We are looking for participants willing to participate in an experiment on depth perception using a gaze contingent display.

 
Details of the study:

• Sessions: One session of about 45 minutes.
• Task: Use a gaze contingent display to perceive objects in a 3D scene.
• Location: School of Psychology, Room 1.36
• Times: 6.5.2013 – 19.5.2013, Mo to Fr from 9.00 to 18.00
• Reward: £5 Amazon voucher per session
• Contact: If you are interested, please send an e-mail to: mm285@st-andrews.ac.uk
• Supervisor: Dr. Miguel Nacenta

 

This year from across SICSA we have at least 16 notes, papers and TOCHI papers being presented at CHI in Paris along with numerous WIPs, workshop papers, SIGs etc. On April 23rd we hosted 35+ people from across SICSA for a Pre-CHI day which allowed all presenters a final dry run of their talks with feedback. This was also an opportunity to inform others across SICSA about their work while allowing everyone an opportunity to snap-shot HCI research in Scotland.
Pre-CHI Day – April 23, 2013: 10am – 4:30pm – Location: Medical and Biological Sciences Building, Seminar Room 1
9:30 – 10:00 Coffee/Tea
10:00 – 10:25 Memorability of Pre-designed and User-defined Gesture Sets M. Nacenta, Y. Kamber, Y. Qiang, P.O. Kristensson (Univ. of St Andrews, UK) Paper
10:25 – 10:50 Supporting Personal Narrative for Children with Complex Communication Needs R. Black (Univ. of Dundee, UK), A. Waller (Univ. of Dundee, UK) R. Turner (Data2Text, UK), E. Reiter (Univ. of Aberdeen, UK) TOCHI paper
10:50 – 11:05 Coffee Break
11:05 – 11:30 Use of an Agile Bridge in the Development of Assistive Technology S. Prior (Univ. of Abertay Dundee, UK). A. Waller (Univ. of Dundee, UK) T. Kroll (Univ. of Dundee, UK), R. Black (Univ. of Dundee, UK) Paper
11:30 – 11:45 Multiple Notification Modalities and Older Users D. Warnock, S. Brewster, M. McGee-Lennon (Univ. of Glasgow, UK) Note
11:45 – 11:55 Visual Focus-Aware Applications and Services in Multi-Display Environments J. Dostal, P.O. Kristensson, A. Quigley (Univ. of St Andrews) Workshop paper (Workshop on Gaze Interaction in the Post-WIMP)
12:00 – 1:00 Lunch Break & Poster Presentations
1:00 – 1:25 ‘Digital Motherhood’: How does technology help new mothers? L. Gibson and V. Hanson (Univ. of Dundee, UK) Paper
1:25 – 1:40 Combining Touch and Gaze for Distant Selection in a Tabletop Setting M. Mauderer (Univ. of St Andrews), F. Daiber (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence – DFKI), A. Krüger (DFKI) Workshop paper (Workshop on Gaze Interaction in the Post-WIMP)
1:40 – 2:05 Focused and Casual Interactions: Allowing Users to Vary Their Level of Engagement H. Pohl (Univ. of Hanover, DE) and R. Murray-Smith (Univ. of Glasgow, UK) Paper
2:05 – 2:20 Seizure Frequency Analysis Mobile Application: The Participatory Design of an Interface with and for Caregivers Heather R. Ellis (Univ. of Dundee) Student Research Competition
2:20 – 2:40 Coffee Break
2:40 – 3:05 Exploring & Designing Tools to Enhance Falls Rehabilitation in the Home S. Uzor and L. Baillie (Glasgow Caledonian Univ., UK) Paper
3:05 – 3:30 Understanding Exergame Users’ Physical Activity, Motivation and Behavior Over Time A. Macvean and J. Robertson (Heriot-Watt Univ., UK) Paper
3:30 – 3:45 Developing Efficient Text Entry Methods for the Sinhalese Language S. Reyal (Univ. of St Andrews), K. Vertanen (Montana Tech), P.O. Kristensson (Univ. of St Andrews) Workshop paper (Grand Challenges in Text Entry)
3:45 – 4:10 The Emotional Wellbeing of Researchers: Considerations for Practice W. Moncur (Univ. of Dundee, UK) Paper
4:10 – 4:30 Closing remarks and (optional) pub outing.
 
 
 

<!–Speaker: Maria Wolters, University of Edinburgh
Date/Time: 1-2pm April 2, 2013
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
In this talk, I will give an overview of recent work on reminding and remembering that I have been involved in. I will argue two main points.
– Reminding in telehealthcare is not about putting an intervention in place that enforces 100% adherence to the protocol set for the patient by their wise clinicians. Instead, we need to work with users to select cues that will help them remember and that are solidly anchored in their conceptualisation of their own health and abilities, their life, and their home.
– When tracking a person’s mental health, the stigma of being monitored can outweigh the benefits of monitoring. We don’t remember everything perfectly – if we did, that would be pathological. But this is a problem when we’re asked to report our own feelings, activity levels, sleeping patterns, etc. over a period of several days or weeks, which is important for identifying mental health problems. Is intensive monitoring the solution? Only if it is unobtrusive and non-stigmatising.
I will conclude with a short discussion of the EU project Forget-IT that started in February 2013 and looks at contextualised remembering and intelligent preservation of individual data (such as a record of trips a person made or photos they’ve taken) and organisational data (such as web sites).
Bio:
Maria Wolters is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh who works on the cognitive and perceptual foundations of human computer interaction. She specialises in dialogue and auditory interfaces. The main application areas are eHealth, telehealthcare, and personal digital archiving. Maria is the Scientific coordinator of the EU FP7 STREP Help4Mood, which supports the treatment of people with depression in the community, and is a researcher on the EU FP7 IP Forget-IT, which looks at sustainable digital archiving. She used to work on the EPSRC funded MultiMemoHome project, which finished in February

Jakub Dostal and Per Ola Kristensson are at IUI 2013 in Santa Monica, California.
On Thursday morning Jakub presented the full paper Subtle Gaze-Dependent Techniques for Visualising Display Changes in Multi-Display Environments by Jakub Dostal, Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron Quigley. You can read more about this work on its on designated project page: Diff Displays.
Jakub also participated in the IUI Doctoral Consortium and as a Student Volunteer for the conference. Per Ola Kristensson is a member of the Senior Programme Committee for IUI 2013.

The Tiree Tech Wave (TTW), is run twice a year, and is billed as ‘a hands-on making and meeting event ‘. This Spring, thanks to SICSA funding, SACHI member Anne- Marie Mann was given the privilege of attending.

The Tiree Tech Wave (TTW), organised by Alan Dix and Graham Dean, those who participate are lured by the promise of time to step out, to experiment, play, make things with others and discuss what brings us all together – our new digital maker culture.
The first challenge to all participants of the Tech Wave is getting to Tiree, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. The short flight from Glasgow challenges even the most intrepid participants and appears to be a rite of passage. For the duration of the stay Tech Wavers ask ‘Did you come in the tiny plane?’ a feat of pure courage that bonds us all to Tiree and its inhabitants.
Safe and sound on the island, it’s straight down to business. The Tiree Rural Centre becomes home to the 30+ participants of TTW5. This year, saw an eclectic mix of people from across the country enjoying the island and the projects they worked on. This was an exciting opportunity to meet a wide range of people and develop projects and ideas with them.
Whilst everyone was busy working away, I had the pleasure to work on a project with Ruth Aylett, from Heriot Watt University and Steve Forshaw, from HighWire at Lancaster University . The project was based on an art installation by Gordon Pask called Colloquy of Mobiles that had intrigued Ruth. The original artwork, deemed a form of Cybernetic Serendipity was a reactive, computer-based system composed of five large mobiles. Our task was to honour the artwork using only what we could scrounge from the electronic artefacts in front of us. The resultant piece, which we loosely named Cybernetic Fecundity, was run by 3 arduinos, a ‘male’, a ‘female’ and a constant , which represented time and rhythm. Completing the work took time, patience and a lot of ‘iterative design’. For me, it provided a demonstration of design – from conception to realisation, and it’s achievement drew on everyone’s strength and experience and was an excellent learning opportunity. A video of the project in action can be viewed here.
Other projects such as those brought by Cardiff School of Art and Design, included various wearable technologies, building a 3D printer, and a ceramic representation of its artist with an embedded RFID tag. The University of Lancaster consisted of two contingents of people, those from HighWire  and a group from the Catalyst project, working on an app to help raise Autism awareness. Another project worth mentioning was conducted by Alessio Malizia and Alan Chamberlain, who both worked hard to implement a gesture aware table top in the Tiree Rural Centre, using a Kinect and a projecter.
Whilst busy by day, the evenings were a more social affair. The events organised included a meal at the Scarinish hotel, the launch of the Tiree mobile heritage app, and a meal hosted by Marie-Angela, Tim, Will and Sam from Catalyst.
The true success of TTW5 was the fellowship and ingenuity of the participants. The Tech Wave allows a chance for creativity and networking in a relaxed, informal atmosphere that fosters strong bonds between those taken part. On that note I would like to thank everyone involved with my Tiree Tech Wave experience and it is fair to say that I hope to see them all again.

On the 4th March, the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland welcomed 50 new members, among them Dr Per Ola Kristensson acknowledging his contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, and specifically mobile text entry.
Dr Kristensson, and the 49 other appointees, joins the inaugural 68 members in what is expected to be a limited group of around 150 members. In addition to the special recognition, membership entitles Dr Kristensson to apply for funding from many of the Royal Society’s grants.
SACHI, and the entire School of Computer Science, wishes to congratulate Dr Kristensson on this prestigious honour.
 

On July 8th, Rónan McAteer from the Watson Solutions Development Software Group in IBM Ireland will give a talk as part of the Big Data Information Visualisation Summer School here in St Andrews. This talk is entitled “Cognitive Computing: Watson’s path from Jeopardy to real-world Big (and dirty) Data.”
While this talk is part of the summer school, we are trying to host it in a venue in central St Andrews during the evening of July 8th so that people from across St Andrews and SICSA can attend if they wish.
The Abstract for Rónan’s talk is below:
Building on the success of the Jeopardy Challenge in 2011, IBM is now preparing Watson for use in commercial applications. At first glance, the original challenge appears to present an open-domain question answering problem. However, moving from the regular, grammatical, well-formed nature of gameshow questions, to the malformed and error-strewn data that exists in the real world, is very much a new and complex challenge for IBM. Unstructured and noisy data in the form of natural language text, coming from sources like instant messaging and recorded conversations, automatically digitised text (OCR), human shorthand notes (replete with their individual sets of prose and typos), must all be processed in a matter of seconds, to find the proverbial ‘needle in the haystack’.
In this talk we’ll take a look at how Watson is rising to meet these new challenges. We’ll go under the hood to take a look at how the system has changed since the days of Jeopardy, using state-of-the-art IBM hardware and software, to significantly reduce the cost while increasing the capability.

SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group and the Big Data Lab St Andrews are pleased to announce that we will jointly run a SICSA supported “Big Data Information Visualisation” summer school on July 8th-12th 2013. 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 school we take a blended theory and application approach here with hands on work with data, big data systems and information visualisation toolkits.
The first round of applications closes on March 15th, 2013.  If there are places remaining, the second round of applications will close on Apr 19th 2013.
More details can be found here.
 

This SIG meeting provides a forum for visionaries; researchers and practitioners looking to consider the place and importance of visions within CHI. Can visions, the process of visioning and forming new visions help us refine, advance or develop new research or forms of interaction. And if visions are important to us, then are they part of the regular academic process? If so, should CHI provide venues for publishing new visions?
To support the planning for this Special Interest Group meeting we have setup a Wiki called Visions Of Computing. If you would like to contribute contact Aaron Quigley for an account.

<!–Speaker: Jakub Dostal, SACHI, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm March 5, 2013
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
Modern computer workstation setups regularly include multiple displays in various configurations. With such multi-monitor or multi-display setups we have reached a stage where we have more display real-estate available than we are able to comfortably attend to. This talk will present the results of an exploration of techniques for visualising display changes in multi-display environments. Apart from four subtle gaze-dependent techniques for visualising change on unattended displays, it will cover the technology used to enable quick and cost-effective deployment to workstations. An evaluation of the technology as well as the techniques themselves will be presented as well. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion on the challenges in evaluating subtle interaction techniques.
About Jakub:
Jakub’s bio on the SACHI website.