<!–Speaker: Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh
Date/Time: 1-2pm Sep 10, 2013
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St. Andrews–>
Abstract:
In the EU-funded LIREC project, finishing last year, Heriot-Watt University investigated how a long-lived multi-embodied (robot, graphical) companion might be incorporated into a work-environment as a team buddy, running a final continuous three-week study. This talk gives an overview of the technology issues and some of the surprises from various user-studies.
Bio:
Ruth Aylett is Professor of Computer Sciences in the School of Mathematical and Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. She researches intelligent graphical characters, affective agent models, human-robot interaction, and interactive narrative. She was a founder of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents and was a partner in the large HRI project LIREC – see lirec.eu. She has more than 200 publications – book chapters, journals, and refereed conferences and coordinates the Autonomous affective Agents group at Heriot-Watt University- see here
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Title: London and the 19th Century Global Commodity Trade: Industrialists and Economic Botanists
 
<!–Speaker: Jim Clifford, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada (@jburnford,
Date/Time: Thursday, August 15; 1-2pm,
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Greater London’s industry relied on overseas ghost acres for economic expansion. Britain did not have enough land to support the massive growth in industries such as soap making and it could not grow tropical and sub-tropical plants, such as sugarcane or cinchona, on an economic scale. This project explores the environmental consequences of London’s industrial development during the long nineteenth century. For example, the soap industry’s transnational fat supply shifted from Russian tallow at the start of the century, to animal fats from around the world, supplemented by palm oil from West Africa, coconut oil from Ceylon, and cottonseed oil from Egypt. This one industry’s supply chain represents a wider trend where British industrialists increasingly relied on plantations, farms, forest, mines and oceans all over the world to supply essential raw materials. Along with finding new supplies to expand existing industries, London’s industrialists, and economic botanists at Kew Gardens, also searched the world for new economically viable plants, and both groups played a role in the transfer of seeds and living plants to establish new plantations throughout the British Empire. For example, the British created neo-South American landscapes in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) with cinchona and rubber plantations.
This presentation will discuss how I’m combining archival research on the soap industry and economic botany with a text mined database created by the Trading Consequence research project. Our research team extracts a database of information about commodity flows throughout the British World during the nineteenth century by using computer algorithms to text-mine millions of pages of digitized historical documents. We then develop a range of visualizations to explore this large database. This new methodology allows us to explore a much wider range of commodity flows throughout the British World in the nineteenth century than traditional archival research.
Bio:
Jim Clifford is an environmental historian of Britain and the British World during the long-19th century. He uses digital methods to explore the global environmental consequences of Britain’s growing industrial economy. Jim is interested in the intersections between environmental, social and political history. In particular, he researches how communities responded to worsening environmental conditions.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

The St Andrews Human Computer Interaction research group is involved in the organisation of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2013, UIST 2013 and ITS 2013, the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2013 conferences. Today a number of important things happened worthy of note and thanks. We are organising UIST with our colleagues Microsoft Research in Cambridge and ITS with our colleagues in the University of Helsinki.
The program for UIST 2013 went online. Our PC chairs Ivan and Takeo along with our general chairs Shahram and Aaron put this together. Our own Per Ola Kristensson was a member of the PC along with 30 others from around the world. Miguel Nacenta from SACHI has a paper in the final program. He will be posting more details on this paper and demo closer to the conference date.
The registration for UIST 2013 and for ITS 2013 opened today. Our own Jakub Dostal is one of the ITS and UIST registration chairs along with Merve and they have been hard at work getting this system up and running, ready for today, and the months leading upto the conference.
Miguel Nacenta is the local chair for UIST 2013 and he has been putting in enormous effort with the local arrangements from what the hotels should be, to how the student innovation contest can operate in the Kinkell Byre.  Per Ola Kristensson is the local chair for ITS 2013 and has likewise been very busy looking after many aspects of the program from getting our USB keys to ensuring the WiFi holds up. Per Ola is also busy as demonstrations co-chair with Scott from Microsoft for UIST 2013. This UIST demo event will be held in the Hall of Champions at the Old Course hotel. These aren’t things academics should be spending their time on but it’s what’s called of us when we agree to host a conference as a service to our research community. Miguel has put together a wonderful website with details on how to get to St Andrews for ITS and UIST. It’s a website released today and I know we in SACHI will be using for many years to come!
Finally, our own Uta Hinrichs who along with Eve are the student volunteer chairs for ITS and UIST. Thanks also to our local student volunteers who are already busy making the program layout, arranging shipping of incoming sponsor material etc. Of course, there are many other people from reviewers to other chairs to thank but I’ll leave that for a future post. For now, this post is to thank all of my local colleagues for their efforts in organising ITS and UIST this year.
It might take a village to raise a child but I can tell you it takes a research group with connections to the global research community to host two international conferences!

We are looking forward to welcoming all of the summer school participants and instructors to St Andrews this week. We have nearly 40 students and over a dozen instructors and other visitors attending this SICSA sponsored summer school on big data information visualisation.
This summer school is concerned with the processing, management and hence presentation of “big data”, in an intelligible form with information visualisation techniques and methods. In this summer school we aim to demystify the concept of big data by introducing a systematic, scientific and rigorous approach to tackling it. We take a blended theory and practice approach here, by providing both theoretical underpinnings and practical use of the infrastructure to process big-data and the means to understand it with information visualisation.
Students are getting access to industrial scale datasets, research datasets, open datasets along with the accounts on the Amazon infrastructure. Thanks to Amazon for providing us with a grant of thousands of dollars worth of credits and to brightsolid and Skyscanner for datasets.
The final team presentations are now going online.

<!–Speaker: Gregor Miller, The University of British Columbia, Canada
Date/Time: 1-2pm July 16, 2013
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
I will be discussing two projects from the Human Communications Technology lab at the University of British Columbia. The first is OpenVL, an abstraction of computer vision which provides developers with a description language which models vision problems and hides the complexity of individual algorithms and their parameters. Additionally this provides facilities for hardware acceleration (and multiple implementations) and quick inclusion of improvement to the state-of-the-art. The second project is MyView, a video navigation framework utilising a personal video history for simpler browsing and search, as well as intuitive summary creation, social navigation and video editing.
Bio:
Gregor Miller has been a Research Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC since early 2008, working in the areas of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Human-Computer Interaction, and in particular the strands which connect them. Dr. Miller works in the Human Communication Technologies Laboratory as lead researcher for the MyView and OpenVL projects. Prior to coming to UBC Dr. Miller worked as a Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Dundee, designing multi-viewpoint camera systems. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Vision and Graphics from the University of Surrey and a BSc (Honours) in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Miller has also been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, and worked for three years as a software developer.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.

Rapid Prototyping with .net Gadgeteer in St Andrews, July 24, 2013 from 9:30 AM to 5:00 PMWe are pleased to host a hardware workshop on “Rapid Prototyping with .Net Gadgeteer“. Tilman and Thomas will give an introduction to the .NET Gadgeteer Platform and show some prototypes. Over the first part of the course they show how to build a digital camera, followed by group projects where they ask participants to come up with ideas that are relevant to their fields of research/studies.
Tilman and Thomas are two researchers from the University of Stuttgart and they are interested in the design space as well as limitations of building smart artifacts using .NET Gadgeteer. The workshop is kindly supported by Microsoft Research in Cambridge which is why there is no cost for hosts or participants. .NET Gadgeteer was developed for Open Source usage in Cambridge.
We thanks the SICSA MMI theme for their support in bringing this workshop here along with it’s sister workshop in Glasgow. If you are a SICSA student you can signup to this event here.
 
 
 
 

Information retrieval document analysis tasks, such as those conducted by search engines are ideal Big Data tasks, as they are often embarrassingly parallelisable using techniques such as MapReduce. However, while a large portion of the document sets such as the Web are static in nature, social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook generate document streams comprised of hundreds of millions of posts each day. The easy availability, high volume and tendency of such streams to reflect real-world events make them ideal sources of information to drive applications such as event detection or real-time search. However, the scale of these data streams mean that distributed parallel processing is needed, while traditional distributed processing paradigms such as MapReduce are unsuited to streaming data due to their batch-orientated nature. In this presentation, we will provide a brief overview of Big Data analysis within IR, before moving onto the challenges that real-time streaming data streams pose, discussing the new generation of distributed steam processing platforms currently under development and illustrating how one specific use-case, namely real-time search can be accomplished using one such platform.

<!–Speaker: Jacob Eisenstein, Georgia Institute of Technology,
Date/Time: 1-2pm July 23, 2013
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Large text document collections are increasingly important in a variety of domains; examples of such collections include news articles, streaming social media, scientific research papers, and digitized literary documents. Existing methods for searching and exploring these collections focus on surface-level matches to user queries, ignoring higher-level thematic structure. Probabilistic topic models are a machine learning technique for finding themes that recur across a corpus, but there has been little work on how they can support end users in exploratory analysis. In this talk I will survey the topic modeling literature and describe our ongoing work on using topic models to support digital humanities research. In the second half of the talk, I will describe TopicViz, an interactive environment that combines traditional search and citation-graph exploration with a dust-and-magnet layout that links documents to the latent themes discovered by the topic model.
This work is in collaboration with:
Polo Chau, Jaegul Choo, Niki Kittur, Chang-Hyun Lee, Lauren Klein, Jarek Rossignac, Haesun Park, Eric P. Xing, and Tina Zhou
Bio:
Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on social media analysis, discourse, and latent variable models. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award.

This week Aaron is attending the Second International Symposium on Pervasive Displays at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. He is attending to present a paper co-authored with Jakub Dostal and Per Ola Kristensson in SACHI, along with being a session chair on the second day of the conference. The paper is titled.
Dostal, J., Kristensson, P.O. and Quigley, A. 2013. Multi-view proxemics: distance and position sensitive interaction. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis 2013). ACM Press: forthcoming.

The paper presents SACHI research from these three authors at the intersection of proxemic interaction and multi-view display technologies. This work relies on underlying technologies to determine the viewers, their distance and angle to the display. Knowledge of these factors allows us to design interactive systems which exploits it for novel forms of interaction. We explore this in two studies that are based on two real-world scenarios of a departure board and a video player (with subtitles). Our results show that multi-view proxemic systems are accurate and that users find them useful and would use them if they were available.

<!–Speaker: Olivier Penacchio, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm June 11, 2013
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
The perception of such simple visual features as black, greys and white may sound simple. However, the luminance we perceive, also called brightness, does not match the luminance as physically measured. Instead, the perceived intensity of an area is modulated by the luminance of surrounding areas. This phenomenon is known as brightness induction and provides a striking demonstration that visual perception cannot be considered a simple pixel-wise sampling of the environment.
The talk will start with an overview of the classical examples of brightness induction and a quick look at the different theories underlying this phenomenon. We will next introduce a neurodynamical model of brightness induction, recently published*. This model is based on the architecture of the primary visual cortex and successfully accounts for well-known psychophysical effects both in static and dynamic contexts. It suggests that a common simple mechanism may underlie different fundamental processes of visual perception such as saliency and brightness perception. Finally, we will briefly outline potential applications in the arena of computer vision and medical imaging.
* Penacchio O, Otazu X, Dempere-Marco L (2013) A Neurodynamical Model of Brightness Induction in V1. PLoS ONE 8(5): e64086. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064086

Bio:
Olivier Penacchio is a postdoctoral researcher in the school of Psychology and Neuroscience of St Andrews University. He is currently working on the perception and evolution of counter-shading camouflage. His background is in pure mathematics, algebraic geometry, and he is a recent convert to the area of vision research.