Aaron Quigley's blog

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 wit…

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 organisati…

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 qu…

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 …

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 …

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 p…

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…

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 challen…

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 mo…

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 field…

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. Wh…

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 thei…

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 N…

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.

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 …

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 present…

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…

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, machi…

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. W…

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 summ…

"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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
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 …

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; Distrib…

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, conte…

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…

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 interf…

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 healt…