At the end of February, Jakub Dostal and Per Ola Kristensson will be attending IUI 2014 in Haifa, Israel.
Jakub will be presenting the full paper SpiderEyes: Designing Attention and Proximity-Aware Collaborative Interfaces for Wall-Sized Displays by Jakub Dostal, Uta Hinrichs, Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron Quigley. This paper introduces the concept of collaborative proxemics: enabling groups of people to col- laboratively use attention- and proximity-aware applications. To help designers create such applications we have developed SpiderEyes: a system and toolkit for designing attention- and proximity-aware collaborative interfaces for wall-sized displays. SpiderEyes is based on low-cost technology and allows accurate markerless attention-aware tracking of multiple people interacting in front of a display in real-time. The paper discusses how this toolkit can be applied to design attention- and proximity-aware collaborative scenarios around large wall-sized displays, and how the information visualisation pipeline can be extended to incorporate proxemic interactions.
You will soon be able to read more about this work on its on designated project page: SpiderEyes.
Jakub is also a Student Volunteer for the conference. Per Ola is a member of the Senior Programme Committee for IUI 2014.

On Thursday 6 February 2014 the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willtts MP, announced funding of £4.6 million for 21 Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities projects as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) investment in Big Data.
Along with colleagues in the Department of English & Scottish Literature and the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh Aaron Quigley and Uta Hinrichs have been awarded one of largest of these grants for the project Palimpsest: an Edinburgh Literary Cityscape. In this project they aim to create a new, visualised literary cityscape, based on an extensive dataset of literary texts. This project has a focus on Edinburgh but the plan is for the techniques, methods and tools to apply to other UNESCO World Cities of Literature or indeed any literary city.
Palimpsest will be available to an online community of remote visitors, those with an interest in the literature of Scotland and its constituent places who explore the city and its culture from a distance. Palimpsest arises out of the idea of creating an innovative way of engaging people with literature, and drawing on literature’s own dependence on, and engagement with, place and space. Exploration of the relation between urban places and literature first arose in sociology in the mid 19th century. This project represents an excellent example of SICSA academics working together with colleagues in the humanities in making voluminous and varied data accessible for all.
Professor James Loxley from the University of Edinburgh said “We are looking forward to working with expert colleagues at St Andrews on this project. Palimpsest is all about learning to look at the literary writing of Edinburgh in ways that reveal collective imaginative investments in place and patterns within the work of individual authors. Visualisation is key to this – we want to be able to see the literary city, and the city in literature, in new and exciting ways that are also intuitively comprehensible to users coming to the resource for the first time.”
Of the overall funding, Universities and Science Minister David Willetts said: “Getting quality data out of the hands of a few and into the public domain is an important goal for this Government. This funding will help to overcome the challenge of making vast amounts of rich data more accessible and easier to interpret by the public. These 21 projects promise to come up with innovative long-lasting solutions.”
Professor Andrew Prescott the Digital Transformation theme Leadership Fellow commented; “The exciting projects announced by the Arts and Humanities Research Council illustrate how the arts and humanities can help exploit the opportunities offered by these vast data resources. They cover an amazing range of subject areas, from classical history and more efficient retrieval of information about music to the use of online gambling data for more accurate political analysis. By developing better tools for the visualisation and analysis of data, these projects will have significant impact beyond the arts and humanities and will assist the UK in grasping the economic and social opportunities offered by big data.” [1]
 

1. AHRC announcement 06/02/2014.

This March, Anne-Marie Mann will attend the Workshop on the Impact of Pen and Touch Technology in Education (WIPTTE 2014) in College Station, Texas. This conference focuses on the potential of pen and touch-based computing in education environments. Now in its 8th year, approximately 150 participants from industry, academia and education travel to WIPTTE to share their tools, experiences and ideas using this new hands-on technology.  This year the Keynote Speakers are Barbara Tversky (Columbia University) and Randall Davis (MIT) .
Anne-Marie has been awarded a registration scholarship and will present her paper “Digital Pen Technology’s Suitability to Support Handwriting Learning“, co-authored with Uta Hinrichs and Aaron Quigley, during the conference. Anne-Marie hopes that  the conference will provide an opportunity for open discussion regarding her recent study and research interests that will prove useful during future projects.

<!–Speaker: Hans Gellersen, Lancaster University
Date/Time: 2-3pm Feb 11, 2014
Location: Maths Lecture Theatre B, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Touch input and two-handed interaction were intensively studied in the mid 80’s but it’s taken 20 years for these ideas to emerge in the mainstream, with the advent of multi-touch interfaces. Gaze has been studied for almost as long as interaction modality and appears on the brink of wider use. This talk will present recent work that reconsiders touch and gaze to address challenges in ubiquitous computing: interaction across personal devices and large displays, and spontaneous interaction with displays using our eyes only.
Bio:
Hans Gellersen is a Professor of Interactive Systems in the School of Computing & Communications at Lancaster University. His research interests are in ubiquitous computing and systems and technologies for human-computer interaction. He has contributed on topics including location, context and activity sensing, device association and cross-device interaction, and interfaces that blend physical and digital interaction. In his recent work, he is particularly interested in eye movement analysis: as a source of contextual information on human activity, interest and well-being; and as a resource for interaction beyond the lab. Hans is closely involved with the UbiComp conference series which we founded in 1999, and served on the Editorial Boards of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, and IEEE Pervasive Computing. He holds a PhD from Karlsruhe University.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

There are many experiments in Computer Science, from eye tracking to mobile security or gestural interaction to navigation in virtual worlds. Such experiments are particularly common in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and we are continually looking for people willing and interested in participating in our studies.

To make it easier for us to reach and contact interested people, and for you to stay informed about our exciting experiments, we are launching our new participant database. If you are interested in participating in our studies, get a chance to interact with the newest toys and technical equipment and would like to stay informed about the ongoing experiments in Computer Science you can sign up using our registration form.

We will try to contact you only for relevant experiments. We aim to restrict the messages you receive based on the data you provide. Should you decide that you don’t want be in our database any more, you can be removed anytime, no questions asked. If you like the idea of staying up to date on our ongoing user studies and know others that might find this useful, please share this announcement with them.

Researchers from the School of Computer Science that are interested in contributing to our database or using the database to promote your experiments should contact Michael Mauderer or look into the CS Wiki.

Building on the success of the 2012 and 2013 events, the 3rd International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis’14) will be held this June with Aaron Quigley as the program chair. The website is at: http://pervasivedisplays.org/2014/
This symposium will take place in Copenhagen in June 2014 and will include a keynote address. In addition to research papers we are also soliciting submissions for posters and demonstrations.
As digital displays become pervasive, they become increasingly prevalent and indeed relevant in many areas, including advertising, art, computing, engineering, entertainment, interaction design, sociology and urban life. We invite submissions that report on cutting-edge research in the broad spectrum of pervasive digital displays, from large interactive walls to wearable displays, from installations to personalised signage or mobile displays to urban visualisation. The symposium on Pervasive Displays welcomes work on all areas pertaining to digital displays including, but not limited to:

• Applications
• Content design
• Evaluations, case studies, deployments and experience reports
• Interfaces and interaction techniques
• Novel technologies and new forms of pervasive display
• System architectures and infrastructure

http://pervasivedisplays.org/2014/
 
 
 

(Please note this competition is open to any student in the University of St Andrews)
The St Andrews Human-Computer Interaction Research group (SACHI) is one of the leading research groups in Human-Computer Interaction in Scotland and the United Kingdom. To accompany our current growth and increased impact and international recognition, we are planning to redesign the image of the group, starting with its logo.
We have decided to open the design of the logo to any students in the University of St Andrews. We are looking for a logo that:

• Looks and feels contemporary
• Is original, recognisable, and distinguishable from other similar institutions
• Can be integrated in a range of media (e.g., websites and paper)

Prize:

• One submission will get a 100 pound gift voucher.
• The author of the winning logo will be acknowledged in the group’s webpage.

Notice that:

• The logo can have one or more forms (e.g., one with letters and one without) for flexibility of use in different contexts
• The logo can, but does not have to, include the text “SACHI” or any subset or super-set of these letters
• The logo can, but does not have to, be graphically connected with the activities of the group, namely: human-computer interaction, information visualization, intelligent user interfaces, input devices, interaction techniques, computer-supported collaborative work. For more inspiration from the research themes of the group, please take a look at our soon-to-be-redesigned web page (http://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk )

Requirements:

• The logo should be original, free of royalties, and not include any element owned by third-party (e.g., existing fonts, dingbats, or external logos, even if these are open source/open access/royalty free).
• The logo should be usable for a number of graphical and non-graphical media, including web, software and paper-based media.
• The logo should have a small version that can be recognisable that is 50 pixels in its minimum dimension (horizontal or vertical).
• The logo should have a greyscale version that can be recognisable (note: these version does not have to be just a greyscale conversion of the full-colour logo).

Submission:

• The logo or logos will be submitted in a single pdf, in at least three sizes (small = 1cm, medium = 3cm, large 10cm), and with a version in greyscale or black and white for each of the sizes.
• The logo or logos will include an explanation of the logo in text of at least 50 words.
• The logo or logos can be accompanied by a preferred colour scheme.

Rules:

• The winning logo will be chosen by a jury chosen from the SACHI staff and students. Although members of SACHI are encouraged to submit their logos, they will not be able to be both submitters and judges.
• The contest may be left with no winners (no new logo from the submissions is adopted) but, if this is the case, there will still be a 50 pound prize to the best design.
• Submissions need to be sent by e-mail to aquigley@st-andrews.ac.uk before January 31st2014, 12:00pm GMT. Send any further queries or questions to this address.

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.