<!–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.

As some of you probably know, we are a member of SICSA – The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance. SICSA will host a SICSA Networking Event at CHI 2011 in Vancouver, Canada.
SACHI faculty member Per Ola Kristensson will attend it in conjunction to attending the main program and a workshop on ‘App Store’ Ethics: Large Scale Trials & User Generated Content.

Dr Miguel Nacenta will be joining the University of St Andrews as a lecturer in May 2011 from his current position as at the Interactions Lab in the University of Calgary, Canada. Miguel’s research is focused on developing input and output technology that can extend human capabilities. He is interested in applying perceptual and social principles to novel multi-display, haptic, and multi-modal interfaces. Miguel will become the second supervisor for Umer Rashid a PhD student in SACHI. For more information see his full website or follow him on twitter @miguelnacenta. The February 2011 SICSA Newsletter highlighted details on the establishment of SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group along with details of our two new SICSA lecturers in SACHI Miguel Nacenta and Per Ola Kristensson.

Good luck to Aaron who is travelling to Oulu in Finland next month to co-chair the Doctoral Colloquium at GPC 2011 the Grid and Pervasive Computing conference. He will spend a few days in Oulu and looks forward to attending GPC as well as seeing the work being undertaken in Ubiquitous Oulu. Ubiquitous Oulu is a prototype of a future ubiquitous city which is being built by the multidisciplinary UBI (UrBan Interactions) program, coordinated by the University of Oulu, and the City of Oulu.

The doctoral colloquium itself offers a chance for PhD students to receive high-quality feedback from external reviewers including Aaron and to directly interact with peers, to exchange ideas, discuss concepts, and establish informal cooperation between researchers and research groups.
Grid and Pervasive Computing (or Ubiquitous Computing) covers research issues and challenges in the field of computer science and engineering in areas of grid and pervasive computing. Grid computing connects computer resources from multiple domains for solving computationally complex scientific, technical or business problems in a distributed fashion. Pervasive or Ubiquitous Computing aims at creating computational devices and systems that will blend into environment to support everyday human activities via natural human computer interaction.

<!–Speaker: Umer Rashid, SACHI, University of St Andrews
Date/Time: 1-2pm April 26th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:

While the portability of mobile devices makes them desirable for pervasive access to information, their small screen real estate and the lack of peripheral input devices often impose restriction on the amount of information to be displayed and manipulated on them. This talk provides an overview of our work that explores the ways the mobile screens can be used with large external displays to complement the inherent limitations of each device and create an enhanced user experience. This work is particularly focused on the analysis of visual attention switch and its impact on user performance for designing an interaction space distributed across heterogeneous display devices.
About Umer:
Umer Rashid is a PhD student in School of Computer Science, University of St. Andrews. He received his BS in computer systems engineering from GIK Institute, Pakistan and MS in Information & Communications from Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology, South Korea. His research interests include software engineering and human-computer-interaction in context-aware pervasive computing environments.

Applications to attend our SICSA Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism to be held in St Andrews from June 27th – July 1, 2011 are now open. Full details can be found on our Summer School website at sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt. Thanks to all our guest lecturers who are coming from far and wide and to everyone in SACHI for helping out with this summer school (and we mean everyone!).
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.
We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice. 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.
In addition, Ben Arent a leading interaction designer based in Dublin has agreed to host (subject to sufficient interest) a day long Arduino workshop for interested participants on Sunday June 26th.
Seminar Topics
– Multimodal Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Multimodal Interaction with the Android platform
– Creating Engaging Visitor Experiences in Museums and Heritage sites
– Multimodal Interaction with spatial data
– Speech-driven, hands-free, eyes-free navigation
– Haptic Tabletop Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Natural language generation for Multimodal Interaction
– Mobility as a challenge for interaction design, Tourism as a special case
– Multimodal Augmented-Reality Interaction for Digital Tourism
– Designing context aware-systems
Speakers
– Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow
– Tristan Henderson, University of St Andrews
– Eva Hornecker, University of Strathclyde
– Antonio Krüger, Saarland University
– William Mackaness, University of Edinburgh
– Miguel Nacenta, University of Calgary
– Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
– Antti Oulasvirta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
– Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews
– Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart
The deadline for applications to attend is May 3rd, with notifications by May 9th. Participation is limited to 30 and we expect a mix of both national and international participants. The registration fee is £450, which covers four nights of accommodation (Mon – Fri) in St Andrews, breakfast, lunch, dinner and summer school materials. Also included is a welcome reception and farewell dinner. An optional Arduino workshop (with Sunday night accommodation) is an additional £70.
The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) is providing 16 grants to cover the £450 registration fee for PhD students from most Scottish Universities. See SICSA website for details: http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/
See the summer school website for a full programme, biographies of speakers and full details for applications: http://sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt
The school is directed by Aaron Quigley (University of St Andrews), Eva Hornecker (University of Strathclyde), Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh) and Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow).

Aaron is the current chair of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Pervasive Computing and today, on behalf of this committee he published a call for proposals to host Pervasive 2012 the Tenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing. You can find full details of this call here.
Aaron has also been busy working with his counterpart James Scott the Chair of the Steering Committee of the UbiComp Conference Series in the formation of a new Joint Steering Committee which begins its work in late April of 2011. Good luck to Aaron who will be attending Pervasive 2011 the Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, in San Francisco in June 2011.