<!–Speaker: Mark Shovman, University of Abertay, Dundee
Date/Time: 2-3pm September 13th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
In natural and social sciences, novel insights are often derived from visual analysis of data. But what principles underpin the extraction of meaningful content from these visualisations? Abstract data visualisation can be traced at least as far back as 1801; but with the increase in the quantity and complexity of data that require analysis, standard tools and techniques are no longer adequate for the task. The ubiquity of computing power enables novel visualisations that are rich, multimodal and interactive; but what is the most effective way to exploit this power to support analysis of large, complex data sets? Often, the lack of fundamental theory is pointed out as a central ‘missing link’ in the development and assessment of efficient novel visualisation tools and techniques.
In this talk, I will present some first steps towards the theory of visualisation comprehension, drawing heavily on existing research in natural scene perception and reading comprehension. The central inspiration is the Reverse Hierarchy Theory of perceptual organisation, which is a recent (2002) development of the near-centennial Laws of Gestalt. The proposed theory comes complete with a testing methodology (the ‘pop-out’ effect testing) that is based on our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in visualisation comprehension.
About Mark:
Mark Shovman is a SICSA Lecturer in Information Visualisation in the Institute of Arts, Media and Computer Games Technology in the University of Abertay Dundee. He is an interdisciplinary researcher, studying the perception and cognition aspects of information visualisations, computer games, and immersive virtual reality. His recent research projects include the application of dynamic 3D link-charts in Systems Biology; alleviating cyber-sickness in VR helmets; and immersive VR as an art medium. Mark was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lived in Jerusalem, Israel since 1990. He can be found on LinkedIn

A big thank you to Timothy Sheridan an undergrad working in the SACHI group for editing down and polishing up the videos of the MMI summer school final project presentations. Thanks also to Miguel and Jakub for handling and arranging the video equipment. The video presentations are from the final project presentations at the SICSA MMI Summer School in June 2011. In addition you can see the final projects page here with images, text and links to other resources.

<!–Date/Time: 1-2pm August 30th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Speaker: Yemliha Kamber, , University of St Andrews
Title: Empirical Investigation of The Memorability of Gesture Sets
Abstract:
As technology is becoming increasing advanced and sophisticated, various input technologies and new experimental input technologies allow for large numbers of gestures types and new ways in controlling software. However very little is
known about the eects they have and how people learn and remember the various gestures. This presentation will briefly talk about what gestures are, the related work, our experimental study and the results which we analysed.
Speaker: Asset Nurboluly, University of St Andrews
Title: Multi touch transparent input output device
Abstract:
In recent years multi-touch interfaces have become popular. They have been giving a new way of human interaction. Multi-touch interfaces can be used in various aspects of human lives, such as medicine, education, military, science etc. The main aim of this project is to build a transparent display device, which uses multi-touch interface. Transparent display is a future trend in a technology world, setting out first in sci-fi movies and turning into reality nowadays. Usage of such devices is significant. They can be used in cars as a windshield, where a driver can see the GPS information as well as watching what happens on the road. In everyday life we can integrate them in mirrors, so in the morning during tooth-brushing we can check out the news, weather etc.
Regarding medicine and military areas, transparent displays can be used to show real-time interactive information for soldiers and surgeons.
The Prototype has been built by using laser light plane technology for multi touch sensing. An image projected from a projector, IR camera was used to capture the touches. The built-in system is a transparent multi-touch display.

Several SACHI members are presenting papers at leading international conferences in the upcoming months.
Aaron Quigley presented a paper co-authored with Mike Bennett at Stanford University entitled “Creating Personalized Digital Human Models Of Perception For Visual Analytics” at UMAP 2011 in Girona, Spain, on Thursday July 14th. Umer Rashid and Aaron Quigley co-authored a paper with Jarmo Kauko and Jonna Häkkiläat at Nokia Research Center entitled “Proximal and Distal Selection of Widgets: Designing Distributed UI for Mobile Interaction with Large Display”. It will be presented by Umer Rashid at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden on Friday September 2nd. Aaron Quigley also co-authored a paper with Michael Farrugia and Neil Hurely entitled “SNAP: Towards a validation of the Social Network Assembly Pipeline” which was presented by Michael Farrugia at the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, on Monday July 25th.
Miguel Nacenta is a keynote speaker at the Integrating multi-touch and interactive surfaces into the research environment workshop in Oxford, UK, in September 16-17. He has also co-authored a paper with Sean Lynch and Sheelagh Carpendale which will be presented by Sean Lynch at Interact 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal. The talk is entitled: “ToCoPlay: Graphical Multi-touch Interaction for Composing and Playing Music”.
Per Ola Kristensson presented a paper on Thursday July 28th at the Association for Computational Linguistics‘s Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011) in Edinburgh, UK. The talk was entitled “The Imagination of Crowds: Conversational AAC Language Modeling using Crowdsourcing and Large Data Sources”. On Monday August 29th he will present a paper at Interspeech 2011 in Florence, Italy. This talk will be in the multimodal signal processing session and it is entitled: “Asynchronous Multimodal Text Entry using Speech and Gesture Keyboards”. Shortly thereafter, on Thursday September 1st, he will present a paper at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden. This talk is entitled “A Versatile Dataset for Text Entry Evaluations Based on Genuine Mobile Emails”. These papers were co-authored with Keith Vertanen at Princeton University. He also co-authored a paper which was presented on Saturday August 6th by Leif Denby at the 8th Eurographics Symposium on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling (SBIM 2011) in Vancouver, Canada. The talk was entitled: “Continuous Recognition and Visualization of Pen Strokes and Touch-Screen Gestures”.

<!–Speaker: Peterri Nurmi,  Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT
Date/Time: 12pm-1pm July 29th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Contemporary mobile phones readily support different positioning techniques. In addition to integrated GPS receivers, GSM and WiFi can be used for position estimation, and other sensors such as accelerometers and digital compasses can be used to support positioning, e.g., through dead reckoning or the detection of stationary periods. Selecting which sensor technologies to use for positioning is, however, a non-trivial task as available sensor technologies vary considerably in terms of their energy demand and the accuracy of location estimates. To improve the energy-efficiency of mobile devices and to provide as accurate position estimates as possible, novel on-device positioning technologies together with techniques that select optimal sensor modalities based on positioning accuracy requirements are required. In this talk we first introduce novel GSM and WiFi fingerprinting algorithms that run directly on mobile devices with minimal energy consumption [1]. We also introduce our recent work on minimizing the power consumption of continuous location and trajectory tracking on mobile devices [2].
[1] P. Nurmi, S. Bhattacharya, J. Kukkonen: “A grid-based algorithm for on-device GSM positioning.” Proc. 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2010). ACM Press, 2010, 227-236.
[2] M. B. Kjaergaard, S. Bhattacharya, H. Blunck, P. Nurmi, “Energy-efficient Trajectory Tracking for Mobile Devices”, Proc. 9th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys, June-July, 2011).
About Petteri:
Dr. Petteri Nurmi is a Senior Researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki in 2009. He is currently co-leading the Adaptive Computing research group at HIIT together with Doc. Patrik Floréen. His research focuses on ubiquitous computing, user modeling and interaction with a view of making the life of ordinary people easier through easy-to-use mobile services. He regularly serves as Program Committee Member and reviewer for numerous leading conferences and journals. More information about his research can be found from the webpage of the research group: http://www.hiit.fi/adapc/

The project descriptions from the five project teams we had in St Andrews during our summer school on multimodal systems for digital tourism are now available. Congratulations to all the teams on a great job. The project teams included, The Sonic Wanderer, Ubrella, The Living Souvenir, Time Walker and the Tourist Tricorder.

<!–Speaker: Mirco Musolesi,  Computer Science, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm July 26th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Mobile phones are increasingly equipped with sensors, such as accelerometers, GPS receivers, proximity sensors and cameras, that can be used to sense and interpret people behaviour in real-time. Novel user-centered sensing applications can be built by exploiting the availability of such technologies in these devices that are part of our everyday experience. Moreover, data extracted from the sensors can also be used to model people behaviour and movement patterns providing a very rich set of multi-dimensional data, which can be extremely useful for social science, marketing and epidemiological studies.
In this talk I will present some of my recent work in this area including the design and implementation of the CenceMe platform, a system that supports the inference of activities and other presence information of individuals using off-the-shelf sensor-enabled phones and of EmotionSense, a system for supporting social psychology research. Finally, I will discuss the issues related to the design of energy-efficient social sensing systems.
About Mirco:
Dr. Mirco Musolesi is a SICSA Lecturer at the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews. He received a PhD in Computer Science from University College London in 2007 and a Master in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna in 2002. From October 2005 to August 2007 he was a Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University College London. Then, from September 2007 to August 2008 he was an ISTS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Dartmouth College, NH, USA, and from September 2008 to October 2009 a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His research interests lie in the broad area of mobile systems and networking with a current focus on intelligent mobile systems, online social networks, application of complex network theory to networked systems design, mobility modelling and sensing systems based on mobile phones. More information about his research profile can be found at the following URL: http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mirco

<!–Speaker: Nava Tintarev, University of Aberdeen
Date/Time: 1-2pm July 19th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Story-telling, (including personal narrative), is a big part of our personal and social communication. This talk will identify challenges and solutions that look at the generation of narrative for social communication. We describe a way to “automatically” generate personal stories. The stories which are mix of natural language and multimedia, are based on sensor, and other data, collected with a mobile phone. This study will place a particular focus on the natural language generation task of document structuring: segmenting this data into meaningful and distinct events.
About Nava:
Nava Tintarev has worked on applied HCI projects with themes such as explanations in recommender systems, recommendations in a mobile travel scenario, and more recently, natural language generation for assistive technology. Currently, she is working as a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen where she is a member of the Natural Language Generation Group. She has been working on the “How was School today…?” project, which helps children with complex communication needs create and tell a story about their day at school (which will be the applied setting for the talk on the 19th of July). Before that, she was at Telefónica Research, Barcelona, working on user-centred issues in recommender systems.
Her doctoral thesis focused on explanations for recommender systems, and one of her papers on the topic won her the James Chen best student paper award at the International Conference on Hypermedia (2008). For the last three years she has also been co-organizing a workshop on explanation-aware computing (ExaCt) (http://exact2011.workshop.hm/).

In March of 2011, Jakub Dostal, a member of SACHI, participated in a unique retreat-style research event called Tiree Tech Wave. In the summer issue of Interfaces, the BCS Interaction Group magazine, he and Prof. Alan Dix describe the event and their experiences.
Link to the magazine issue/article.
Link to the event website.