and inhabitants in the emerging socio-technical situations that might characterise the Hybrid City of the near-future. The built environment is already in the process of being enriched with layers of data gathering computation and, combined with our own personal mobile technologies, this is offering a myriad of new urban informatics experiences and possibilities.
By employing a Critical Design methodology the UrbanIxD FP7 project is providing an opportunity to re-think what networked and connected communities of the future might look like. The project is questioning the premise of the “smart city” and is developing a community of researchers with a shared commitment to the foregrounding of the human experience in the emerging field of Urban Interaction Design.
Bio:
Ingi Helgason is a research fellow working on the UrbanIxD project based at Edinburgh Napier University where she is also studying part-time towards a PhD in Interaction Design. She teaches technology design and innovation at the Open University and her research interests focus on technology-mediated interactions in public and urban spaces. She was a member of the executive committee of the BCS Create series of interaction design conferences, and was on the programme committee of the BCS HCI conference for 2012. Ingi is on the editorial board of the SpringerOpen Journal of Interaction Science (JoIS). She is one of the organisers of This Happened Edinburgh, a series of events focusing on the stories behind interaction design.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Two weeks ago Aaron Quigley, Jakub Dostal and Max Nicosia attended a Schloss Dagstuhl on Proxemics in Human-Computer Interaction which Saul Greenberg, Kasper Hornbæk, Aaron and Harald Reiterer organised. The topic relates to ongoing research here eg. (DiffDisplays) in SACHI and in other groups around the world.
In disciplines like architecture and interior design, knowledge about proxemics has been used for decades to model use of space for face-to-face interactions, urban planning, and environmental design. In human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI), however, the use of proxemics is fairly new, and both disciplines just started to employ proxemics and related theories and models (e.g., Hall’s theory of proxemics in his book “The Hidden Dimension”) to design new interaction concepts that act on proxemics features. However, work on understanding how proxemics can be used for HCI (and HRI) has only just begun (e.g., Proxemic Interactions). We started with the use of Greenberg et al.’s dimensions on Proxemic Interactions and Pedersen et al.’s Egocentric Interaction Paradigm and a keynote from Saul and Nic flowing from their paper you can see here Proxemic interactions: the new ubicomp.
The structure of the seminar started with the four pillars of application, technology, vision, and theory that were equally exposed in early stage break-out seminar activities. Following from 16 mini-talks we had numerous breakout sessions on each of the pillars and other topics which emerged over the week.
The week was quite excellent to discuss research ideas, new directions and plans for the future.

Proxemics in Human-Computer Interaction participants

Our paper introducing the new field of what we term “Human-Data Interaction” won the best paper award at DE2013: Open Digital – The Fourth Annual Digital Economy All Hands Meeting. We are currently building a research agenda and community around this topic; if you are interested then please visit the HDI website.

The special issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies on Privacy Methodologies in HCI (edited by Mina Vasalou, Tristan Henderson and Adam Joinson) is now available online. Please take a look if you are interested in conducting studies about privacy.

At the start of last month we hosted UIST 2013, the 26th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology and ITS 2013 the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference (ITS) here in the University of St Andrews. Around 500 delegates came to St Andrews from around the world. We have just written to the Principal to express our thanks to the staff across the University who went beyond the call of duty to help us make these memorable and world-class events.
You can see a selection of photos from UIST 2013 here

Created with flickr slideshow.And you can see a selection of photos from ITS 2013 here

Created with flickr slideshow.

Tristan Henderson is serving as workshop co-chair for ACM MobiSys 2014. MobiSys is the premier conference for researchers working in mobile systems, with a particular focus on actual deployed implementations rather than analytical or simulation results. 2014 sees the twelfth instance of the MobiSys conference, to be held in historic Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA.

The call for workshops is available on the MobiSys website. We are particularly interested in reaching out to the HCI community, since there is a long tradition of implementing and deploying real systems for usability and interface studies that might not be known to the traditional MobiSys community. So if anyone reading this is interested in running a workshop, please get in touch!

The annual 35 Innovators Under 35, published by the MIT Technology Review identifies young individuals who are pushing forward the boundaries of technology and driving the next generation. This year, SACHI’s Dr Per Ola Kristensson was recognised in the prestigious Visionaries category.
Per Ola was recognised for his breakthrough work on text input and gesture recognition originally successfully commercialised as ShapeWriter, later purchased by Nuance Communications. The technology is a highly influential precursor to the gesture keyboards seen in today’s Android mobile telephone handsets and tablet computers.
Joining tech luminaries already honoured, including Jonathan Ive, Jerry Yang, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, Per Ola was also recognised for his work to aid people with disabilities, such as speech impediments or limited dexterity, expanding the use of statistical language modelling to significantly speed their communication from an unaided one or two words per minute.
SACHI congratulates Per Ola on this prestigious honour.
Read More: MIT Technology Review, University of St Andrews News