Aaron Quigley, SACHI and Jeff Pierce, IBM Research Almaden are chairing the tutorial program at MobileHCI 2012. MobileHCI 2012 continues to build on the tradition of previous conferences with a high quality tutorial program. They are inviting proposals for 1, 2 or 3 hour tutorials on emerging and established areas of research and practice. Tutorials will be held on the first day of the conference and are expected to provide participants with new insights and skills relevant to the area.
A MobileHCI tutorial is an in-depth presentation of one or more state-of-the-art topics presented by researchers or practitioners within the field of Mobile HCI. The scope for tutorials is broad and includes topics such as new technologies, research approaches and methodologies, design practices, user/consumer insights, investigations into new services/applications/interfaces, and much more. For more details see Aaron’s blog (where you can leave comments suggesting tutorial topics) here Call for MobileHCI 2012 Tutorials.
 
 

Aaron Quigley and Per Ola Kristensson from SACHI are the Short Papers chairs for the BCS HCI 2012 conference. HCI 2012 is the 26th Annual Conference of the Specialist HCI group of the BCS and the short papers track has a submission date of June 15, 2012. The full paper track for HCI 2012 has a deadline of the 30th March 2012.
From the main call:
We invite submissions for short papers that address any area of HCI. Authors are encouraged to submit late-breaking research results that show timely and innovative ideas. Short paper submissions should report original work and must not have been published previously or be a condensed version of previously published papers.
This year we have returned to the founding theme of the conference: “People and Computers”. This is to encapsulate and highlight the growing diversity of our field of HCI in one event. Technology is now common in all walks of life and HCI practitioners and researchers have more areas of impact than ever before. We want the conference to reflect this growing importance and diversity.
Submission Tracks
The conference will have usual tracks of high-quality research papers, written as either Full or Short papers. Full papers should be a maximum of 10 pages in length. These submissions should be of original work and should not have been previously published. Short papers should be a maximum of 6 pages and should be compact short pieces of original work. There is also a ‘work-in-progress’ category. We strongly encourage participants to reflect the spirit of the track by submitting early-stage, surprising or incomplete results that may be of relevance and interest to the community. The submission dates for the tracks are below.
Following on from last year we have also included an alt-HCI track. This track is for work that highlights a more extreme, unusual and less mainstream side of HCI. The more alternative the work is, the better. We are looking for high quality contributions that might be highly contentious, using atypical methodologies, critical of established ideas or focused in an unconventional domain. If your work is alternative, controversial and interesting, then alt-HCI is the track for you.
The conference will also host a variety of workshops and a doctorial consortium. These will be held on the leafy campus of the University of Birmingham, in Edgbaston. A redbrick University and member of the Russell group, it offers a pleasant green environment.
Submissions
We encourage submissions that focus on human interaction with technology and computer systems. Whether your work is at the fundamental end of the spectrum (theory, design, or principle), or at the practical end (evaluation, product, or impact) we are interested in encouraging high-quality submissions to the conference.
The dates for submission for each paper track are:
Full Papers:- 30th March 2012 (Notification:- 31st May 2012)
Short Papers, WiP & Alt-HCI:- 15th June 2012 (Notification:-27th July 2012)
Relevant topics areas include but are by no means limited to:

• Persuasive Technology
• Mobile Interactions
• User Experience
• Touchtable interactions
• Affective Computing/Interactions
• Usability Engineering
• Accessibility
• Child Computer Interaction
• Interaction Design
• UCD4D
• Recommender Systems
• Annotation
• Brain Computer Interfaces
• Technology and Culture
• E-Government

Aaron Quigley wrote an article on the future of HCI in the Interfaces magazine of Interaction, a specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society (BCS). Founded in 1984, Interaction formerly known as The British HCI Group, is the longest-established and largest national group in Europe devoted to HCI. It provides an organisation for all those working on human-computer interaction – the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of technologies for human use.
Aaron Quigley is the Scottish Chair of Interaction and his article is a “view from the Scottish Chair”.
“For the past seven decades, computers have radically changed the world we live in, as have our interactions with them. Today, people require more sophisticated interfaces as computers are platforms supporting the entire spectrum of human activity. There is not an area of human society that has not been affected by computers and the power they afford us. Computing and hence human computer interaction touches on every facet of science, art, engineering and the economy as a whole. Desktop and mobile computing have evolved as advanced interactive technologies change our view of applications, services, gaming and computing. Today we have many researchers in HCI looking at gestures, haptics, large surface interaction, touch and sensing beyond the classical desktop system.

Congratulations to Per Ola Kristensson who was recent conferred with the the title of Docent (Honorary Associate Professor) in Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University in Sweden. Per Ola has been in the University of St Andrews since early 2011 but before coming to St Andrews Per Ola was the Schlumberger Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge and held personal Marie Curie and EPSRC fellowships at the Cavendish and Computer Laboratories at the University of Cambridge.
Per Ola’s research has been widely reported in the international press, including The Economist, Die Zeit and BBC World News. In 2005 he won the Best Doctoral Consortium Contribution Award at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, a premier publication venue in human-computer interaction. Together with Dr Shumin Zhai he pioneered gesture keyboard technology for touch-screens and co-founded ShapeWriter, Inc. to commercialise this technology in 2007. He was the Director of Engineering of this company (2007-2010) and worked fulltime in Beijing, China in 2007-2008 to set up and manage the engineering office with about ten employees. The company was acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc. in 2010. ShapeWriter was selected as the 8th best iPhone application in the world by Time magazine in 2008 and won a Google Android ADC50 developer award the same year. Per Ola did his doctoral work at the Institute of Technology at Linköping University, Sweden and at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA (Ph.D. Computer Science 2007).

<!–Date/Time: 1-2pm October 27th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)
Second Talk:
Speaker: David Flatla, Interaction Lab, University of Saskatchewan, Canada–>
Title: Using Situation-Specific Models of Colour Differentiation to Assist Individuals with Colour Vision Deficiency
Abstract:
Approximately 10% of the world’s population experiences either congenital, acquired, or situationally-induced colour vision deficiency (CVD – commonly called colour blindness). People with CVD often confuse colours that those without CVD can distinguish. When working in digital environments, CVD can lead to problems ranging from minor nuisances (e.g., being unable to distinguish ‘visited’ from ‘not visited’ links on a webpage) to major safety concerns (e.g., not seeing colour-coded warning messages).
Recently, recolouring tools have been developed that modify the colours presented on a display to eliminate the colour confusion that people with CVD experience. However, these tools are limited to individuals with dichromatic CVD – a particularly severe and somewhat rare form of congenital CVD. As a result, individuals with acquired and situationally-induced CVD as well as those with non-dichromatic forms of congenital CVD continue to have difficulties.
In this talk, I will present my PhD research toward a new recolouring tool based on situation-specific models of colour differentiation. I will first present my work on situation-specific models that capture the colour differentiation abilities of any individual in any environment through a two-minute in-situ calibration procedure. I will then discuss my most recent work on developing a recolouring tool based on situation-specific models of colour differentiation.
About David:
David Flatla is a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada under the supervision of Dr. Carl Gutwin. His research focusses on the field of accessibility, particularly on how to help individuals with colour vision deficiency (CVD – commonly called colour blindness). To do this, he invented situation-specific models of colour differentiation that utilize in-situ calibration to accurately capture how people differentiate colors. He publishes at conferences like CHI and ASSETS. At UIST this year, he presented research exploring how to make boring calibrations fun by turning them into games.

The SACHI group and the University of St Andrews will be running the Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference in 2013 (ITS 2013). This is the leading international conference on research in interactive tabletops and surfaces. This conference at St Andrews will be a proud continuation of the excellent experiences of past ITS conferences from Banff, Saarbrücken and Kobe. In due course we will be publishing a full website at http://www.its2013.org where you can learn more about the Workshops,  Keynote , Industrial Keynote, calls for Tutorials, papers and posters, along with demos, a doctoral colloquium, social events.
Our current Conference Committee includes:
General Chairs
Aaron Quigley
Giulio Jacucci, HIIT, Finland
Program Co-Chairs
Yoshifumi Kitamura, Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University
Miguel Nacenta
Local Conference Chair
Per Ola Kristensson
Local Organising Committee
Tristan Henderson
Per Ola Kristensson
Miguel Nacenta
Aaron Quigley
We look forward to welcoming the ITS community to St Andrews which is celebrating its 600th anniversary during 2013.

November 2011 – Editorial: Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science

Aaron Quigley
Editorial: Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science Computers 2011, 1(1), 1-2; doi:10.3390/computers1010001
– published online 10 November 2011
For the past seven decades, computers have radically changed the world we live in. From machines for calculation, computers are now platforms for information processing and computation, supporting the entire spectrum of human endeavour. While computer science is a relatively young field, it is shaping how people live in our modern world. There is not an area of human society that has not been affected by computers and the power they afford us. Computer science touches on every facet of science, art, engineering and economics. Its impact ranges from electronic commerce to improved medical devices; and from enhanced communication to new forms of media and entertainment. The future, with ubiquitous computational power and natural user interfaces, will extend and enhance all human capabilities. To reach this future we need to quickly and freely disseminate our cutting edge research results globally, and this journal aims to help us achieve that.

See full welcome to this new journal here –

<!–Speaker: Aaron Quigley, SACHI University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm November 15th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Our bodies shape our experience of the world, and our bodies influence what we design. How important are the physical differences between people? Can we model the physiological differences and use the models to adapt and personalize designs, user interfaces and artifacts? Within many disciplines Digital Human Models and Standard Observer Models are widely used and have proven to be very useful for modeling users and simulating humans. In this paper, we create personalized digital human models of perception (Individual Observer Models), particularly focused on how humans see. Individual Observer Models capture how our bodies shape our perceptions. Individual Observer Models are useful for adapting and personalizing user interfaces and artifacts to suit individual users’ bodies and perceptions. We introduce and demonstrate an Individual Observer Model of human eyesight, which we use to simulate 3600 biologically valid human eyes. An evaluation of the simulated eyes finds that they see eye charts the same as humans. Also demonstrated is the Individual Observer Model successfully making predictions about how easy or hard it is to see visual information and visual designs. The ability to predict and adapt visual information to maximize how effective it is is an important problem in visual design and analytics.
About Aaron:
In this talk Professor Aaron Quigley will present a talk for a paper he is presenting at the User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP) conference 2011 on July 12th in Barcelona Spain. This work on Creating Personalized Digital Human Models of Perception for Visual Analytics is the work with and of his former PhD student Dr. Mike Bennett and now postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology in Stanford University.
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 and his appointment is part of SICSA, the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance. Aaron’s research interests include surface and multi-display computing, human computer interaction, pervasive and ubiquitous computing and information visualisation.