The iVoLVER system (iVoLVER.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk), created by Gonzalo Méndez and Miguel Nacenta from the SACHI group at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, received on Thursday 19 the ACM ISS Best Demo Jury Award during the conference, which took place at Brighton, UK.

iVoLVER is a web-based visual programming environment that enables anyone to transform visualizations that the find in-the-wild (e.g., in a poster or a newspaper) into new visualizations that are more useful for them.

The ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces conference takes place yearly in different locations. Next year it will take place in Tokyo, Japan. The conference is a premier venue for work that studies how people interact in smart spaces and surfaces and how to design and engineering solutions for novel interfaces.

Title:
Visualization and Taxonomy
Abstract:
This talk will consider the relationship between visualization and taxonomy from two perspectives. Firstly, how visualization can aid understanding the process of taxonomy, specifically biological taxonomy and the visualization challenges this poses. Secondly, the role of taxonomy in understanding and making sense of the growing field of visualization will be discussed and the challenges facing the visualization community in making this process more rigorous will be considered.
Speaker Bio:
Jessie joined Edinburgh Napier University in 1986 as a lecturer, was promoted to Senior Lecturer, Reader, and then Professor in 2000 Thereafter she held the post of Director of the Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation from 2010-14 and is currently Dean of Research and Innovation for the University.
Jessie has published widely, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications and over £2 million in research funding from a range of bodies, including EPSRC, BBSRC, National Science Foundation, and KTP, and has had 13 PhD students complete. She has been programme chair, programme committee member and organiser of many international conferences, a reviewer and panel member for many national and international computer science funding bodies, and became a Member of EPSRC Peer Review College in 1996 and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
Jessie has a long-standing record of contribution to inter-disciplinary research, working to further biological research through the application of novel computing technology.
Her research in the areas of user interfaces to databases and data visualisation in biology contributed to the establishment of the field of biological visualisation. She hosted the first biological visualisation workshop at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2008, was an invited speaker at a BBSRC workshop on Challenges in Biological Visualisation in 2010, was a founding member of the International Symposium in Biological Visualisation – being Programme Chair in 2011, General Chair in 2012 and 2013 – and steering committee member since 2014.
She has been keynote speaker at related international conferences and workshops, such as VIZBI, the International Visualisation conference and BioIT World, and is currently leading a BBSRC network on biological visualisation.
Her research in collaboration with taxonomists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, produced a data model for representing differing taxonomic opinions in Linnaean classification. This work led to collaboration on a large USA-funded project with ecologists from six US universities and resulted in a data standard for the exchange biodiversity data that has been adopted by major global taxonomic and biodiversity organisations.

Gala who undertook her honours project in SACHI has been awarded the Young Software Engineer of the Year 2017 by ScotlandIS.

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Title:  How to Closely Read a Topic Model: Visualizing the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Biography:  Jonathan Armosa is a Doctoral Fellow at New York University (NYU).  Jonathan’s research is in the area of Digital Humanities and focuses on Computational Modelling of Literature and Information Visualization.  MORE

Uta Hinrichs is currently representing SACHI at the IEEE VIS conference in Phoenix, Arizona. If you are at IEEE VIS this week, too, come and say “hi” (look for the pink hair) and hear about the cool visualization work happening at SACHI. Find some of the activities Uta is involved in at the conference below, including the VIS4DH workshop, a tutorial on Analyzing Qualitative Data, and a Panel on Reflection on Reflection in Design Studies.
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Please note that this seminar is confirmed for Purdie C on Wednesday October 4th between 14:00 and 15:00
Title: New file metaphors for a networked world
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• This smartphone app plays smooth jazz when you put it on the sofa TechRadar 5 Sep 2017
• New app could make your phone learn its exact location ETTelecom.com 5 Sep 2017
• You might never have to search for your phone again thanks to SpeCam  Android Authority (blog) 7 Sep 2017
• SpeCam Helps Phones To ‘See’ Surfaces & Respond With Actions Android Headlines 6 Sep 2017
• Scots researchers make phone that uses AI to detect different surfaces  The Scotsman 7 Sep 2017
• New technology allows smartphone to recognise surfaces  FutureScot (blog) 6 Sep 2017
• New app could make your phone detect its exact location AZERTAC News 8 Sep 2017
• See: Full Project Page
  Citation:
  SpeCam: sensing surface color and material with the front-facing camera of a mobile device.
  Hui-Shyong Yeo, Juyoung Lee, Andrea Bianchi, David Harris-Birtill, and Aaron Quigley. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 25, 9 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3098279.3098541
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Members of SACHI will be at the upcoming MobileHCI’17 Conference in Vienna Austria.
If you are looking to meet members of SACHI to discuss collaborations or research visits you can find us here. Likewise, if you are a company attending MobileHCI and you wish to discuss working with us please get in touch. You can find us helping and involved throughout MobileHCI 2017 with the presentation of 3 papers including 1 paper (honorable mention), 2 workshop papers, organizing a workshop and other activities throughout the conference.
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Please note that this seminar will now take place in Jack Cole 1.33A on Wednesday 5th July between 15:00 and 16:00
Title: Between Exploration and Explanation: Visualizations for Insights, Curiosity, and Storytelling.
Abstract: This talk presents a set of interactive visualizations for exploration and recent work in how to communicate insights through data-driven stories. In particular, I will present work on visualizing networks including an open-source online platform. Then, I will discuss comics as an approach to communicate not only changes in temporal data but to weave narration, textual explanations, and data visualizations. The questions raised by the talk are about effective ways to engage a larger audience in understanding, learning, and use of visualizations for exploration and communication. As visualizations are becoming more and more commonplace and familiar to people, we can see more and more aspects of our daily lives being potentially enriched with information presented visually. Eventually, I want to raise the question of which role novel technology such as Augmented and Virtual Reality can play in exploring, communicating, and interacting with visualizations.
Biography: Benjamin is a Lecturer in Design Informatics and Visualization at the University of Edinburgh. His research designs and investigates interactive information visualizations to help people explore, present, and understand information hidden in data. He focuses on the visualization of dynamic networks (e.g., social networks, brain connectivity networks), as well as temporal data (e.g., changes in videos and Wikipedia articles, events on timelines), comics for storytelling with visualizations, as well as visualization and interaction in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2017, Benjamin worked as a postdoc at Harvard University, Monash University, as well as the Microsoft-Research Inria Joint Centre. Benjamin was visiting researcher at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research in 2015. He obtained his PhD in 2014 from the Université Paris Sud where he worked at the Aviz Group at Inria.

Title:  Finding What to Read: Visual Text Analytics Tools and Techniques to Guide Investigation
Abstract:  Text is one of the most prominent forms of open data available, from social media to legal cases. Text visualizations are often critiqued for not being useful, for being unstructured and presenting data out of context (think: word clouds). I argue that we should not expect them to be a replacement for reading. In this talk I will briefly discuss the close/distant reading debate then focus on where I think text visualization can be useful: hypothesis generation and guiding investigation. Text visualization can help someone form questions about a large text collection, then drill down to investigate through targeted reading of the underlying source texts. Over the past 10 years my research focus has been primarily on creating techniques and systems for text analytics using visualization, across domains as diverse as legal studies, poetics, social media, and automotive safety.  I will review several of my past projects with particular attention to the capabilities and limitations of the technologies and tools we used, how we use semantics to structure visualizations, and the importance of providing interactive links to the source materials. In addition, I will discuss the design challenges which, while common across visualization, are particularly important with text (legibility, label fitting, finding appropriate levels of ‘zoom’).
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