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

<!–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.