Congratulations to Per Ola and his co-author who won an Honourable Mention (for Best Paper) at the Eye Tracking Research & Applications Symposium 2012. Only 3 of the 101 submitted papers received an honorable mention.
Kristensson, P.O. and Vertanen, K. 2012. The potential of dwell-free eye-typing for fast assistive gaze communication. In Proceedings ofthe 7th ACM Symposium on Eye-Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA2012). ACM Press: 241-244.
“The Seventh ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012) was held in Santa Barbara, California on March 28th-30th, 2012. The ETRA conference series focuses on all aspects of eye movement research and applications across a wide range of disciplines. The symposium presents research that advances the state-of-the-art in these areas, leading to new capabilities in gaze tracking systems, gaze aware applications, gaze based interaction, eye movement data analysis, etc. For ETRA 2012, we invite papers in all areas of eye tracking research and applications.” [ETRA 2012 website]
 

Miguel Nacenta is currently in Switzerland, participating as a keynote speaker in the Swiss Workshop on Multi-display Environments, 2012. During the workshop participants will have the opportunity to discuss on the issues of designing and building Multi-display Environments. The workshop includes another two key-note speakers (Prof. Streitz and Prof. Reiterer) and a presentation of the Interactive Collaborative Environment (ICE) research project that is currently being undertaken by the Pervasive and Artificial Intelligence research group at the Department of Informatics of the University of Fribourg.

<!–Speaker: Sriram Subramanian, University of Bristol
Date/Time: 1-2pm March 6th, 2012
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
The talk will present some of the recent research endeavours of the Bristol Interaction and Graphics group. The group has been exploring various technical solutions to create the next generation of touch interfaces that support multi-point haptic feedback as well as dynamic allocation of views to different users. The talk will rely on a lot of videos of on-going work to illustrate and describe our systems. I expect the talk to be accessible to all computer scientists and even to the lay public. Thus I particularly welcome discussion, feedback, and critique from the community.
About Sriram:
Dr. Sriram Subramanian is a Reader at the University of Bristol with a research interests in Human-computer Interaction (HCI). He is specifically interested in new forms of physical input. Before joining the University of Bristol, he worked as a senior scientist at Philips Research Netherlands and as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. You can find more details of his research interests at his groups page http://big.cs.bris.ac.uk

Per Ola Kristensson will give two presentations at IUI 2012: 17th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in Lisbon, Portugal on February 14-17, 2012.

The first presentation is on Wednesday and is entitled “Performance comparisons of phrase sets and presentation styles for text entry evaluations”. This paper describes how we used crowdsourcing to empirically compare five different publicly-available phrase sets in two large-scale text entry experiments. We also investigated the impact of asking participants to memorise phrases before writing them versus allowing participants to see the phrase during text entry. This paper is co-authored with Keith Vertanen, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Montana Tech in USA.

The second presentation is on Thursday and is entitled “Continuous recognition of one-handed and two-handed gestures using 3D full-body motion tracking sensors”. This paper is co-authored with SACHI members Thomas Nicholson and Aaron Quigley. In this paper we present a new bimanual gesture interface for the Kinect. Among other things, our evaluation shows that the system recognises one-handed and two-handed gestures with an accuracy of 92.7%–96.2%.
Per Ola will also introduce the keynote speaker Chris Bishop from Microsoft Research Cambridge on Thursday. Chris will talk about “…the crucial role played by machine learning in the Kinect 3D full-body motion sensor, which has recently become the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history.”
Per Ola is a Workshop Co-Chair for IUI 2012 together with Andreas Butz, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Munich in Germany.

<!–Speaker: Annalu Waller, University of Dundee
Date/Time: 1-2pm February 21st, 2012
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) attempts to augment natural speech, or to provide alternative ways to communicate for people with limited or no speech. Technology has played an increasing role in AAC. At the most simplest level, people with complex communication needs (CCN) can cause a prestored message to be spoken by activating a single switch. At the most sophisticated level, literate users can generate novel text. Although some individuals with CCN become effective communicators, most do not – they tend to be passive communicators, responding mainly to questions or prompts at a one or two word level. Conversational skills such as initiation, elaboration and story telling are seldom observed.
One reason for the reduced levels of communicative ability is that AAC technology provides the user with a purely physical link to speech output. The user is required to have sufficient language abilities and physical stamina to translate what they want to say into the code sequence of operations needed to produce the desired output. Instead of placing all the cognitive load on the user, AAC devices can be designed to support the cognitive and language needs of individuals with CCN, taking into account the need to scaffold communication as children develop into adulthood. A range of research projects, including systems to support personal narrative and language play, will be used to illustrate the application of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) in the design and implementation of electronic AAC devices.
About Annalu:
Dr Annalu Waller is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Dundee. She has worked in the field of Augmentative and Alternate Communication (AAC) since 1985, designing communication systems for and with nonspeaking individuals. She established the first AAC assessment and training centre in South Africa in 1987 before coming to Dundee in 1989. Her PhD developed narrative technology support for adults with acquired dysphasia following stroke. Her primary research areas are human computer interaction, natural language generation, personal narrative and assistive technology. In particular, she focuses on empowering end users, including disabled adults and children, by involving them in the design and use of technology. She manages a number of interdisciplinary research projects with industry and practitioners from rehabilitation engineering, special education, speech and language therapy, nursing and dentistry. She is on the editorial boards of several academic journals and sits on the boards of a number of national and international organisations representing disabled people.

A new paper from SACHI in collaboration with the Interactions Lab (The HapticTouch Toolkit: Enabling Exploration of Haptic Interactions) will be presented at this year’s TEI conference (#tei2012, www.tei-conf.org/12/). The paper describes work on an API to facilitate the fast programming of haptic tabletop application prototypes.

As part of the launch of the Trading Consequences project site Aaron has written the first blog post in which he says that the question is key in this project. “To understand the consequences of our trading history, historians need to ask difficult, subtle, multifaceted and challenging questions. Questions which aren’t polluted by knowledge of the limitations of the methods and technologies we have today. These insightful questions won’t come from a focus on what the tools of today can support, what the analysis or visualisation methods can do or what data is available. ” see the full blog post here.

<!–Speaker: Ken Scott-Brown, University of Abertay Dundee
Date/Time: 1-2pm February 7th, 2012
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
In this talk I review examples from industry engagement activity that have taken well known theory in cognitive science and used them to address common HCI problems by forming new questions that have in turn lead to interface development. In the first part of the talk I discuss how a multi-disciplinary team including input from computer arts, computer games programming, engineering and psychology developed a multi-touch application to visualise financial planning targets on a Microsoft Surface. In the second part of the talk I will discuss how assistive agents displaying deictic gaze cuing have been implemented and evaluated using touch screen displays and eye-movement recording equipment. Both examples demonstrate how a practice-based approach to animation and an appreciation of vision science contribute to the understanding and development of intuitive interface design and implementation. The critical feature is the development of authentic animation conforming to the artistic principles of animation and the biological limits of the human visual system.
Bio:
Ken Scott-Brown is a lecturer at the Centre for Psychology at Abertay. After completing his Honours Degree and PhD in Psychology here at St Andrews he then undertook post-doc research posts at Glasgow Caledonian University, St Andrews, and Nottingham before taking on his current role. He is a currently Principal Investigator on a series of industry and public sector funded grants; and a collaborator on several more cross-discipline research projects. The projects are linked by the theme of data visualisation and interaction using a blend of approaches informed by Cognitive Science and exploiting technologies and skills from the Computer Games Industry.
 

Aaron Quigley will be delivering a week long summer school on information visulisation of UbiComp data during the 3rd International UBI Summer School in Oulu, Finland on May 28 – June 2 2012. You can see full details of this summer school here.

 

“The summer school provides young researchers with an opportunity to gain hands on experience and insight on selected topics on the multidisciplinary fields of ubiquitous computing and urban informatics under the tutelage of distinguished experts. The summer school is targeted primarily to doctoral students, but M.Sc. students and postdocs are also welcome to attend.”
The 2012 UBI Summer School comprises of four parallel workshops:
A: Information Visulisation for UbiComp Data by Professor Aaron Quigley,
University of St. Andrews, Scotland;
B: Supporting Community Through Interactive Public Displays by Dr. Keith
Cheverst, Lancaster University, UK;
C: Civic Technology: Mobility, Democracy and Civic Engagement by Professor
Eric Gordon, Emerson College, USA;
D: Urban Sensoria: Human-Centered Computing in Practice by Dr. Alejandro
(Alex) Jaimes, Yahoo! Research.

Congratulations to Miguel Nacenta and Aaron Quigley and their colleagues Alan Dix from Lancaster University and Tom Rodden from the University of Nottingham on having their PPD12 workshop accepted to the Advanced Visual Interfaces International Working Conference in Capri Italy, May 21-25, 2012.
PPD12 is a workshop on infrastructure and design challenges of coupled display visual interfaces.

Please see their PPD12 workshop website if you are interested in research on display ecosystems, distributed user interfaces, ubiquitous user interfaces and coupled displays visual interfaces in general. This workshop follows up on PPD’08 and PPD’10.