Per Ola Kristensson who is arriving to St Andrews today and joins us next week has been selected for the Scottish Crucible 2011 Personal and Professional Leadership and Development programme. The programme is sponsored by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Scottish Funding Council and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). “The scheme enables 30 talented researchers from a variety of disciplines to come together to explore and expand their creative capacity and problem-solving potential. As well as its personal impact, NESTA’s Crucible programme has led to numerous interdisciplinary collaborations for its participants and has established itself as an innovative way of empowering researchers and adding value to their institutions.” Our congratulations to Per Ola on a great start here with SACHI.

Aaron is giving a seminar at the HCI Group in the School of Computer Science in the University of Birmingham on the 28th of March. This talk will focus on Information Visulisation of Social-* data (where * are networks, media, streams, search activity and records of information dissemination etc). In addition he will discuss how we can infer patterns of individual or collective behaviour through analysis, data mining, confirmatory and exploratory visulisation.
This talk first overviews our research in SACHI before leading into an in depth exploration of one of our key topics, namely Information Visualisation and its application to Social-* data. Information Visualisation is a research area that focuses on the use of graphical techniques to present data in an explicit form. Such static (pictures) or dynamic presentations help people formulate an understanding of data and an internal model of it for reasoning about. Such pictures of data are an external artefact supporting decision making. While sharing many of the same goals of Scientific Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design and Computer Graphics, Information Visualisation focuses on the visual presentation of data without a physical or geometric form. As such it relies on research in mathematics, data mining, data structures, algorithms, graph drawing, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, cartography, interactive graphics, imaging and visual design.
In this talk I will present a brief history of social-* analysis and visualisation, introduce layout algorithms we have developed for visualising such data. I will complete with a detailed case study on the layout of evolving or “dynamic graphs” extracted through SNAP, our Social Network Assembly Pipeline. SNAP operates on the premise of “social network inference” and we have studied it experimentally with the analysis of 10,000,000 record sets without explicit relations.

<!–Speaker: Chris Speed, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
Date/Time: 1-2pm March 29th, 2011
Location: 1.33a Jack Cole, University of St Andrews (directions)–>
Abstract:
The term ‘internet of things’ refers to the technical and cultural shift that is anticipated as society moves to a ubiquitous form of computing in which every device is ‘on’, and every device is connected in some way to the internet. However, many versions of the ‘internet of things’ rely upon one premise: that the thing remains in existence. This paper forecasts a near future when digital memories that have been associated with artefacts remain as the only reference to that thing, because that thing has been lost or disposed of. Remaining as entries in databases whilst its material instantiation has been crushed, burnt or tipped into a landfill, the immaterial artefact has the potential to live on within the networks society. Alive and well in the cloud, these ghosts will haunt their makers, distributors, vendors and owners forever, remaining as searchable artefacts that can be correlated against any other data from the past, present or future.
In this seminar Chris Speed will reflect upon recent research / art projects that evoke a sense of time and exhume personal memories of the past.
About Chris:
Dr. Chris Speed is Reader in Digital Spaces at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture where he teaches undergraduate, masters and supervises PhD students.

Chris has sustained a critical enquiry into how digital technology can engage with the field of architecture and human geography through a variety of established international digital art contexts including: International Symposium on Electronic Art, Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth, Ars Electronica, Consciousness Reframed, Sonic Acts, LoveBytes, We Love Technology, Sonic Arts Festival, MELT, Less Remote, FutureSonic, and the Arts Catalyst / Leonardo symposium held alongside The International Astronautical Congress.
Chris is currently working with collaborative GPS technologies and the streaming of social and environmental data. He is the lead academic on a GPS tool for historical maps iPhone application: Walking Through Time, is the leader of a large UK academic team investigating social memory within the ‘Internet of Things’ funded by the UK Research Councils and is the co-developer for the locative media application Comob Net available for download in the Apple iPhone App Store developed in conjunction with Jen Southern (independent artist) and colleagues from ECA and Uni Edinburgh.

Our new Android phone testbed, comprising 20 HTC Desire smartphones, has arrived. This equipment comes courtesy of Tristan’s Privacy Value Networks grant and will be used, amongst others, by Iain for his work on privacy-aware interfaces and systems for mobile opportunistic networks.

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 Per Ola Kristensson and Miguel Nacenta. Dr Per Ola Kristensson will be joining the University of St Andrews as a lecturer in March 2011 from his current position at the University of Cambridge. Per Ola is interested in creating interactive systems that enable people to be more creative, expressive and satisfied in their daily lives. He will become the second supervisor for Jakub Dostal a SICSA PhD student in SACHI. For more information visit his full website or follow him on twitter @pokristensson.

Aaron is giving a seminar at the IDEAS Research Institute & School of Computing in Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen on the 11th of March at 14.00. This talk will focus on social network, their analysis, inference (of nodes, edges attributes) and their visualisation.
Title: Information Visualisation and Social Networks
Information visualisation is a research area that focuses on the use of graphical techniques to present data in an explicit form. Such static (pictures) or dynamic presentations help people formulate an understanding of data and an internal model of it for reasoning about. Such pictures of data are an external artifact supporting decision making. While sharing many of the same goals of Scientific Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design and Computer Graphics, Information Visualisation focuses on the visual presentation of data (or information within a frame of reference) without a physical or geometric form. As such it relies on research in mathematics, data mining, data structures, algorithms, graph drawing, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, cartography, interactive graphics, imaging and visual design

SACHI members are organising two workshops in conjunction with the 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction in Newcastle on July 5th 2011. Aaron and Miguel are co-organisers for the workshop on Coupled Multi-display Environments (MDEs) in Classrooms (PPD’11). Tristan is co-organising the Health, Wealth and Identity Theft: designing and evaluating usable privacy and security mechanisms for online happiness workshop.

Aaron will give a research colloquium on Information Visualisation on March 7th, 2011.
Abstract:
Societies continued reliance on information and communications technologies has resulted in organizations generating, gathering, and storing “raw data” at a rate growing each year. The ability for even a mid-sized organization to store tens to hundreds of terabytes of data is already within reach. Massive storage technologies are rapidly outstripping our ability to effectively analyse, explore, and understand such voluminous data. While research in other fields such as data mining, machine learning and knowledge management are also attempting to aid in the analysis of such voluminous data,
there is a realisation that the “human-in-the-loop” affords a visual analysis not possible through automation alone.
As such, the area of visual analytics extends the fields of scientific and information visualization by incorporating techniques from knowledge management, statistical analysis, cognitive science and decision science. This talk will outline how voluminous data is modeled, managed,
mined and hence visually presented for exploration. Several large scale data and information visualisation methods will be described and discussed along with the a number of challenges and open research questions we face as researchers in using visualisation in an attempt to present information.
More: School Website Details

Title: “Serious Games” – Metrics for the Design of Educational Computer Games
Speaker: Dr. Azizah Jaafar, National University of Malaysia.
 

Professor Aaron Quigley has been invited to join the IDEAS Executive Committee as the external member, and will contribute to guiding the strategic direction of IDEAS. IDEAS is a new multi-disciplinary research centre encompassing the disciplines of Engineering, Computing, Architecture & Built Environment and Art & Design.