• 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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The ACM SIGCHI conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17) is in full swing in Edinburgh, with a strong presence of SACHI research, especially in the area of Data Physicalization! Check out our related pictorial, full paper, workshop and workshop paper:
Trevor Hogan, Uta Hinrichs and Eva Hornecker. The Visual and Beyond: Characterizing Experiences with Auditory, Haptic and Visual Data Representations. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), pp. 797-809, 2017.
Samuel Huron, Pauline Gourlet, Uta Hinrichs, Trevor Hogan and Yvonne Jansen. Let’s Get Physical: Promoting Data Physicalization in Workshop Formats. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), pp. 1409-1422, 2017.
Fearn Bishop and Uta Hinrichs. Challenges of Running Constructive Visualization Studies with Children. In DIS’17 workshop on Pedagogy & Physicalization: Designing Learning Activities around Physical Data Representations.
Trevor Hogan, Uta Hinrichs, Yvonne Jansen, Samuel Huron, Pauline Gourlet, Eva Hornecker and Bettina Nissen. Pedagogy & Physicalization: Designing Learning Activities around Physical Data Representations. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), 2017. http://dataphys.org/workshops/dis17/.

We have a SACHI seminar on Monday 12th June 2017 which will be given by two speakers, presenting two connected talks within the normal hour slot.
The speakers are Dr Oliver Schneider from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany and Professor Karon MacLean who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
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When:  Thursday June 15th
Where:  Maths Seminar Room 2
Time:  14:00 – 15:00
Title:  New Approaches to Mode-Switching
Abstract:  The fundamental unit of all interaction is issuing commands, and the trickiest types of commands are those that control “modes” — different ways to map the same input to different application actions. For example, the current mode in a tablet drawing app could determine if the exact same sequence of touch movements draws a line, pans the canvas, makes a marquee selection, or issues a gestural command. Switching between modes like these are frequent, so finding optimum mode-switching methods is important.  In this talk, I survey my group’s work to understand and improve mode-switching and command selection for different input types and device form factors. These include: Pin-and-Cross, a touch overloading technique combining static touches with nearby crossing selection; Conté, a pen-like input device that leverages small changes in contact geometry; Doppio, a reconfigurable two-faced smartwatch for tangible input; and Gunslinger, a mid-air interaction technique using bare hand postures and gestures performed in a relaxed arms-down position.
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When: Tuesday 30th May, 14:00 to 15:00
Where: Jack Cole room 1.33A
Title:  Internet services, energy demand and everyday life
Abstract:  Over the last decade, the growth in data traffic across the Internet has been dramatic, and forecasts predict a similar ongoing pattern. Since this is associated with remarkable electricity consumption (about 10% globally, and rising), such a trend is significant to efforts to reduce carbon emissions.  This calls for careful attention to the nature of these trends, as levels of Internet electricity demand become ever more directly and explicitly problematic.  Based on a host of prior literature and two field studies, this talk explores what we know about the energy intensity of digital stuff, and the growth of Internet traffic.  It considers how such traffic can be attributed to different Internet services like video streaming or social networking, and how these link to everyday practices which draw upon and generate data online.
Biography:  Dr Mike Hazas is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, who works at the confluence of human-computer interaction and social science. His research combines qualitative and quantitative methods to understand everyday practices and technologies, how they can be related to carbon emissions and energy demand, and more sustainable trajectories. Mike co-directs the multidisciplinary Socio-Digital Sustainability group at Lancaster, and has served as a chair of the CHI Specific Application Areas subcommittee for the last three years.  Mike is a co-investigator in the DEMAND Centre (EPSRC, 2013-2018) which is concerned with the relationship of social practices and energy demand.

Press:
University of St Andrews: SWiM: an evolution in one-handed texting
TechCrunch: Tilt gesture keyboard could hold promise for typing in VR
Fast Co.Design: Why Don’t More UIs Use Accelerometers?
prosthetic knowledge: SWiM: Shape Writing in Motion
NewAtlas: Researchers create an app that makes you tilt and roll to type
The Scotsman: SWiM: an evolution in one-handed texting
Fife Today: Could this be the future of phone messaging?
Gizmodo Japan: 文字入力の方法を再発明。ボールを転がして文字を選んでタップ、片手での操作が簡単に
Engadet De: SWiM: Tippen durch Wackeln
Tweakers: Onderzoekers ontwikkelen typmethode die werkt met kantelbewegingen
Hi-News.ru: В Шотландии придумали принципиально новый способ ввода текста
Naked Science: Исследователи разработали новый способ ввода текста на мобильных устройствах
Sohu: 通过手势倾斜打字，有望成为VR输入方式之一
MobileGeeks: SWiM: Neue Tastatur-Eingabemethode für Einhandbedienung und VR
MacLife: SWiM: Das dürfte die Zukunft der Keyboards sein
30 seconds teaser:

Full video:

Paper [PDF]
 

Members of SACHI will be at the upcoming CHI’17 conference.
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 CHI and you wish to discuss working with us please get in touch. You can find us helping and involved throughout CHI 2017 with the presentation of 5 papers including 2 full papers, 1 late breaking work paper, 2 workshop papers and other activities.
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