Trading Consequences blog post

As part of the launch of the Trading Consequences project site I have written the first blog post in which I emphasise that the question is key in this project. "To understand the consequences of our trading history, historians need to ask difficult, subtle, multifaceted and challenging questions. Questions which aren’t polluted by knowledge of the limitations of the methods and technologies we have today. These insightful questions won’t come from a focus on what the tools of today can support, what the analysis or visualisation methods can do or what data is available. " see the full blog post here.

Jan 2012 - New Grants, Research Fellow and PhD Scholarships

Along with colleagues in the Univeristies of Edinburgh and York we have achieved grant success with JISC. Our project “Trading Consequences” (Universities of Edinburgh, York and St Andrews) will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents through structured query and visualisation. There is a page on our research group's website about this in more detail.

Along with Miguel Nacenta and colleagues from ADS and Historic Scotland we have been awarded a Smart Tourism grant named LADDIE or Large Augmented Digital Displays for Interactive Experiences of Historic Sites. In addition to this, along with colleagues from MUSA in St Andrews and Interface3 who have been awarded a second Smart Tourism Grant named SMART or Scotland’s Museums Augmented Reality Tourism. There is a page on our research group's website about this in more detail.

I'm now advertising for a research fellow to work with me for 3 years (and beyond possibly). The deadline for applications 17th February 2012. We wish to recruit a Research Fellow in Human Computer Interaction to support a number of new and ongoing research projects in Ubiquitous User Interface development. Our research page has some more details but the primary advertisement and details can be found here on the vacancies site.

Finally, I am actively recruiting PhD students. If you are interested in postgraduate research in the area of Human Computer Interaction then please visit our scholarship page on our research group site further details and links.

Short Papers HCI 2012

Myself and Dr. Per Ola Kristensson are the Short Papers chairs for the BCS HCI 2012 conference. HCI 2012 is the 26th Annual Conference of the Specialist HCI group of the BCS and the short papers track has a submission date of June 15, 2012. The full paper track for HCI 2012 has a deadline of the 30th March 2012.

From the main call:

We invite submissions for short papers that address any area of HCI. Authors are encouraged to submit late-breaking research results that show timely and innovative ideas. Short paper submissions should report original work and must not have been published previously or be a condensed version of previously published papers.


This year we have returned to the founding theme of the conference: “People and Computers”. This is to encapsulate and highlight the growing diversity of our field of HCI in one event. Technology is now common in all walks of life and HCI practitioners and researchers have more areas of impact than ever before. We want the conference to reflect this growing importance and diversity.


Submission Tracks
The conference will have usual tracks of high-quality research papers, written as either Full or Short papers. Full papers should be a maximum of 10 pages in length. These submissions should be of original work and should not have been previously published. Short papers should be a maximum of 6 pages and should be compact short pieces of original work. There is also a ‘work-in-progress’ category. We strongly encourage participants to reflect the spirit of the track by submitting early-stage, surprising or incomplete results that may be of relevance and interest to the community. The submission dates for the tracks are below.
Following on from last year we have also included an alt-HCI track. This track is for work that highlights a more extreme, unusual and less mainstream side of HCI. The more alternative the work is, the better. We are looking for high quality contributions that might be highly contentious, using atypical methodologies, critical of established ideas or focused in an unconventional domain. If your work is alternative, controversial and interesting, then alt-HCI is the track for you.
The conference will also host a variety of workshops and a doctorial consortium. These will be held on the leafy campus of the University of Birmingham, in Edgbaston. A redbrick University and member of the Russell group, it offers a pleasant green environment.

Submissions
We encourage submissions that focus on human interaction with technology and computer systems. Whether your work is at the fundamental end of the spectrum (theory, design, or principle), or at the practical end (evaluation, product, or impact) we are interested in encouraging high-quality submissions to the conference.

The dates for submission for each paper track are:

Full Papers:- 30th March 2012 (Notification:- 31st May 2012)
Short Papers, WiP & Alt-HCI:- 15th June 2012 (Notification:-27th July 2012)

Relevant topics areas include but are by no means limited to:

• Persuasive Technology
• Mobile Interactions
• User Experience
• Touchtable interactions
• Affective Computing/Interactions
• Usability Engineering
• Accessibility
• Child Computer Interaction
• Interaction Design
• UCD4D
• Recommender Systems
• Annotation
• Brain Computer Interfaces
• Technology and Culture
• E-Government

Call for MobileHCI 2012 Tutorials

MobileHCI 2012 continues to build on the tradition of previous conferences with a high quality tutorial program. We invite proposals for 1, 2 or 3 hour tutorials on emerging and established areas of research and practice. Tutorials will be held on the first day of the conference and are expected to provide participants with new insights and skills relevant to the area.

A MobileHCI tutorial is an in-depth presentation of one or more state-of-the-art topics presented by researchers or practitioners within the field of Mobile HCI. The scope for tutorials is broad and includes topics such as new technologies, research approaches and methodologies, design practices, user/consumer insights, investigations into new services/applications/interfaces, and much more.

A tutorial should focus on its topic in detail and include references to the "must read" papers or materials within its domain. A participatory approach in which the tutorial participants actively engage in exercises is welcomed, though not required. In addition we welcome proposals incorporating hands-on work where the outcome is a working prototype. The tutorial organizers will work with the main session organisers to provide 2 spots in the demo session to showcase the best prototypes that emerge from the tutorial program.

The expected audience will vary in terms of prior knowledge, but will largely consist of researchers, Ph.D. students, practitioners, and educators.

We encourage you to review the scope and nature of the previous tutorial program at  http://www.mobilehci2011.org/tutorials.

Submission Instructions:

1. We may invite a small number of tutorials from Bay Area experts that we think will be particularly interesting to attendees. In order to avoid overlaps with those tutorials we suggest reviewing the 2012 Tutorials page (which we will update to reflect invited tutorials) before submitting.
2. Remember that a MobileHCI 2012 tutorial should last between 1 and 3 hours.
3. In your proposal include a brief biography of the presenter(s), the title of the tutorial, and a sufficiently detailed description of the tutorial (the intended topics, the depths to which you will cover them, and activities that attendees will engage in) to convey what you expect attendees to have learned at the end of the tutorial.
4. Send a PDF version of your tutorial proposal directly to the Tutorial Chairs at tutorials@mobilehci2012.org 
5. The Tutorials Chairs will evaluate all proposals and communicate acceptance decisions to the proposers. 
6. Accepted tutorial proposals will be included in the main conference proceedings

Timeline:

• Submission deadline:  May 4th, 2012 
• Proposers notified:      June 11th, 2012

We look forward to your submissions!

2012 Tutorial Chairs

• Jeff Pierce, IBM Research - Almaden
• Aaron Quigley, SACHI, University of St Andrews