The remainder of the second day included both a poster paper session and three research paper sessions. During the poster paper session my PhD student
Jakub Dostal presented our poster on "There Is More to Multimodal Interfaces than Speech, Vibration and Position: State of the Art in Multimodal Interfaces for People with Disabilities". This poster is based on the findings from
A Survey of Multimodal Systems for Disabled Users (PDF) he published as a technical report from the Human Interface Technology Laboratory Australia (
TR001) in July 2010. This survey is the initial literature review from the early stages of his doctoral work. Jakub was successfully awarded a Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (
SICSA) scholarship earlier this year. SICSA has four themes, one of which is
multi-modal interaction. Both myself and Jakub are looking forward to collaborating with the wider body of SICSA multi-modal research community in Scotland.
Some of the research papers which prompted interesting thoughts for me included "Considering prior experience and expectation in automotive safety system development" by Christopher Wilkinson for the University of Cambridge, UK and Alan Dix from the Lancaster University, UK. The use of haptic feedback prompted me to recall an earlier blog post on the "
haptic jingle". The use of such feedback for notification, while difficult to sense, is an interesting use of haptics for conveying key state information (which cannot be easily ignored). A second paper of interest was entitled "Now You See It, Now You Don't: The effect of wiki flexibility on anxiety during wiki editing" by
Benjamin R. Cowan and Mervyn A. Jack from the University of Edinburgh, UK. This is an interesting paper which studies how Wikis are used in Higher Education. Given my use of Wiki's in projects including
CAPSIL and
BRAID along with a moo, discussion board, Moodle, Blackboard etc. this talk resonated with me. I pointed Ben towards this recent book on "
The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age". The concepts and issued raised in this book are relevant to the use of Wikis. In addition, as a co-created book the history of the book development itself is interesting with respect to who feels ownership along with details on the final text lock down and edit prior to print. The final paper I was taken by was entitled "Designing Interaction for a Multi-touch Wall" by Chen Wang (National University of Defence Technology, China), Hyowon Lee, Alan F. Smeaton (Dublin City University, Ireland). This area is a significant challenge as large public multi-touch, multi-person systems move from research lab based prototype to real world deployments.
Congratulations to the folks from DCU for organising iHCI 2010, in particular
Daragh Byrne who put in considerable effort. I'd like to see iHCI grow and prosper as a national conference in HCI for Ireland.