Dec 2009 ISAmI 2010

I've been invited to serve on the program committee for the 1st International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence to be held in Guimarães, Portugal on the 16th-18th June, 2010 (isami2010.di.uminho.pt)

[ Website ] [ Call for papers ]

"Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a recent paradigm emerging from Artificial Intelligence (AI), where computers are used as proactive tools assisting people in their day-to-day, making everyone’s life more comfortable. The interaction with computers is changing quickly, as we no longer need to do it in ways not natural for us, since a main concern of AmI consists in to make possible the interaction with computational systems using friendly interfaces, allowing input through natural language or simple gestures.

This inclusion of technology in our day-to-day objects and environments should be as invisible as possible, because of the computational power and communication techno-logies embedding in most of the devices we use nowadays. Human interaction with computing power embedded systems should happen without noticing it. The only awareness people should have arises from AmI: more safety, comfort and well-being, emerging in a natural and inherent way.

As defined by the IST Advisory Group (ISTAG), AmI has born thanks to three new key technologies: Ubiquitous Computing, Ubiquitous Communication and Intelligent User Interfaces, which are starting to change the way we see computers. ISAmI is the International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, aiming to bring together researchers from various disciplines that constitute the scientific field of Ambient Intelligence to present and discuss the latest results, new ideas, projects and lessons.

Dec 2009 HITLab Australia Director

  

I have now started as director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory Australia (HIT Lab AU). I am also now an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Tasmania. I aim to build an exciting research and teaching environment in the HITLab Australia for undergraduates, postgraduates, postdocs, research interns, researchers, collaborators and all our industry partners.

My role is to provide strategic leadership of the HIT Lab AU and its inter-disciplinary undergraduate and postgraduate courses and research higher degree programs. As Director I will oversee exciting, cross-disciplinary collaboration in teaching and research activities with other UTAS schools and faculties; the development of consulting activities and commercial projects with business and industry.

I will also oversee the establishment of national and international partnerships with our partners the HIT Labs US and NZ, the Virtual Worlds Consortium, and other organisations. My aim is to make this a major research and teaching centre on the national and international stage.

My new contact details are:

Associate Professor Aaron Quigley
Director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITLab) Australia
School of Computing and Information Systems
University of Tasmania
Locked Bag 1359
Launceston Tas 7250
Australia

url: http://www.hitlab.utas.edu.au/wiki/Aaron_Quigley
twitter: http://twitter.com/aquigley
phone: +61 3 6324 3977

Dec 2009 Chapters in book on Mining and Analysing Social Networks

Along with two of my graduate students we have had two book chapters accepted in the upcoming book entitled "Mining and Analyzing Social Networks" which is part of the book series of studies in Computational Intelligence, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg Germany, 2010. Social Network Analysis and Visualization will form an aspect of collaborative and emerging visualization research projects within the Human Interface Technology Research Laboratory Australia (HITLAB AU).

These chapters are entitled "Actor Identification in Implicit Relational Data" and "Perception of Online Social Networks" which are detailed below.

Actor Identification in Implicit Relational Data
Michael Farrugia and Aaron Quigley

Abstract
Large scale network data sets have become increasingly accessible to researchers. While computer networks, networks of webpages and biological networks are all important sources of data, it is the study of social networks that is driving many new research questions. Researchers are finding that the popularity of online social networking sites may produce large dynamic data sets of actor connectivity.


Sites such as Facebook have 250 million active users and LinkedIn 43 million active users. Such systems offer researchers potential access to rich large scale networks for study. However, while data sets can be collected directly from sources that specifically define the actors and ties between those actors, there are many other data sources that do not have an explicit network structure defined. To transform such non-relational data into a relational format two facets must be identified - the actors and the ties between the actors. In this chapter we survey a range of techniques that can be employed to identify unique actors when inferring networks from non explicit network data sets.We present our methods for unique node identification of social network actors in a business scenario where a unique node identifier is not available. We validate these methods through the study of a large scale real world case study of over 9 million records.


Perception of Online Social Networks
Travis Green and Aaron Quigley

Abstract.
This paper examines data derived from an application on Facebook.com that investigates the relations among members of their online social network. It confirms that online social networks are more often used to maintain weak connections but that a subset of users focus on strong connections, determines that connection intensity to both connected people predicts perceptual accuracy, and shows that intra-group connections are perceived more accurately. Surprisingly, a user‘s sex does not influence accuracy, and one‘s number of friends only mildly correlates with accuracy indicating a flexible underlying cognitive structure. Users‘ reports of significantly increased numbers of weak connections indicate increased diversity of information flow to users. In addition the approach and dataset represent a candidate ―ground truth‖ for other proximity metrics. Finally, implications in epidemiology, information transmission, network analysis, human behavior, economics, and neuroscience are summarized. Over a period of two weeks, 14,051 responses were gathered from 166 participants, approximately 80 per participant, which overlapped on 588 edges representing 1341 responses, approximately 10% of the total. Participants were primarily university-age students from English-speaking countries, and included 84 males and 82 females. Responses represent a random sampling of each participant‘s online connections, representing 953,969 possible connections, with the average participant having 483 friends. Offline research has indicated that people maintain approximately 8-10 strong connections from an average of 150-250 friends. These data indicate that people maintain online approximately 40 strong ties and 185 weak ties over an average of 483 friends. Average inter-group accuracy was below the guessing rate at 0.32, while accuracy on intra-group connections converged to the guessing rate, 0.5, as group size increased.

Nov 2009 UbiComp 2010

I have been invited and will serve on the Program Committee for the 2010 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, from September 26-29 2010. The deadline for Papers and Notes is March 12, 2010. The Call for Papers for UbiComp 2010 can be found here.

Ubiquitous Computing (bridging the digital-physical divide) is central to several of the emerging research projects within the Human Interface Technology Research Laboratory Australia (HITLAB AU).

UbiComp 2010 is the 12th UbiComp conference and is one of the premier venues for presenting research in the design, development, deployment, evaluation and understanding of ubiquitous computing systems.

"UbiComp is an interdisciplinary field of research and development that utilizes and integrates pervasive, wireless, embedded, wearable and/or mobile technologies to bridge the gaps between the digital and physical worlds. UbiComp 2010 will bring together top researchers and practitioners who are interested in both the technical and applied aspects of Ubiquitous Computing technologies, systems and applications. The Ubicomp 2010 program features keynotes, technical paper and notes sessions, specialized workshops, live demonstrations, posters, video presentations, and a Doctoral Colloquium."

Conference Website

Nov 2009 Internet of Things 2010 Conference

I have been invited and will serve on the Program Committee for the 2010 Internet of Things Conference. The Internet of Things (IoT) interlinks our physical and digital worlds hence bridging the digital-physical divide. This topic is very relevant to the emerging research projects within the Human Interface Technology Research Laboratory Australia (HITLAB AU).  

"This conference will continue the success of the Internet of Things conference from 2008 in Zurich. It brings internationally leading researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry together to facilitate sharing of applications, research results, and knowledge. The IoT2010 particularly encourages research on infrastructure and applications facilitating environmentaly responsibility under a theme "IoT for a Green Planet". The three-day event will feature keynotes from industrial and academic visionaries, technical presentations of cutting-edge research, reports on the user-experience from seasoned practitioners, panel discussions on hot topics, poster sessions summarizing late-breaking results, and hands-on demos of current technology.

The 2010 Conference will take place at the Royal Park Hotel in Tokyo from November 29 to December 1, 2010.

Nov 2009 Workshops at Pervasive '10

Pervasive 2010 is the eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing from 17-20 May 2010 in Helsinki, Finland. The workshop program will be held on May 17th 2010. For 2010 our program is quite different than in the past years. We have four invited workshops from leading international research groups on targeted research topics, along with three workshops accepted in the first phase call and five accepted in the second phase call.

Workshops proposals have been reviewed by leading international experts in Pervasive Computing to access the quality of the proposals. As workshop chairs we carefully considered their reviews along with considering the relevance of the topic to Pervasive, potential interest, as well as the format, scope and overlap of workshops.

Thanks to all those who submitted workshop proposals and to our international reviewers. Special thanks to my workshop co-chair Petteri Nurmi for putting up with my international travel schedule while trying to arrange this program. My best wishes to Antonio and Mirjana on the main conference program for which the papers are under active review now.

A number of very interesting workshops will be at the conference next year.

Workshops Website

• w1 Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive Applications
  
• w2 Multimodal Location Based Techniques for Extreme Navigation
  
• w3 Pervasive Personalization
  
• w4 Ubiquitous Virtual Reality
  
• w5 Security and Privacy in Spontaneous Interaction and Mobile Phone Use
  
• w6 Pervasive Advertising and Shopping
  
• w7 What can the Internet of Things do for the citizen (CIoT)
  
• w8 Designing for Crowds
  
• w9 How to do good activity recognition research? Experimental methodologies, evaluation metrics, and reproducibility issues?
  
• w10 UBIPROJECTION 2010: Workshop on Personal Projection
  
• w11 Ubicomp in the Large: Collaborative Sensing and Collective Phenomena
  
• w12 First International Workshop on Programming Models for Mobile and Pervasive Systems (PMMPS)
  

Sept 2009 Workshop at Pervasive 2010: What can the Internet of Things do for the citizen (CIoT)?

Thanks to Florian and Albrecht for inviting me to join the PC for CIoT.

************************* CALL FOR PAPERS ************************

Pervasive 2010 Conference Workshop on
What can the Internet of Things do for the citizen?

CIoT 2010
May 17, 2010
Helsinki (Finland)

http://www.autoidlabs.org/events/ciot2010/

******************************************************************

Topics
------
Submissions should address citizens needs. Topics are proposed but not limited to:

* Emerging applications and interaction paradigms
o using mobile phones and other mobile devices as
gateways to services for citizens
o integrating existing infrastructure in homes
(digital picture frames, smart metering of energy etc.)
o enabling end-user programming and service mash-ups
o embedding virtual services into physical artifacts
o developing emerging services and applications

* Infrastructure and network
o extension of existing network paradigms and web protocols (web of things)
o integration of social networks
o opportunities and limitations of standards

* Case studies and experience reports
o case studies on real-world deployments
o user studies on technology perception and acceptance

* Social impact and consequences
o discussion of anticipated behavioral changes of users
o security and privacy

Submissions:
------------
We invite three types of submissions:

Research contributions introducing novel concepts and presenting new insight
may be between 6-10 pages. These submissions are supposed to discuss
experiences and lessons learned from applying as well as new applications
and internet of things interaction paradigms.

Case studies should be 3-5 pages outlining the deployment of pervasive
computing technologies in a real world environment. In particular, we
are looking for reports on the experiences collecting while introducing
internet of things technologies or sensor networks into productive
environments.

Position statements may be up to 2 pages. They should outline a person's
interest and experience in the topic of the workshop. Position
statements will not be included in the proceedings but will serve as
introductions for panel discussions.

We are looking forward to your submissions!

Deadlines and Dates
-------------------
Submissions due by: 15th of January 2010
Notifications due by: 8th of March 2010
Final papers due to LNCS: 31st March 2010
Workshop day: 17th of May 2010

PDF version of the call:
http://www.autoidlabs.org/fileadmin/events/ciot2010/ciot2010_flyer.pdf


Workhop Chairs and Organizers
-----------------------------
Florian Michahelles, ETH Zurich
Associate Director Auto-ID Labs

Stephan Karpischek, ETH Zurich
Senior Researcher, Auto-ID Labs

Albrecht Schmidt, University of Duisburg-Essen
Chair of Pervasive Computing and User Interface Engineering


Technical Programm Commitee
---------------------------
Aaron Beach, University of Colorado
Aaron Quigley, HIT Lab Australia
Alois Ferscha, University of Linz
Anind Dey, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Antonio Kruger, DFKI
Carsten Magerkurth, SAP Research
Christian Decker, University of Karlsruhe
Christian Floerkemeier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Christof Roduner, ETH Zurich
Dieter Uckelmann, University of Bremen
Dominique Guinard, ETH Zurich & SAP Research
Elgar Fleisch, ETH Zurich & University of St. Gallen
Enrico Rukzio, Lancaster University
Felix von Reischach, ETH Zurich & SAP Research
Florian Resatsch, ServTag
Frederic Thiesse, University of St. Gallen
Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich
Gaetano Boriello, University of Washington
Gregor Broll, NTT Docomo Europe Labs
Heikki Huomo, Center for Internet Excellence
Jens Str¸ker, University of Freiburg
Jin Mitsugi, Keio University
Juha Laurila, Nokia Research Center Lausanne
Kary Fr‰mling, University of Helsinki
Kristof Van Laerhoven, Darmstadt University of Technology
Lars Erik Holmquist, Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS)
Manfred Aigner, Technical University of Graz
Marcus Handte, University of Bonn
Martin Strohbach, NEC Europe Ltd.
Matthias Kranz, TU Munich
Matthias Wagner, NTT Docomo Europe Labs
Michael Beigl, University of Braunschweig
Michael Rohs, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin
Osamu Nakamura, Keio University
Paul Holleis, NTT Docomo Europe Labs
Rene Mayrhofer, Vienna University
Rick Han, University of Colorado
Rob van Kranenburg, Founder of Council
Trevor Bubridge, BT
Sanjay Sarma, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Sarah Spiekerman, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Tom·s S·nchez LÛpez, University of Cambridge
Wontack Woo, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)

for further questions please contact: ciot2010@ethz.ch

Sept 2009 Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals

I have a chapter on UbiComp User Interfaces in a new book called "Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals" Edited by John Krumm in Microsoft and published by Chapman & Hall/CRC; 1 edition (September 18, 2009) ISBN: 978-1420093605. [ Amazon ]

The user interface represents the point of contact between a computer system and a human, both in terms of input to the system and output from the system. There are many facets of a "Ubiquitous Computing" or ubicomp system, from the low-level sensor technologies in the environment, through the collection, management and processing of the context data through to the middleware required to enable the dynamic composition of devices and services envisaged. These hardware, software, systems and services act as the computational edice around which we need to build our Ubicomp User Interface, or UUI. The ability to provide natural inputs and outputs from a system which can allow it to remain in the periphery is hence the central challenge in UUI design.

While this chapter surveys the current state of the art to the user beyond the classical keyboard, screen and mouse, it is important to also acknowledge that UUIs represent a paradigm shift in human computer interaction with input and output technologies not yet envisaged. UUIs are built around a next generation technological paradigm which in essence reshapes our relationship with our personal information, environment, artefacts and even our friends, family and colleagues. The challenge is not about providing the next generation mouse and keyboard but instead making the collection of inputs and outputs operate in a fuid and seamless manner.

Chapters
1. Introduction to Ubiquitous Computing Roy Want
2. Ubiquitous Computing Systems Jakob Bardram 
and Adrian Friday
3. Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing Marc Langheinrich
4. Ubiquitous Computing Field Studies A.J. Bernheim Brush
5. Ethnography in Ubiquitous Computing Alex S. Taylor
6. From GUI to UUI: Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing 
Aaron Quigley
7. Location in Ubiquitous Computing 
Alexander Varshavsky and Shwetak Patel
8. Context-Aware Computing Anind K. Dey
9. Sequential Sensor Processing John Krumm

Sept 2009 Congratulations to Dr. Bennett

It is with great pride that I congratulate Mike Bennett on passing his Viva on Wednesday the 2nd of September 2009. Mike or (Dr. Bennett designate, as we should call him) is my second PhD student completed. He came to work with me in mid 2005 on a startup scholarship UCD afforded me and Mike was awarded for his studies. Amusingly, we met while both a little drunk at an MLE farewell party where he had been a researcher. He was the third student I'd convinced to come work with me after a bout of heavy drinking which is thankfully a habit I've managed to break. (Large grants or lovely scholarships or my insane desire to stay upto 3am working on our nth+1 paper are the attractions to work with me now ;-)

Mikes' keen intellect and curiosity impressed me greatly then as it does now. It's been my great pleasure to have had the chance to work with Mike over the past few years. Dr. Bennett is now a postdoc researcher with the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies and is moving onto bigger and better things in his research. I wish him all the very best for the rest of his very bright research career.

Mike's thesis work is on designing for an individual’s eyes with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction, Vision And Individual Differences. Mike's examiners Professors Alan Dix and Paddy Nixon said his work demonstrated clearly his mastery of the area of his thesis. And that he clearly has a deep understanding of human vision and the application of the knowledge to design and has applied strong methodological rigor to his work.

The abstract of Mike's Thesis.
When a user interface, information visualisation or graphic designer is conceiving and creating design mockups how does the designer know whether the intended audience is able to perceive the design? When a designer does know how well an intended audience can or cannot see, such as with a design targeted at an aging audience, how does that knowledge influence the visual layout of the design?

There are rules of thumb about font size, contrast, and the interaction between unused space that are learnt and handed down as design lore. If a designer follows good use of font size, with good contrast then a proposed design should be readable as long as its not too cluttered. Unfortunately “good usage”, “good contrast” and “not too cluttered” are subjective measures. What one designer defines as good another could find distinctly lacking, though experience and training do help a designer acquire knowledge of what visually works.

This thesis is concerned with examining and showing how the experience of seeing a design can be non-subjectively quantified. Then it demonstrates how the quantifications tied together with individual differences in the Human Visual System (HVS) can be used to evaluate and adapt the designs, such that they are customised to individual eye sight.

In order to non-subjectively quantify the experience of seeing a design we introduce, evaluate and demonstate two measures of perceptual stability. Perceptual stability is defined by us as a measure of how stable or unstable a visual design or image is due to differences in a perceiver’s perception. The first measure PERSva evaluates how easy or difficult it is for people to see visual detail in a design. While the second measure PERScp evaluates how different forms of colour perception effect the legibility of a visual design.

Objective quantifications which are capable of modelling individual differences are useful for automating design judgements, i.e. automatically compare a range of potential interface designs and make a decision about which is best for a specific user. Demonstrated in this work are automatic evaluations of text and font styles, network graph designs and layouts, and the pseudocolouring of scientific visualisations.

In the longer term, as we move into a world where Mass Customisation and Product Personalisation become common place, objective design quantifications are useful for adapting and customising designs to suit individual physiologies, capabilities and preferences.


Congrats once again. His site has copies of his papers and thesis.

ps. Mike your gift is in the post ;)

Sept 2009 Proceedings of the 3rd Irish Conference on Human Computer Interaction I-HCI 2009

Along with my colleague (and former classmate) Dr. Gavin Doherty we are the conference chairs for the 3rd Irish Conference on Human Computer Interaction (I-HCI 2009) held in Trinity College Dublin on the 17th and 18th of September 2009. The program chair for I-HCI 2009 is Dr. Saturnino Luz
 from Trinity College Dublin.

Registration for the conference is now open. The conference proceedings, all 142 pages, contains the papers presented at (I-HCI 2009). As the Irish HCI community is evolving there isn’t a specific theme for I-HCI 2009 but instead we aim to draw together the research community through this conference. 
I-HCI 2009 presents new research on human computer interaction. We sought short and long technical papers and student papers describing original, previously unpublished research results including:


- Collaborative System UIs

- Computer-Mediated Communication and Online Communities

- Design Methods

- End-User Programming and Adaptation

- Ethnography and design-oriented fieldwork

- Evaluation Methods

- Human-Centered software engineering

- Hypermedia and Web Design and Usability

- Intelligent User Interfaces and User Modeling

- Location-aware Interaction

- Ubiquitous and Context-Aware Computing

- Speech and Natural Language

- Information Visualisation



Special topics of interest include

- Human Factors in Health Care Informatics

- Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing in the wild

- Evaluation Methods suitable for study in home, workplace and mobile settings.


The program includes an IxDA Industry Session, a tutorial on Inclusive Design for Older and Disabled Users offered by Prof. Helen Petrie and colleagues from the Univ. of York, a workshop on experience, usability, and functionality: exploring the components of interaction, organised by HFRG, UCC and UL along with a keynote presentation by Professor Barry Smyth from the University College Dublin.



"Doherty G., Quigley A. and Luz S. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd Irish Conference on Human Computer Interaction (I-HCI 2009), ISBN: 9781871408485, Dublin Ireland, Sept 17-18 2009 "


For more details on the program of events visit the conference program.

Aug 2009 Invited Trinity Long Room Hub Talk

On October 1st 2009 I will give an invited talk at the Trinity Long Room Hub entitled 'Using Information Visualisation as an Analytical Tool' at 1.00 p.m. - 2.30 p.m. IIIS Seminar Room, C.6002, 6th Floor, Arts Building, TCD.

The following is the working abstract for the talk.

Abstract:
A byproduct of the explosive growth in the use of computing technology is that organizations are generating, gathering, using and storing data at an increasing rate. Consider the amount of data a Government census collect, the amount of data Google gathers and uses or details of all the transactions eBay must handle on a daily basis? To make this concrete the last US Census includes details of 304,059,724 people (US Census Bureau) with data on age, gender, ethnicity, household make up, home structure, income, farms, business and sales available. In July 2008 Google found 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once and eBay handles in excess of 1 billion payments per year. While Google and eBay and indeed their customers gain value from the applications on offer, simply storing the raw data after the fact is of little value unless useful high level information and hence knowledge can be derived from it. Many researchers and commercial organisations are facing similar tasks with large amounts of image data, video, geographic data, textual data or statistical data.

However when trying to understand details about millions of customers, webpages or products the amount of raw data makes the analysis task difficult. One approach to the problem is to convert the data into pictures and models that can be graphically displayed. The intuition behind the use of such graphics is that human beings are inherently skilled at understanding data in visual forms. We refer to the use of computer graphics to visually represent and convey the meaning of abstract information "Information Visualisation".

This talk will outline how various types of information is modeled, managed, mined and hence visually presented on screen for exploration. Several large scale data and information visualisation methods will be described and discussed along with the 7 key challenges we face as researchers and developers in using visualisation in an attempt to present information. These 7 key challenges are: Empowerment, Connection, Volume, Hetrogeneity, Audience, Dynamism and Discovery.

July 2009 Visualisation ... 7 Key Challenges we face

The Digital Humanities Observatory is running a week long series of workshops on TEI, XSLT, Data Modelling and Data Visulisation from Monday the 13th to Friday the 17th of July. As part of this I was invited to present a lecture to all the workshop participants. I entitled my talk "Visualisation as an analytical tool, from networks to data streams. 7 Key Challenges we face." Michael Maguire gave a very flattering description of my talk on his blog (thanks).



As I said during my talk, I normally give such a talk as an introductory session to information visualisation or visual analytics. However, this time I structured my talk around what I see as the 7 key challenges we (or anyone interested in visualising data) face. This blog post is a summary of the 110+ slides I presented (sans examples and mathematics!).

The ideas I presented are my view on the world of information visulisation and visual analytics. The key challenges were not presented in order of importance (as their relative importance is problem or domain dependent). There are also a number of challenges I personally feel (including multi-device and small screen visulisation) are crucial but I realise are not as pressing as the mainstream issues people face.

My ideas are informed by my ongoing research in InfoVis and from keynotes, lectures, online talks, toolkits and blogs that I've read or seen. Useful (and insightful) sources include, the visualizeit blog, the infosethetics blog by Andrew in the University of Sydney, the keynote Peter Eades gave at InfoVis 2006, the keynote Christian Chabot gave at the IEEE VAST 2008 and the ideas I could glean online from the VisWeek 2008 Panel on Grand Challenges for Information Visualization. If I've missed anything you feel is important do let me know!

So the 7 key challenges I see include:

1. Empower: We must ensure the person using visualisation to understand data is empowered to gain insight or save time etc. To achieve this focus (long and hard) on identifying the questions that you need to answer with your visulisation. Do not just think about the data. If you think you have tool, method or technique to help empower a person (yourself or another) to gain insight or save time, can you validate this? What validation methods can you employ to ensure you are not just toying with pretty pictures?
   
2. Connect: Ensure, based on the question at hand, you help the person using the visualisation build a connection between the data and any processing/analysis and the visual form presented. The question at hand and hence data drives what is an appropriate visualisation. Also, if you are using a particular visual form (eg. maps) how far can you stretch the metaphor or connection between data and display, before it breaks?
   
3. Volume: Ensure if the data needed to help answer the question at hand has many elements that your visualisation method, tool or technique can support this. Voluminous datasets can break many desktop tools simply due to the time/memory/bandwidth needed to "load" the dataset. There are many sources of data with numerous individual elements to consider, 304,059,724 people in the USA (sources US Census Bureau) data on age, gender, ethnicity, household make up, home structure, income, farms, business and sales available. In July 2008 Google found 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once. This is ever increasing with user generated and automatically created content. One of our recent studies on extracting social networks from non-social network data started with 9,468,460 one-way flight passenger records. Clearly there are large datasets one might be faced with. Another problem (often overstated) is the dimensionality of the data (each element having multiple attributes to consider).
   
4. Heterogeneity: Ensure if the data needed to help answer the question at hand consists of heterogenous data from multiple different sources or of “variant types” that your visualisation method, tool or technique can support this. If you need to consider a heterogenous data space then ensure the data-sets interlock so coupled or co-ordinated views are meaningful (and possible to display).
   
5. Audience:Suit the word (display) to the audience. Ensure you match the visualisations to your questions and your audience. Know your user and don’t explore visualisation questions in a bubble. Engage and explore! Some methods, tools and techniques do not suit particular audiences. "You haven’t made impact with visual analytics until you help people with their own data" and I would add to this "in the particular sociotechnical context where they will use your tools, 
methods or techniques".
   
6. Dynamism: Data isn’t static. Ensure if the data needed to help answer the question at hand is a live source or the display is expected highlight changes over time that your visualisation method, tool or technique can support this.
   
7. Discovery: Discover the new world once!: Ensure that your tools can store and capture and automate the process of pattern identification for subsequent data exploration. Convert identified patterns into “alerts” or stepwise mining, analysis, query and refinement into workflow.
   

As this was a masterclass I went on to point out the 10hr - 100,000hr guidelines to move from Trainee to Mastering visualisation. Gladwell spoke of the 10,000hr rule in his book Outliers which is important to consider when being introduced to a new topic like this. I pointed this out so people could help benchmark their own knowledge and skill level. My talk contained an introduction to cartography and GIS, multi-dimensional visualisation, parallel coordinates, paired parallel coordinates, graph drawing, force directed layouts and treemaps. As I'm currently learning iPhone application development myself, I know how dangerous and presumptive one can become moving from "Trainee" to "Apprentice" levels of knowledge. As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing! I very much enjoyed giving this lecture to this DHO masterclass. I also gained some great insights with the director of the DHO Susan Schreibman on her experiences being a director there. Thanks to Shawn Day and Paolo Battino for inviting me to come along.

July 2009 Upcoming Conferences of interest.

My upcoming move has me thinking about conferences in areas of interest to the HITLab Australia.


The International Symposium on Wearable Computers 2009 will be held in Sept in Linz Austria. I aim to attend ISWC 2009 as well as visiting Vodafone research in Munich enroute to meet some colleagues and one of my students undertaking an internship there.

The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing 2009 will be held in May in Helsinki Finland. Along with my role as workshop co-chair I'm planning with some of my students and colleagues to submit some papers. Pervasive is one the premier events showcasing state of the art research in Pervasive Computing. It's a very good event to attend both to understand the developments within our field but also to engage the entire research community through workshops, demos, posters etc.

Along with colleagues I ran a Workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for coupled public and private displays at AVI 2008 in Naples. AVI 2010 the biannual 10th International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces will be held in Rome in May 2010. I intend to run another workshop with colleagues to follow up on PPD08 along with submitting research papers based on our current and ongoing research.

Due to prior travel commitments one conference I cannot attend but would like to is this year's International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2009) in Florida from October 19-23. I do however hope to attend ISMAR 2010 in Korea.

July 2009 Elevation to BCS Fellow

The British Computer Society has informed me that I am now a Fellow of the BCS, specifically a chartered fellow (FBCS CITP) of the BCS. Thanks to Professor Dobson for being my supporter on this.

June 2009 HITLab Australia Director Designate

I'm very excited to announce that I am going to be the inaugural director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory Australia (HIT Lab AU) and an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Tasmania. The HITLab consists of three international research laboratories. The first is now a leading research lab formed in the University of Washington USA over 20 years ago and the second laboratory was started in New Zealand in 2002. This is the third research lab.

Since working at MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories) Cambridge Massachusetts USA in '01/'02 it's been my long-term ambition to develop and lead a research lab such as this. The guidance I received from Joe Marks, then director of MERL, made me realise his was the type of job I would one day aspire to. He showed me the positive influence, excitement and vision a director can offer a lab and the type of creative environment that one can build. I hope to build just such an environment in the HITLab Australia for undergraduates, postgraduates, postdocts, researchers, collaborators and all our industry partners.

The process of applying for and getting this role is a long one and I want to thank Mark Billinghurst, the director of the HITLab New Zealand for first pointing me at this role and then giving me great feedback before and after I was made the offer. Our lab will be collaborating closely with Mark and the HITLab New Zealand over the next few years. My involvement in a number of major SFI funded activities here in Ireland has helped lay the ground work for my move into this role. As such, I want to thank all my colleagues in UCD and all my colleagues in Lero - The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre (SFI CSET), CLARITY - the centre for Sensor Web technologies (SFI CSET) and Clique the research cluster for network analysis and visualization (SFI SRC) for their collaborations over the past 5 years. The HITLab Australia will be developing linkages to some of these and other international groups over the coming years.



In the international hunt to find someone to fill this post the Vice-Chancellor Professor Daryl Le Grew said: "I am looking for the inaugural Director to provide strategic leadership of the HIT Lab AU and its inter-disciplinary undergraduate and postgraduate courses and research higher degree programs. The Director will oversee exciting, cross-disciplinary collaboration in teaching and research activities with other UTAS schools and faculties; the development of consulting activities and commercial projects with business and industry; and the establishment of national and international partnerships with our partners the HIT Labs US and NZ, the Virtual Worlds Consortium, and other organisations.


The inaugural Director will have an exciting and unprecedented opportunity to shape and guide the HITLab AU as a major research and teaching centre on the national and international stage."

I am really looking forward to this challenge over the coming years and the opportunity to connect and collaborate with colleagues in Tasmania and across Australia while developing new and innovative undergraduate and postgraduate programs within the lab. My aim is to make this a major research and teaching centre on the national and international stage.

June 2009 TEDxDublin

On June 12th at 7.30pm I organised TEDxDublin which was hosted by the Science Gallery but it truly was a team effort!

Links: [ Facebook Fan Page ] [ TEDxDublin Website ] [ #tedxdub on twitter ] [ #tedx on twitter ] [ TEDxDublin on Flickr ]

TEDxDublin is a local, self-organized event that brought people together to share "ideas worth spreading". At TEDxDublin we had a program of 2 TEDTalks videos and 3 live speakers. See the TEDxDublin website (which the Science Gallery kindly host) for full details and videos on this event. This event really did spark off some deep discussions and connection. I was particularly glad that our ODCSSS 2009 research interns were able to attend along with some of their mentors and supervisors. It really is a great testament to Dublin that such an event can come together on such short notice yet have speakers from around the world and be delivered through such a high quality event.

Thanks go to our three speakers for giving up their time and presenting inspiring talks and also our local volunteers. The Science Gallery and all the staff who helped are to be very much complimented for their professionalism with helping to plan and execute on TEDxDublin. Beforehand a number of people said they weren't sure if we could have something in Dublin that emulated the buzz, energy and inspiration of the original TED talks but afterwards many people said the event had met and exceeded just those expectations. Rowan Manahan from Fortify Services has written a very nice blog piece on TEDxDublin.

Two interesting aspects of how this whole event came together was firstly the speed (18 days) and also the use of social media (lots of twitter and Facebook). Due to the whole connection to TED I was interviewed by a local reporter Marie Boran on the use of social media to drive the organisation of this event. You can see her piece on this in the Silicon Republic.

The event itself....

Our first presentation came from Scott Rickard on "source signal separation" or the cocktail-party effect. Scott gave a great and engaging talk and certainly inspired many people, if the discussions afterwards are anything to judge by! Scott is keenly interested in science, mathematics, and engineering education, at all levels. He is co-founder of Science With Me! and co-created RoboRugby. He is the director of the Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory UCD. Along with explaining what is some complex research in accessible terms Scott was able to give a live demo with multi-lingual source seperation on the spot! Pretty impressive.

Educated at MIT and Princeton, Scott was a research assistant at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts (from 1991 to 1993) and worked on a prototype analog neural network computer, designed neural networks for mine detection from sonar images, and designed large sets of frequency hopped waveforms with nearly ideal ambiguity properties for sonar applications. From 1993 to 2003 he was a member of technical staff at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey. He spent 1995 and 1996 in Munich Germany with Siemens working in the Neural Networks Group. While with Siemens, he developed and applied machine learning technology to industrial problems such as vehicle navigation, automated image analysis, biomedical signal classification, and industrial plant state prediction. Scott moved to UCD in September 2003 and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering and the Director of the UCD Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL).

Our first TED talk on video at TEDxDublin came from Pattie Maes on the Sixth Sense. [ TED Link ]


Mark Billinghurst was our second live presenter on "Accessible AR: Bringing Augmented Reality to the Masses". Mark is the director of the Human Interface Technology Lab New Zealand. He is the inventor of the "Magic Book" - an animated children's book that comes to life when viewed through the lightweight head-mounted display (HMD).He was awarded a Discover Magazine Award in 2001, for Entertainment for creating the Magic Book technology. In 2004 he was nominated for a prestigious World Technology Network (WTN) World Technology Award in the education category and in 2005 he was appointed to the New Zealand Government's Growth and Innovation Advisory Board.

Our second TED talk on video at TEDxDublin came from Robert Full on Learning from the gecko's tail. [ TED Link ]

Our final live talk at TEDxDublin came from Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft Live Labs. Blaise is well know for his original TED talk in 2007 on [ Photosynth ]. Blaise Aguera y Arcas has authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques, and in 2001, he made an influential computational discovery that cast doubt on Gutenberg's role as the father of movable type.

He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or "fly" in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

Thanks to Catalin David of Jacobs University Bremen, Germany for his images of the event. Catalin is an ODCSSS research intern.

June 2009 Paper Accepted to EMBC 2009

Congratulations to my co-authors from UCD and TRIL on our recent paper entitled "Objective real-time assessment of walking and turning in elderly adults" which was accepted at the 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC'09). EMBC'09 will be held during September 2~6, 2009 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"The EMBC'09 technical program will consist of plenary and keynote lectures, workshops, symposia, and invited sessions, in which the leading experts from all around the world will present state-of-the-art reviews of rapidly-developing and exciting areas, report the latest significant findings and developments in all the major fields of biomedical engineering, and discuss government and industry related issues. Accepted high-quality original technical papers will be presented in poster and oral sessions, with up to 4-page papers to be included in IEEE Xplore and indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE. A number of student travel awards will also be made available to assist graduate students attending EMBC'09."

June 2009 Master Class on Visualisation

I'm giving a Master Classes called "Visualisation as an analytical tool, from networks to data streams" at the DHO Summer School 2009 in July. Thanks to Shawn and Paolo for inviting me. I'm looking forward to outlining the 7 key research challenges our field faces in light of the ever increasing torrent of both local and remote data sources.

Lecture: Visualisation as an analytical tool, from networks to data streams.
7 Key Challenges we face. Aaron Quigley (University College, Dublin)

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 7 key challenges we face as researchers and developers in using visualisation in an attempt to present information.


Details:
DHO Summer School 2009

Date: 13 - 17 July 2009
Venue: Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College Dublin

The Digital Humanities Observatory in conjunction with NINES and 18th Connect are delighted to offer a week-long workshop to allow scholars undertaking digital projects to develop their skills, share interests, and work towards common goals. Workshop strands, master classes and lectures will focus on the theoretical, technical, administrative, and institutional issues relevant to the needs of digital humanities projects.

The summer school will offer participants four week-long workshop strands to choose from:

* Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative: Theory and Practice;
* Data Modelling and Databases for Humanities Research;
* Data Visualisation for the Humanities;
* Text Transformations with XSLT.

In addition the Summer School will feature lectures and master classes by leading experts and theorists in digital humanities.

June 2009 Paper Accepted to SNMABA 2009

Congratulations to Mike Farrugia on having our new paper entitled "Enhancing airline customer relationship management data by inferring ties between passengers” accepted as a regular paper at the International Workshop on Social Networks Mining and Analysis for Business Applications (SNMABA2009). This workshop will be held in conjunction with the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing in Vancouver, Canada. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop section of the main conference proceedings of SocialComp-09.

"Abstract—In the airline industry, as in many other industries, customer relationship management data is predominantly based on quantitative data. In this paper we explore the possibility of augmenting this quantitative data with relational data by inferring ties between passengers. Different methods of inferring relationships are proposed and discussed, along with the business
benefits such relational data adds to current customer information. We also explain some visualisation approaches to facilitate the exploration of this data by business analysts in marketing, sales and customer loyalty sections."

June 2009 4th ODCSSS Program

This is the 4th year for the ODCSSS program. ODCSSS is a 12 week undergraduate summer research internship program between the University College Dublin (UCD) and Dublin City University (DCU) Ireland which starts on June 2nd 2009. This program offers a distributed and interdisciplinary research environment at the forefront of ICT research. The theme for 2009 is "Technologies for bridging the digital-physical divide: sensing the environment". Each ODCSSS student is engaged in a research project with a faculty member and mentor which provides them an opportunity to experience research.

This year we have, yet again, an impressive set of research interns coming here for the summer. Our 2009 research launch event will be held in the Guinness Store House Dublin on June 2nd with a strong line of research presentations for academia, industry and applied research labs.

As UCD director for this program I wish all the research interns based here and in DCU all the very best in their summer research. To see some past images view this flickr set called ODCSSS SET

May 2009 Paper Accepted to HCII 2009

"Interaction Techniques for Binding Smartphones"



Congratulations to Umer on having his paper on Interaction Techniques for Binding Smartphones published in the proceedings of the First International Conference on Human Centered Design 2009. This conference is held as part of HCI International 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, July 19-24, 2009. The proceedings are published in the prestigious Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Our paper reports on the use of guided interviews to evaluate the desirability
of different interaction techniques for binding smartphones. We demonstrate
five interaction techniques using storyboard sketches and cardboard
prototypes of iPhones. We discuss the implications of these results for the
design of interaction techniques for smartphones.

May 2009 Workshops Pervasive 2010

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Pervasive 2010
The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing

Call One: Workshop Proposals Pervasive 2010
Submission Deadline: June 26, 2009

Helsinki, Finland
May 17 - 20, 2010
http://pervasive2010.org/
----------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------
Call One for Workshop Proposals
--------------------------------------------------------

Pervasive 2010, the Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing will be held in Helsinki, Finland on the 17 - 20 May.

The workshop program for Pervasive 2010 will be different than in past years as invited projects, invited topics and regular workshops form part of the program. This call represents the first opportunity for anyone to submit a regular workshop proposal. Two topical and two project workshops have already been invited. The invited workshops include:

1 Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive Applications
2 Multimodal Location Based Techniques for Extreme Navigation
3 Workshop on Pervasive Personalization
4 Workshop on Ubiquitous Virtual Reality

Contrary to previous years, there will be two calls for workshop proposals. Workshops will be selected from both calls. The deadline for this first call is *June 26, 2009*. Interested parties should submit 1-2 page workshop proposals that include the following details:
- Title and abstract/description for the workshop
- Format of the workshop
- Motivation for the relevance of the workshop to Pervasive computing
- Names and affiliations of the organisers

The workshop calls will be evaluated considering the (i) quality of the proposal, (ii) relevance of the workshop topic and (iii) overall span of workshop topics. This first call is targeted at groups who which to establish a longer lead time to promote and develop their workshop program than is typically the case with Pervasive workshops. Clearly, topics for workshops should differ substantially from the topics of the invited workshops.

The notifications will be sent by the end of July. Accepted workshops are expected to finalize their workshop program (call for papers, PC, website etc.) at the latest by October 2nd, 2009.

Critical dates:

* June 26, 2009: Submission deadline
* July 31, 2009: Notification
* October 2, 2009: Deadline for final workshop descriptions and workshop webpages

The deadline for the second call is October 16, 2009. This will be the standard call our research community has for each Pervasive conference.
Participants submitting to the second call are expected to submit full proposals (4-6 pages). More details about this call will be sent at a later stage.

Please visit the workshops page at
http://www.pervasive2010.org/workshops.html
for up to date information.

Best regards,
Petteri Nurmi & Aaron Quigley
Pervasive 2010 Workshop Chairs
pervasive2010-workshops-list@cs.helsinki.fi

May 2009 Paper Accepted to ICSOFT 2009

Congrats to Emil and Mike my co-authors for our newly accepted paper entitled "A self-adaptive architecture for autonomic systems developed with ASSL" at ICSOFT 2009, the 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies.

"The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested on information technology and software development. The conference tracks are "Software Engineering", "Information Systems and Data Management", "Programming Languages", "Distributed and Parallel Systems" and "Knowledge Engineering".

Software and data technologies are essential for developing any computer information system, encompassing a large number of research topics and applications: from programming issues to the more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from databases and data-warehouses to the most complex management information systems; knowledge-base systems; Distributed systems, ubiquity, data quality and many other topics are included in the scope of ICSOFT."

May 2009 "Haptic Jingle" and Pervasive Advertising 2009

Earlier this week I attended a Pervasive 2009 workshop on Pervasive Advertising I organized with Jörg Müller, University of Münster, Albrecht Schmidt, University of Duisburg-Essen and Bo Begole, PARC. My postgraduate student Ross Shannon presented two papers on our ideas and developments in this space. There were some very interesting and thought provoking presentations and all the participants fully engaged with the full program of events from presentations to actual working sessions.

During Pervasive Advertising 2009 we discussed not only means of showing dynamically updated content, but also means to react implicitly and explicitly to the audience in its vicinity. In order to interact with the target audience, technologies need to be explored that are capable of identifying the user or their interests/needs. It's clear (for good or bad) advertising is becoming one of the major deployers of pervasive computing technology for many end-users (e.g. mobile ads, digital signs, context awareness, RFID etc.).

On a side note, given a quick survey online I am going to lay claim to coining a new term, namely "Haptic Jingle". This is a pretty simple but I think powerful idea.

Consider all the products we know and use on a regular basis. There are now many products which have well known catch phrases or audio jingles. Typically when we hear such phrases or jingles we automatically recall and associate this with the product or service. Now, I'm not making a value judgment on if this is a good or a bad thing but it did give me the idea for what I call a "Haptic Jingle".

A Haptic Jingle is a particular shake or pulse pattern which we physically experience when we touch a particular object and hence associate with a product/company/service. A company could build such haptic feedback into their products or sales spaces e.g. "I'm loving it" translates to a low key vibration with two or three pulses which match with the inflection points in the associated audio or written phrase. This haptic pattern can then be embedded into physical objects we interact with in public space such as door handles. In the future imagine the scenario of moving into a store, you pull the handle, feel the haptic jingle and then think, yes, yes, I do want a Starbucks Latte. If this strikes you as a worrying idea then stay informed and advocate against it happening!

However, as a scientist I am curious about the range of modalities and multi-modalities which can be employed for information delivery. Be this for advertising or other important elements of information.


During the workshop we were all acutely aware that our physical environment is becoming ever more overloaded with man made objects. At one point our sub-group moved to sit and work in the Nara park where we were based for Pervasive 2009. This inspired us to recall what the late Mark Weiser said. "Ubiquitous computers will help overcome the problem of information overload. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods."


This motivated us to consider this question. Could we weave pervasive advertising into the current park environment as a source of information you might want? Could Pervasive Advertising provide information so the overall experience was "refreshing"? As described in our call for papers in this session we took a positive view to envision advertisements that precisely match a person’s interests and fit the current situation so well that people enjoy receiving them and see advertising as relevant information or a pleasant distraction. During the course of the workshop we also came across many concerns shown in the negative view. One can easily imagine a world where people cannot escape from advertisements, where we are continuously tracked and where advertisements reduce the quality of life.

The overall outcomes from the workshop include, areas of concern from the scientific to the social issues, a number of positive and negative scenarios, a set of small scale research projects and a set of large group projects. The workshop organisers have decided to put together a book on Pervasive Advertising with sections on the various technologies, social and legal issues which will be documented and discussed.

The workshop was an excellent venue for a full and frank discussion on both positive and negative issues and key scientific research challenges.

May 2009 Program Co-Chair LoCA, Tokyo Japan

Last week on May 7-8 I attended LOCA 2009 in Tokyo as one of the Program Co-Chairs for the 4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness. We started the symposium with a very engaging keynote from Dr.Shionozaki of Koozyt. He spoke about moving from PlaceEngine to Location Amplifier i.e. their experience with rolling out commercial Location Based Services. This was a very relevant keynote as LBS are now going main stream in certain countries and ramping up in many others. They provide exemplars and cautionary tales for those looking to explore, develop and commercialize location and context aware systems.

During LoCA presentations were of a very high quality and the papers have made some very impressive contributions to both location and context awareness. Our proceedings were published, more or less, in the Lecture Notes series in Computer Science in their Subseries: Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI , Vol. 5561. LOCA 2009 has published new and significant research on systems, services, and applications to detect, interpret and use location and other contextual information. With context, we can expect computers to deliver information, services, and entertainment in a way that maximises convenience and minimises intrusion. Developing this awareness involves research in sensing, systems, machine learning, human computer interaction and design.

Prior to the conference the International Program Committee and Chairs selected the best paper from the submitted and reviewed papers. The award for the best paper was awarded to Sasank Reddy (University of California Los Angeles, US); Katie Shilton (University of California Los Angeles, US); Jeff Burke (University of California Los Angeles, US); Deborah Estrin (University of California at Los Angeles, US); Mark Hansen (University of California, Los Angeles, US); Mani Srivastava (University of California, Los Angeles, US) for their paper, "Using Context Annotated Mobility Profiles to Recruit Data Collectors in Participatory Sensing".

Three papers were nominated for the best paper award:

• Using Context Annotated Mobility Profiles to Recruit Data Collectors in Participatory Sensing
  
• Multi Activity Recognition based on Bodymodel-Derived Primitives
  
• Where Will They Turn: Predicting Turn Proportions At Intersections
  

During the course of the symposium John Krumm from Microsoft Research Seattle was awarded the best presentation award for his presentation on his paper "Where Will They Turn: Predicting Turn Proportions At Intersections".

Thanks to my co-chair Tanzeem Choudhury from Dartmouth College, our local chair Koji Suginuma from Sony Corporation who did an amazing job with local organisation and to our general chair Thomas Strang from DLR.

April 2009 - CFP 1st International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

I am a member of the Program Committee for the 1st International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications. This will be a interesting and exciting event given the rise of new forms of human computer interaction (such as Surface User Interfaces) and new display technologies suitable for in-car and inter-car application.


CFP:

***** AutomotiveUI'09 http://auto-ui.org *****
***** Conference: Mon/Tue 21-22 Sep 2009 *****
***** Submission Deadline: 02 June 2009 *****

*** The conference is in-cooperation with ***
*** ACM SIGCHI and the proceedings will be ***
*** included in the ACM digital library ***

Topics
---
* new concepts for driving interfaces
* multi-modal car user interfaces
* methods and tools for automotive user interface research
* approaches for the evaluation of novel car user interfaces
* user interface issues for assistive functionality
* novel multimedia interfaces and in-car entertainment
* text input and output while driving
* speech interfaces for in-car use
* user interfaces for information access while driving
* user interfaces for navigation systems
* user interface frameworks and toolkits for vehicles
* development tools and methods for car user interfaces
* biometrics and physiological sensors as a user interface component
* detection and estimation of user intentions
* detecting user distraction and driver state
* new display, visualization and interaction techniques for car UIs
* novel interactive car applications
* using sensors and context for interactive experiences in the car
* applications and user interfaces for inter-vehicle communication
* in-car gaming
* interactive applications for drivers and passengers


Theme
---
Advances in technology have transformed cars into
complex interactive systems. Drivers interact with
a variety of controls and applications to operate
a vehicle. Besides mastering the primary driving
task drivers make use of entertainment, information
and communication systems in the car. The technical
basis in modern cars includes means for communication,
sensing and media provision. With these novel
technologies many opportunities arise for creating
attractive in-car user interfaces. Nevertheless the
challenge of creating such interfaces in a compelling
and safe to use manner has grown ever greater.
Especially in the automotive context users expect
interfaces that are intuitive and straightforward to
use, without the need to read a manual. The overall
experience in driving a car is more and more
influenced by the man-machine interface, and hence
creating attractive user interfaces is of great
importance for a successful product.

Traditional means for user interface development as
known from desktop computing are often not suitable,
as many other conditions have an influence on the
design space for automotive user interfaces. In
comparison to many other domains, trial and error
while the product is already in the market is not
acceptable as the cost of failure may be fatal.

User interface design in the automotive domain is
relevant across many areas ranging from primary
driving control, to assisted functions, to
navigation, information services, entertainment
and games.


Submission
---
Authors are invited to submit papers that are
2, 4 or 8 pages long, formatted to follow the two
column ACM SIGCHI format. We are happy to consider
a variety of styles for inclusion in the proceedings,
such as academic papers, design sketches,
interaction concepts, and industrial case studies.
The papers will be selected using a peer-review process.
All accepted submissions will be included in the
conference proceedings, which will be available
through the ACM Digital Library.


Conference Chairs
---
Albrecht Schmidt, University of Duisburg-Essen
Anind Dey, Carnegie Mellon University

Program Chairs
---
Thomas Seder, GM
Oskar Juhlin, Interactive Institute & Stockholm University

April 2009 - Aware Home - Aware Care

Last week I presented on our CAPSIL project during a workshop on Opportunities in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Geron-technology. The focus of this 2nd Workshop was on the Users Perspective and how Ireland can build a competitive advantage in the emerging AAL market.

Speaking during the session on "Emerging European Trends for Inclusive AAL Solutions" the attendees were able to hear from three of the European Coordinated Actions in this space on their "Road Mapping" activities and suggested frameworks for AAL Development.

For more details visit the workshop website:
"AWARE HOMES | AWARE CARE
Opportunities in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Geron-technology
Building Competitive Advantage in the Emerging AAL Market
2nd Workshop - The Users Perspective
Date | Tuesday 7th April 2009
Time | 8.30 - 5.00pm
Venue | Nursing Building, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Co Louth

Europe's ageing population is a challenge for our job market and its social and health systems. But it is also an economic and social opportunity. By 2020, 25% of the EU's population will be over 65. Spending on pensions, heslth and long-term care is expected to increase by a factor of three by 2050. However, older Europeans are also important consumers with a combined wealth of over €3,000 billion. "