You can see some of the Arduino and Kinect equipment we have for the summer school here starting on June 26th with an Arduino workshop. The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are proving a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a MERL Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.

<!–Speaker: Alistair Morrison, University of Glasgow
Date/Time: 1-2pm June 21st, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
The emergence of ‘app stores’ on a number of mobile platforms provides HCI researchers with a relatively easy means of recruiting very large numbers of participants from all over the world. As the practice of releasing research applications in this way is still relatively new, the HCI community has not yet developed a set of guiding principles or an understanding of what constitutes good practice. In this talk, I’ll share experiences from several ‘app store’ trials we’ve run in the University of Glasgow’s SUMgroup, covering issues such as capturing log data, identifying users, performing qualitative evaluation and the new ethical challenges raised by this approach. In outlining the benefits we’ve gained and the challenges faced I’ll offer recommendations for others seeking to conduct research trials in this way.
About Alistair:
Alistair Morrison is a postdoc researcher at the University of Glasgow, a member of SUMgroup (Social, Ubiquitous, Mobile) and GIST – Glasgow’s HCI group. His background is in information visualisation, and tools and techniques for analysing data collected from ubicomp systems. He has recently run several mass participation studies with tens of thousands of users, developing ways of analysing logged data and examining the various issues surrounding the release of trial software through public ‘App Store’-style software repositories. Recently he co-organised the CHI 2011 workshop on ethics in large-scale HCI research.

<!–Speaker: Iain Parris, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm June 7th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Opportunistic networks have been the study of much research – in
particular on making end-to-end routing efficient. Users’ privacy
concerns, however, have not been the subject of much research. The talk
will describe a user study, investigating how users’ privacy concerns
impact their willingness to participate in an opportunistic network.
Because deploying a very large-scale opportunistic network is infeasible
for a research study, participants will interact with a simulated
opportunistic application – but will be unaware that the application is
simulated. In the context of this simulated application, a decentralised
mobile advertising system, different participants will be introduced to
a range of privacy threats. We will then measure the participants’
willingness to use the application in the presence of different privacy
threats.
About Iain:
Iain is a third-year PhD student in the School of Computer Science,
University of St Andrews. His research focuses on privacy-enhancing
technologies for opportunistic networks. He holds an MA in Computer
Science from the University of Cambridge, and an MSc in Computer Science
from the University of Edinburgh.

 

Two papers with SACHI authors have been recently highlighted for their value.
Our own Aaron Quigley, in colaboration with Michael Farrugia (first author) and Neil Hurley presented the paper: Exploring temporal ego networks using small multiples and tree-ring layouts, which has won the best paper award at ACHI.

Simultaneously, on the Canadian side, Miguel Nacenta co-authors (with Robert Xiao -first author-, Regan Mandryk, Andy Cockburn and Carl Gutwin) the paper: Ubicursor: A Comparison of Direct and Indirect Pointing Feedback in Multi-Display Environments, which has won the Michael A. J. Sweeney Award at this year’s Graphics Interface conference. The paper’s success is also reported in Canada’s Surfnet Newsletter, and will be presented next week.

 

<!–Speaker: Claus Lewerentz, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 31st, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:

In this talk Claus describes a systematic approach to utilize the city metaphor for the visualization of large software systems as evolving software cities. The main contribution is a new layout approach which explicitly takes the development history of software systems into account and makes history directly visible in the layouts. These layouts incrementally evolve in a very smooth and stable way during the development of the represented software system. They are used as a visualization platform for integrating a large variety of product and process data and thus create a coherent set of specialized visualizations. To illustrate this I present some example maps capturing specific development history aspects.
About Claus:
Claus is the program co-chair for the 6th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT2011) September 29-30, 2011 – Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
http://vissoft.iro.umontreal.ca

<!–Speaker: John Brosz, University of Calgary
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 27th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
Generally, interactive computer graphics are limited to a small subset of possible projections known as linear projections. To address this limitation we have created the flexible projection framework; a framework designed to model a wide variety of linear, nonlinear, and hand-tailored artistic projections in a way that is supported by computer graphics hardware. This framework introduces a unified geometry for all of these types of projections using a parametric viewing volume. Through this parametric representation we obtain the ability to create projections that make use of curved projection surfaces and curved projectors. Several applications will be discussed including panoramas, re-creating projections used by artists, and dynamic projections that change over time.
About John:
John Brosz is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the University of Calgary Interactions Lab. His current research examines new techniques for controlling the display of information as well as 3D models and environments. John received his PhD in computer graphics at the University of Calgary and his past research has addressed computer graphics, non-photorealistic rendering, and 3D modelling.

<!–Speaker: Neil Hurley, University College Dublin, Ireland
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 16h, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Note: This seminar is organised by both SACHI and the Systems Group
 
Abstract:
The Clique research group in University College Dublin is focused on the analysis and visualisation of social networks. Computer scientists and computational statisticians are working together on problems including community-finding in social networks, influence propagation and detection of anomalous structure in networks. Research is driven by the analysis of large-scale networks provided by industrial partners, in particular, networks of mobile phone-calls containing more than a million nodes and tens of millions of links. In this talk, I will focus primarily on the community-finding problem, discussing initially the structure of real-world networks and on how this impacts on the communities that likely to be found in such networks. I will argue that the view of social networks as consisting of well-separated communities connected by weak links does not hold in many real-world networks and I will introduce algorithms that we have developed to detect overlapping community structure in networks with pervasive overlapping community structure.
About Neil:

Neil J. Hurley received an M.Sc. in mathematical science from University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland, in 1988. In 1989, he joined Hitachi Dublin Laboratory, a computer science research laboratory at the University of Dublin, Trinity College,from which he received the Ph.D. degree in 1995, for his work in knowledge-based engineering and high-performance computing. He joined the academic staff of UCD in 1999 where his present research activities lie in the areas of large-scale network analysis, robust information retrieval and data-hiding.

Aaron is giving a seminar at the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh) on Wednesday the 18th of May 2011 at 15:15. This talk will be unlike his colloquium talk in March as it focuses on the particular challenges and research questions when dealing with a dynamic source of data (and hence information).
Title: Dynamic Information Visualisation

<!–Speaker: Paddy Nixon, University of Tasmania, Australia
Date/Time: 1-2pm May 3rd, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Note: This seminar is organised by both SACHI and the Systems Group
Abstract:
Human-computer interaction (HCI) is being exploited in many application domains to carry out tasks that were previously thought impossible or life-threatening, e.g., remote operation of mining equipment, robot- assisted search and rescue operations, and military operations. Regardless of the sophistication of the technology, these systems are operated with varying levels of intervention and control by humans, so successful HRI requires solving both human factors challenges such as maintaining situation awareness, managing cognitive load and establishing trust and computational challenges such as executable models of situation awareness and intention recognition. This project is concerned only with the computational perspective and specifically with understanding how autonomous a system can be and still remain resilient to failure.

Members of SACHI have had a number of research papers accepted at both national and leading international venues. These include the following conference papers:

1. Jameson, A., Gabrielli, S., Kristensson, P.O., Reinecke, K., Cena, F., Gena, C. and Vernero, F., How can we support users’ preferential choice? In the Extended Abstracts of the 29th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011). (alt.chi), May 2011, Vancouver, Canada
2. Kristensson, P.O., Design dimensions of intelligent text entry tutors. In the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2011). June-July 2011, Auckland New Zealand
3. Parris I. and Henderson T., Practical privacy-aware opportunistic networking, in the Proceedings of the British HCI Doctoral Consortium, July 2011, Newcastle, UK
4. Bennett M. and Quigley A., Creating Personalized Digital Human Models Of Perception For Visual Analytics, in the Proceedings of UMAP 2011 the 19th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, July 2011, Girona, Spain
5. Farrugia M., Hurley N. and Quigley A., SNAP: Towards a validation of the Social Network Assembly Pipeline, in the Proceedings of ASONAM 2011 the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, July 2011, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan
6. Rashid U., Kauko J., Hakkila J. and Quigley A., Proximal and Distal Selection of Widgets: Designing Distributed UI for Mobile Interaction with Interactive TV, in the Proceedings of MobileHCI 2011 the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, August – September 2011, Stockholm Sweden
7. Vertanen, K. and Kristensson, P.O., A versatile dataset for text entry evaluations based on genuine mobile emails, in the Proceedings of MobileHCI 2011 the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, August – September 2011, Stockholm Sweden.

An upcoming book chapter we are involved with is by:

1. Farrugia M., Hurley N., Payne D. and Quigley A., Social Network Construction in the Information Age: Views and Perspectives in the book, Social Network Mining, Analysis and Research Trends: Techniques and Applications to be published in late 2011.