Next year Miguel will join the program committee for the 2nd International Symposium on Pervasive Displays 2013 in cooperation with ACM / SIGCHI
“As digital displays become pervasive, they become increasingly relevant in many areas, including advertising, art, sociology, engineering, computer science, interaction design, and entertainment. We invite submissions that report on cutting-edge research in the broad spectrum of pervasive digital displays, from large interactive walls to personal projection, from tablets and mobile phone screens to 3-D displays and tabletops. The symposium on Pervasive Displays welcomes work on all areas pertaining to digital displays”. http://www.pervasivedisplays.org/2013/

Aaron and Per Ola are two of the Associate Chairs for MobileHCI 2013, the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2013) which will be held in Munich, Germany August 27 – 30, 2013.
“MobileHCI is the world’s leading conference in the field of Human Computer Interaction concerned with portable and personal devices and with the services to which they enable access. MobileHCI provides a multidisciplinary forum for academics, hardware and software developers, designers and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with and through mobile devices, applications, and services.” http://www.mobilehci2013.org/ Per Ola is also the workshops co-chair for MobileHCI 2013, the call for workshops 2013 is here.

Aaron will be joining the Technical Program Committee of the 2013 ACM International Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2013).
The UbiComp 2013 Program Chairs are Marc Langheinrich, John Canny, and Jun Rekimoto and they said of UbiComp 2013. That it is the first merged edition of the two most renowned conferences in the field: Pervasive and UbiComp. While it retains the “UbiComp” short-name in recognition of the visionary work of Mark Weiser, its long name (and focus) reflects the dual history of the new event, i.e., it seeks to publish any work that one would previously expect to find at either UbiComp or Pervasive. The conference will take place from September 8-12 in Zurich, Switzerland. Aaron has previously served on a number of Pervasive and UbiComp Technical program committees and looks forward to serving on this first joint conference UbiComp TPC which is now the premier forum for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing research.
http://www.ubicomp.org/

Next week Professor Quigley is presenting a seminar in the University of Konstanz, Germany as an invited speaker by Professor Harald Reiterer
Abstract:
The computational and contextual edifice around which we will build our ubicomp user interfaces is complex and constantly changing. This context include physiological, environmental and computational state. In this regard, can we model the physiological differences between people and use the models to adapt and personalize designs, user interfaces and artefacts? Can we model, measure and predict the cost of users altering their gaze in single or multi-display environments? If so, can we personalize interfaces using this knowledge. What about when moving and while the distance between user and screen is varying. Can this be considered a new modality and used to personalize the interfaces along with physiological differences and our current gaze. In this talk we seek to answer some of these questions. We define Ubicomp User Interfaces and introduce an Individual Observer Model of human eyesight, which we use to simulate 3600 biologically valid human eyes. We also report on controlled lab and outdoor experiments with real users. This is to measure both gaze and distance from the screen in an attempt to quantify the cost of attention switching along with the use of distance as a modality. In each case, for distance, gaze or expected eyesight we would like to develop models which can allow us to make predictions about how easy or hard it is to see visual information and visual designs, along with altering the designs to suit individual users based on their current context.

<!–Speaker: John McCaffery, University of St. Andrews
Date/Time: 2-3pm Dec 12, 2012
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews –>
Abstract:
Open Virtual Worlds are a platform of several advantages. They provide an out of the box mechanism for content creation, distributed access and programming. They are open source so can be manipulated as necessary. There is also a large amount of content that has already been created within a Virtual World. As such, in the field of HCI experimentation they provide an interesting opportunity. When experimenting with novel modes of interaction prototypes can be created within a Virtual World relatively easily. Once the prototype has been created, users can be put into use case scenarios based around existing content. Alternatively, custom environments with very constrained parameters can quickly be created for controlled experimentation.
This talk will cover some of the interaction modes currently being experimented with by the OpenVirtualWorlds group.
Bio:
John McCaffery is a PhD student in the Open Virtual Worlds group. John works on investigating how the open frameworks for distributing, programming and manipulating 3D data provided by Open Virtual Worlds can be used to provide a model for how the 3D web may develop. Open Virtual Worlds is a general term for open source, open protocol client / server architectures for streaming and modifying 3D data. Examples include the SecondLife viewer and its derivatives and the SecondLife and OpenSim server platforms. John’s work includes investigating how the programming possibilities of Virtual Worlds can be extended and how Virtual World access can be modified to provide new experiences and new experimental possibilities, built around existing content. For more information on John’s Work see his research blog.

Today is St Andrews day and a number of current and former SACHI members graduated from the University of St Andrews.
Dr Umar Rashid who was supervised by Professor Aaron Quigley and Dr Miguel Nacenta was awarded his PhD for a thesis entitled “Cross-Display Attention Switching in Mobile Interaction with Large Displays”. Dr Per Ola Kristensson was his internal examiner and Dr Adrian Friday from the University of Lancaster was his external examiner. 
Jing Sun and Hong Xue who were supervised by Professor Aaron Quigley graduated with the Degree of M.Sc. Hong was awarded the Medal for M.Sc. in Information Technology and the School of Computer Science Award in Information Technology. Bin Han who was supervised by Dr Per Ola Kristensson graduated with the Degree of M.Sc. Moses Akazue supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta graduated with the Degree of M.Sc. 
 
Anne-Marie Mann who is now a PhD student in SACHI graduated with the Degree of M.Sc.
 
 

SACHI along with other colleagues in Computer Science and across St Andrews are organising a SICSA supported “Big Data Information Visualisation” summer school in July of 2013. We are working on developing the program for this summer school bringing together expertise in a number of areas. Over the weeks and months ahead we will be adding to this website as we confirm topics and speakers. We already have a number of colleagues locally dealing with big data who are willing to act as mentors and domain experts during the summer school.

Two SACHI members, Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron Quigley are organizing with other colleagues workshops at the CHI 2013 the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris in April 2013. These workshops are called Blended Interaction: Envisioning Future Collaborative Interactive Spaces and Grand Challenges in Text Entry.
Once the workshop websites are online, we will link from them here. (click on the CHI 2013 logo above to visit the main conference website).

Aaron Quigley, Judy Kay and Tsvi Kuflik are guest editors for a UMUAI special issue on Ubiquitous and Pervasive User Modelling. You can see the full call for papers for this special issue here.
 

<!–Speakers: Miguel Nacenta and Aaron Quigley, Computer Science University of St. Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm November 20, 2012
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Miguel Nacenta recently attended ITS 2012. The ACM international conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces brings together researchers and innovators from a variety of backgrounds including engineering, computer science, design, and social sciences. Miguel is going to share with us his impressions of the Research Papers, Demos, Tutorials and Workshops he participated in. The ideas and perspectives shared at this year’s ITS include multi-touch and gesture-based interfaces, 3D interaction, interactive surfaces in education and for children, multi-display environments, non-flat surfaces, multitouch development, sketching the user interfaces and high-performance ITS technologies.
Aaron Quigley attendance at the recent UIST 2012.conference, allows Aaron to offer insight into the interesting Research Papers, Videos and Demos he enjoyed there. UIST (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology) is the premier forum for innovations in the software and technology of human-computer interfaces. UIST brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas. Some of the topics we can expect to hear about are traditional graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, and CSCW.
As both UIST 2013 and ITS 2013 are taking place here in St. Andrews next October, it would be worthwhile attending to get a flavour of what to expect next year.
About Miguel:
Dr. Miguel Nacenta has been a University of St Andrews lecturer since May 2011, where he cofounded the SACHI group. Prior to this he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Interactions Lab, University of Calgary, Canada. He holds an electrical engineering degree from the Technical University of Madrid (Ingeniero Superior, UPM), and a doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, under the supervision of Prof. Carl Gutwin.
About Aaron:
Professor Aaron Quigley is the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. He is the director of SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group, His appointment is part of SICSA the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance. From August of 2012 he is the SICSA deputy director for knowledge exchange. He is the general co-chair for UIST 2013 and ITS 2013 (in St Andrews in Oct 2013).