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.

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.