Aaron Quigley's News and Blog

Trading Consequences blog post

2012-01-29T16:31:00.001Z

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

Jan 2012 - New Grants, Research Fellow and PhD Scholarships

2012-01-14T19:36:00.003Z

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

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

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

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

Short Papers HCI 2012

2011-12-21T16:46:00.001Z

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

From the main call:

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

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

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

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

The dates for submission for each paper track are:

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

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

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

Call for MobileHCI 2012 Tutorials

2011-12-16T22:13:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

Submission Instructions:

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

Timeline:

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

We look forward to your submissions!

2012 Tutorial Chairs

Pervasive 2012 - Doctoral Consortium

2011-12-01T08:27:00.009Z

The Pervasive 2012 doctoral consortium provides a collegial and supportive forum in which PhD students can present and defend their doctoral research-in-progress for constructive feedback and discussion. The consortium is guided by a panel of experienced researchers and practitioners with both academic and industrial experience. It offers students the valuable opportunity to receive high-quality feedback and fresh perspectives from recognized international experts in the field, and to engage with other senior doctoral students.

Applicants should be far enough into their PhD research to have identified the salient issues and appropriate research methodology, as well as achieved some results. Preference will be given to applicants who are at a stage where they have completed some portion of the research but are still at a stage that will still permit them to incorporate feedback received at the consortium into their planned PhD research.

Format

The doctoral consortium will be a seminar-style event taking place the day before the main Pervasive 2012 sessions. Time will be allotted to each student for a brief research presentation, and for in-depth, constructive discussion amongst the panellists and other participants. In order to allow for sufficient depth of discussion, the number of accepted participants will be limited to ten.

For the 2012 Pervasive doctoral consortium we aim to include a number of new features including a panel session. The short "Ask a PhD" panel session is a free-form question-and-answer discussion in which the consortium panellists will share their advice and experiences regarding such topics as going on the job market, international career paths, academic versus industry career paths, post-docs versus permanent positions, job offer negotiation, and other topics of relevance to PhD students. This session will serve as a capstone event to the consortium, allowing students to reflect and consider important career issues together.

Submission

Submissions (of up to 5 pages) should be formatted according to the guidelines of Springer's LNCS format. A maximum of 4 pages should be devoted to the Research Summary, described below and 1 page for the students biographical sketch, also described below. The topic scope for submission to the doctoral consortium is the same as those listed in the Pervasive 2012 call for papers. Submissions should consist of the following:

Research summary describing the work in progress, and including a 100 word abstract. Things to consider for inclusion in the research summary are:
- the expected contribution to the field;
- the original idea or thesis statement;
- the problem domain and the specific problem addressed;
- a brief overview of related work;
- the methodological approach;
- research carried out and results so far.
All research summaries should also outline what work remains to be done for the dissertation and indicate the plan for completion.
Student biographical sketch, including the names and affiliations of the research advisor(s), the date that the student began the PhD programme, and the expected date of completion.

All submissions should be made using the PCS submission system.

All submissions will be reviewed by the DC chairs and consortium panellists. If accepted, an applicant may be asked to make minor clarifications and edits to their research summary before the final camera-ready version is due. The accepted doctoral consortium submissions will be published in the adjunct proceedings of the Pervasive 2012 program.

Critical Dates

March 16, 2012 (23:59 EST): Submission deadline
April 13, 2012: Author notification
May 4, 2012: Camera-ready deadline

Doctoral Consortium Chairs

Elaine M. Huang, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Aaron Quigley, University of St. Andrews, UK

November 2011 - Editorial: Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science

2011-11-10T15:40:00.003Z

Aaron Quigley
Editorial: Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science Computers 2011, 1(1), 1-2; doi:10.3390/computers1010001
- published online 10 November 2011

For the past seven decades, computers have radically changed the world we live in. From machines for calculation, computers are now platforms for information processing and computation, supporting the entire spectrum of human endeavour. While computer science is a relatively young field, it is shaping how people live in our modern world. There is not an area of human society that has not been affected by computers and the power they afford us. Computer science touches on every facet of science, art, engineering and economics. Its impact ranges from electronic commerce to improved medical devices; and from enhanced communication to new forms of media and entertainment. The future, with ubiquitous computational power and natural user interfaces, will extend and enhance all human capabilities. To reach this future we need to quickly and freely disseminate our cutting edge research results globally, and this journal aims to help us achieve that.

See full welcome to this new journal here -

Quigley, A. Welcome to Computers––A New Open Access Journal for Computer Science. Computers 2011, 1, 1-2.

October 2011 - Challenges in Information Visualisation

2011-10-08T14:00:00.003+01:00

I gave a seminar in the School of Informatics in the Univeristy of Edinburgh on October 7th 2011 on the topic of the Challenges in Information Visualisation.

Information Visualisation is a research area that focuses on the use of graphical techniques to present abstract data in an explicit form. Such static (pictures) or dynamic presentations help people formulate an understanding of data and an internal model of it for reasoning about. Such pictures of data are an external artefact supporting decision making. While sharing many of the same goals of Scientific Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design and Computer Graphics, Information Visualisation focuses on the visual presentation of data without a physical or geometric form.

As such it relies on research in mathematics, data mining, data structures, algorithms, graph drawing, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, cartography, interactive graphics, imaging and visual design. In this talk Aaron will present a brief history of social-network analysis and visualisation, introduce analysis and layout algorithms we have developed for visualising such data. Our recent analysis focuses on actor identification through network tuning and our Social Network Assembly Pipeline, SNAP which operates on the premise of “social network inference” where we have studied it experimentally with the analysis of 10,000,000 record sets without explicit relations. Our visulisation has focussed on large scale node-link diagrams, small multiples, dynamic network displays and egocentric layouts. The talk concludes with a number of challenges and open research questions we face as researchers in using visualisation in an attempt to present dynamic data sources.

August 2011 Papers - UMAP 2011, MobileHCI 2011 and ASONAM 2011

2011-08-15T09:12:00.002+01:00

I recently presented a paper co-authored with Mike Bennett at Stanford University entitled “Creating Personalized Digital Human Models Of Perception For Visual Analytics” at UMAP 2011 in Girona, Spain, on Thursday July 14th.

You can see see a video of the user modelling anthem below.

Umer Rashid and I co-authored a paper with Jarmo Kauko and Jonna Häkkiläat at Nokia Research Center entitled “Proximal and Distal Selection of Widgets: Designing Distributed UI for Mobile Interaction with Large Display”.

It will be presented by Umer Rashid at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden on Friday September 2nd.

I also co-authored a paper with Michael Farrugia and Neil Hurely entitled “SNAP: Towards a validation of the Social Network Assembly Pipeline” which was presented by Michael Farrugia at the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, on Monday July 25th.

My civil partnership speech

2011-08-09T20:30:00.008+01:00

I would like to thank you, our friends and family for being with us here today on this next great stage in our journey through life together. I love Bradley so very much and I'm very thankful you were here to witness our Union. Or as Bradley's father put it "so we weren't living in sin any more". I'll try to keep this short, as I speak too often and perhaps too long as you all know.

Tonight there are many things I'm thankful for but I do have one regret and one hope for the future. So, firstly, I am very thankful that the surprise venue remained a secret. I hope the surprise was worth the wait? Keeping this a secret from all of you was quite difficult and stressful. We have come to realise that children love surprises but adults, not so much. So, again I wanted to thank all the staff of the Royal Scotsman, our photographers Huma and Matthew and all the staff at the Balmoral hotel from earlier today. Indeed there were many people who have helped make this such a special and memorable day. While myself and Brad were very excited about our civil partnership ceremony here on the Royal Scotsman and surprise for you. I can assure you that all the staff have been simply bursting with excitement!

As Brad said, I also wanted to thank our friends and family who have come from a great distance. We really appreciate your efforts in coming so far. Given the mystery and constraints we placed on you I wanted to complement everyone on how splendid you all look. I would like to thank my brothers Paul and Gavin for being here and my sister in law Mary. Thank you also to Mary's parents, my Aunt and Uncle Des and Phyl and cousins and friends for being here with us. Thank you, one and all.

Of course, my thanks go beyond simply today. I am very thankful for having Bradley in my life. As you might know Quigley men can be a little bossy and high maintenance. So finding someone to put up with me it quite the miracle. Finding someone like Bradley is, I think you will agree, a miracle squared. We are not very lovey dovey men, I think that's fair to say, but I think our love for each other runs very deeply beyond anything superficial. I will always remember what my brother Gavin said when he was married, that "his smile returned when he met Gillian his wife", who sadly cannot be here tonight. When I am away from home, sometimes I will think of Brad and a smile will brighten my face. Brad is that sort of man, just the thought of him will gladden your heart and bring a smile to your face.

Of course, I always say and firmly believe that one should never live life with any regrets. Sadly, I do have one regret. And that is, that my parents never got to meet Bradley. I have been very lucky to have Bradley's parents Steve and Gaile in my life who have treated me as their son, in every way. The kindness they have extended me is surely a sign of the great love and affection they have for Brad. Still, I do wish John and Noelle my parents could have met Brad and his family. I know my mother and Brad would have been as thick as thieves and ganging up on me, I'm sure! John and Steve would have found each other like minded men. And of course Gaile and Noelle, would have found each other as sisters who live continents apart. I like to picture my parents taking Brad under their wing as his parents have for me. Of course, I feel they are here with us and I think they would be proud I found someone like Brad to spend my life with. They might say, "he is the sort of man, all men should aspire to be". Kind and caring, considerate and courteous, sophisticated and stylish and of course, warm and loving.

Clearly, given the amount of time myself and Brad have known each other its safe to say that we haven't rushed into our decision today. Of course a combination of legal hurdles and our migratory lifestyle over the past 14 years means that here, in Scotland, is the first place we have been able to exchange vows in front of family and friends. Instead, wouldn't it have been nice, that like any other couple, we could have decided on the day we met perhaps to simply have eloped! Can't you just picture Brad eloping? No? Perhaps not?

Of course now, as I cast my mind back the 5032 days to when we first met in University I cannot be so sure that we would have eloped. We sat in the court yard of the students union in the University of Newcastle, quite the romantic spot and I proceeded to captivate Brad with my worldly advice and wisdom. Well, at least that's how I saw it. Brad on the other hand had to excuse himself three times to call Gaile with increasingly inventive excuses as to why he was coming home late, as she was to collect him at the train station. I was thinking, O he is dazzled. He was thinking, o, won't he shut up! Of course as Peter Pan said, all of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. Indeed, to this day I will still regale Brad with some of the same witty words and scandalous stories, thinking it's the first time I'm told him, only to be informed that no, I've heard this before, and yes, it was funnier the last time. O, dear.

So, to conclude. I think back to the gift I gave Bradley when he turned 21 the year after we met. In a book I gave him, I wrote the words of Mark Twain which seem appropriate to repeat now:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did.

So, throw off the bowlines.

Sail away from the safe harbor.

Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore.

Dream.

Discover."

The past 14 years have certainly been this, travelling to over 50 countries together and living in 5 countries on four continents. So to you Brad, I look forward to the rest of our lives together, for everything we have left to explore, for all the discoveries we are yet to make and for being there for each other to ensure our dreams don't go unfulfilled.

In the stormy seas of life you are my safe harbour.

Thank you.

(All of our photos are online and you can read a piece Sian Meades in the Times Weddings section wrote on us. There is a little more background on me here.)

July 2011 Professional Activities

2011-07-12T08:22:00.010+01:00

This year and next I will be,

a program committee member for the 7th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, CONTEXT’11, which will which will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany from Sept 26th to 30th, 2011

a program committee member for the 3rd International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, AutomotiveUI’11, which will be held in Salzburg, Austria, from Nov 29th to Dec 2nd, 2011

a program committee member for the 8th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, MobiQuitous 2011, which will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark from Dec 6th to 9th, 2011

a program committee member for the 6th International Conference on Tangible, embedded and embodied interaction, TEI 2012, which will be held in Kingston, Canada from February 19th to 22nd, 2012

a program committee member for the10th IEEE Pervasive Computing and Communication, PerCom 2012, which will be held in Lugano, Switzerland from March 19th to 23rd, 2012

I am co-chairing with Elaine Huang from the University of Zurich the Doctoral Consortium at the 10th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Pervasive 2012, which will be held in Newcastle, UK from June 19th – 22nd, 2012

June 2011 - Upcoming Summer School

2011-06-25T13:19:00.004+01:00

Some of the equipment for Summer School

You can see some of the Arduino and Kinect equipment we have for the summer school here starting on June 26th with an Arduino workshop. The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are proving a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a MERL Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.

http://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/2011/06/one-week-until-summer-school-in-st-andrews/

May 2011: How to Write a Good Review

2011-05-13T20:44:00.000+01:00

In Computer Science in St Andrews following an email from Professor Kevin Hammond in May 2011 on reviewing and the reviewing process we had a very fruitful discussion that I'd like to summarise for myself and my students here. Kevin is presenting on this topic, during the 2011 SICSA PhD conference in Edinburgh in May 2011. I'm going to continue to edit this page as I develop new insights or as ideas and pointers present themselves.

Given the nature of Computer Science, our conferences are a very important pathway for disseminating the results of our work. Other people, perhaps you, might disagree but this is how I see the field and I know it's how many others do too. As a result, conferences are very competitive with sub 20% acceptance rates being common. Written reviews, from independent reviewers, determine what is accepted for publication at a conference or in a Journal and "in the long run reviews have an impact upon other people's professional advancement and careers, and upon progress in the field." [1]

As I understand it, this is different than in other areas of the humanities and science where conference acceptance rates can be very high and "reviewing" conference papers before acceptance is an alien concept. As a result, many fields don't see papers in peer-reviewed conferences as high-quality scholarly articles. Whereas, in computer science, papers in peer-reviewed conferences are accepted as high-quality scholarly articles.

It's important here to draw a distinction between conference paper reviewing (which is often a "one shot" and affords the authors little opportunity to refute/address or improve the paper based on the reviews) and journal paper reviewing. The Journal review process is just that, a process, a rejection with reviews can be used to improve and address the comments (factual or otherwise) and the paper can be resubmitted. Indeed, the question of "Choosing a venue: conference or journal?" has been considered by others and is important to consider often and early.

The central questions as I see them are "how do I write a good review" and also "how do I deal with a review I feel is unfair". Many reviewers put in thankless hours of work in writing detailed and helpful reviews. It's our job as academics to accept and use these reviews to make our work better. We shouldn't just ignore reviews (negative or positive). Many of us have seen the same paper resubmitted to another venue without any of the review comments being addressed. This is frustrating for reviewers and turns the review process, which should improve the work, into a game. I feel we collectively need to push against this (regardless of how unfair/unjust/incorrect/inappropriate we feel the reviews received might be). A unfair review can be addressed in a rebuttal process (such as in CHI) or in a new submission or by making all reviews public. This is of course an area of active discussion. For example, as Mirco noted the ACM have a document on Rights and Responsibilities in ACM Publishing which looks at the area from a range of viewpoints from author to reviewer to conference chairs and Journal editors.

Whatever the case, writing a good review is an important skill and here are the thoughts and reflections of others on this topic.

Reading a computer science research paper (PDF) Computer Science
How to review a systems paper (PDF) Computer Science
How NOT to review a paper (PDF) Computer Science
The task of the referee (PDF) Computer Science
The Task of the Referee (ACM paper) (PDF) Computer Science
How to review a paper (full text html) Physiology (PDF download)
How I review an original scientific Article (full text html) Respiratory

I'm going to reflect further on this and extend my own thoughts on this here in due course.

For now, take writing a review as a serious matter, give yourself enough time to read and reflect on the paper(s). I often read the papers quickly when I first get them then a few days/weeks later in more detail. This two phase process is really helpful in keeping my comments and thoughts in scope to the conference/journal. It's also important to help me determine comments on the research done rather than the research I wish they had done. These are not the same thing and I think a lot of people forget this in their role as a reviewer. Saleem suggest that we should always "include references to related work" in reviews as appropriate, instead of simply alluding to "past work" or "this has been done". It's important to learn to appreciate the reviews we get (and acknowledge them as appropriate) and not simply dismiss them.

When receiving a review, read it. If your work is accepted, consider the reviews a way to make your paper that much better in the final version so people read, use and cite it! (getting it published is only the first step, making it have impact is another job). If rejected, read the reviews. If there is no rebuttal, wait a few days, then read the reviews again (with your co-authors) and discuss what you can take from the reviews to improve the paper. Break the review down into aspects of style, substance, new work, errors etc. Then decide how to use the review to your benefit. One poor review out of three can be frustrating but three out of three suggests you might be doing something fundamentally wrong in the presentation or experiments etc. Of course this isn't always the case, and there are famous examples of ground breaking papers being rejected as evidence that peer-review doesn't work. We must acknowledge peer-review is a human activity and as such is inherently fallible.

In summary, if asked to write a review, if you are too busy say no but if you say yes take the time to do it well. When you get reviews, read them, use them and learn what from them what you find useful or things you wish to avoid in your own reviews.

Apr 2011: Applications open for Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism

2011-04-05T13:07:00.002+01:00

Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism

SICSA Summer School

St Andrews, Scotland, June 27th - July 1, 2011

Summer School Website: www.sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt

The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation.

We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are providing a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.

In addition, Ben Arent a leading interaction designer based in Dublin has agreed to host (subject to sufficient interest) a day long Arduino workshop for interested participants on Sunday June 26th.

Seminar Topics

Multimodal Interaction for Digital Tourism
Multimodal Interaction with the Android platform
Creating Engaging Visitor Experiences in Museums and Heritage sites
Multimodal Interaction with spatial data
Speech-driven, hands-free, eyes-free navigation
Haptic Tabletop Interaction for Digital Tourism
Natural language generation for Multimodal Interaction
Mobility as a challenge for interaction design, Tourism as a special case
Multimodal Augmented-Reality Interaction for Digital Tourism
Designing context aware-systems

Speakers

Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow
Tristan Henderson, University of St Andrews
Eva Hornecker, University of Strathclyde
Antonio Krüger, Saarland University
William Mackaness, University of Edinburgh
Miguel Nacenta, University of Calgary
Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
Antti Oulasvirta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews
Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart

The deadline for applications to attend is May 3rd, with notifications by May 9th. Participation is limited to 30 and we expect a mix of both national and international participants. The registration fee is £450, which covers four nights of accommodation (Mon - Fri) in St Andrews, breakfast, lunch, dinner and summer school materials. Also included is a welcome reception and farewell dinner. An optional Arduino workshop (with Sunday night accommodation) is an additional £70.

The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) is providing 16 grants to cover the £450 registration fee for PhD students from most Scottish Universities. See SICSA website for details: http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/

See the summer school website for a full programme, biographies of speakers and full details for applications: http://sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt

The school is directed by Aaron Quigley (University of St Andrews), Eva Hornecker (University of Strathclyde), Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh) and Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow).

Apr 2011: Call for bids to host Pervasive 2012

2011-04-01T11:57:00.003+01:00

The Steering Committee of the International Conference on Pervasive Computing
is calling for proposals to host Pervasive 2012 the Tenth International
Conference on Pervasive Computing. The Ninth International Conference
on Pervasive Computing, is coming to San Francisco in June 2011 and its
registration is now open at http://www.pervasiveconference.org/2011.

Pervasive 2011 and ISWC 2011are co-located conferences. For 2012, in
agreement with the ISWC steering committee, we welcome proposals to
continue this association. Proposals to host Pervasive 2012 alone, or
Pervasive 2012 co-located with ISWC 2012, or other novel in-association
proposals will all be considered. Decisions on the ISWC 2012 component
of any bid remains the remit of the ISWC steering committee. We would
suggest groups or associated groups working in Pervasive and Wearable
Computing would be interested in a bid to host the co-located conferences.

We are dedicated to being an international conference series and we seek to
alternate the venues for the conferences between different areas of the globe
– Europe, Middle East and Africa, North/Central and South America and Asia
or the Pacific region. The conference is typically held in May and care should
be taken to avoid date conflicts (with regard to the conference dates and
submission deadlines) with the following international conferences:
UbiComp, CHI, INTERACT, UIST and MobileHCI.

The Steering Committee welcomes proposals for hosting and organising the
2012 Pervasive Computing conference from active members of the pervasive
computing community. And the deadline for proposals is April 21st, 2011 where
selected bidders are encouraged to attend Pervasive 2011 this year in June.
If you are interested in bidding we encourage you to review this document
as there are a number of changes you will want to be aware of.

We are also pleased to announce that the Steering Committee of the UbiComp
Conference Series and the Steering Committee of the Pervasive Computing
Conference Series are in the process of forming a Joint Steering Committee.
We expect the final decision on bids to be taken by this new
Joint Steering Committee.

Proposals should be as detailed as possible.
Please include the following information in a proposal:

* name and contact details for lead proposer(s)
* proposed location and details about possible venue(s)
* potential dates when the conference can be held
* description of the conference (technical program, workshops, demos,
student volunteers, etc.) – this may be similar to previous years,
though any proposed differences in the program should be highlighted.
* biographies of the lead organisers, including general chair(s),
local chair(s) - including details of past conference involvement
* while a full list of roles is not expected please include members of
the community who have indicated their willingness to serve in
various roles (workshop chairs, demo chairs etc).
* conference program chairs are nominated in cooperation between
the chosen conference chairs and the steering committee. We of
course welcome proposals with suggested program chairs.
* a detailed budget including expected registration rates
* details of sponsorship, either committed or expected
* previous conference rates are available online showing rates in
Ireland, Germany, Canada, USA, Australia and Japan
* details of any local conference management, support,
organisation you expect to engage

The three most recent Pervasive Conferences were in Japan, Finland and the USA.
However, for 2012 we are open to accepting bids from anywhere.

If you are interested in hosting Pervasive 2012, please submit a proposal
not later than Apr 21, 2011 to aquigley@cs.st-andrews.ac.uk
We would like to express our thanks to previous and current steering
committees of Pervasive and UbiComp whose call text we have
adapted to make this call.

Any member of the steering committee is happy to advise
prospective hosts before a proposal is submitted.

Yours,

Aaron Quigley,
On behalf of the Steering Committee of the Pervasive Computing Conference Series

A.J. Brush, Microsoft Research, USA
Hans Gellersen, Lancaster University, UK
Anthony LaMarca, Intel Research, USA
Marc Langheinrich, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews, UK
Hide Tokuda, Keio University, Japan
Khai Truong, University of Toronto, Canada

Mar 2011: £600,000 Smart Tourism Grant

2011-03-31T13:32:00.001+01:00

Professor Jon Oberlander at Smart Tourism launch event March 29th

Along with colleagues from across SICSA we have been awarded a grant valued at up to £600,000 from the Horizon Fund by the Scottish Funding Council towards the cost of the SMART Tourism project on digital tourism translational research. There are many academic and industry partners involved in this project and we hope this is a first step towards a more sustained and broad based engagement between industry and academia in this area. Within SACHI this programme will closely align with our upcoming summer school of multi-modal interfaces for digital tourism and ongoing digital tourism related research.

The 13 SMEs in the project are technology SMEs with an interest in tourism challenges around Scotland’s visitor attractions. They range from AmbieSense in Aberdeen to Eagle Gardens in Kelso, and from SymetrIQ in Glasgow to Loc8 Solutions in Edinburgh. Commenting on the project, the lead academic Professor Jon Oberlander noted, "The project is built around challenges identified by key stakeholders who operate significant visitor attractions, especially Historic Scotland, Festivals Edinburgh, and Glasgow City Museums. Global ICT players are partnering with us, providing cash and in-kind support: NCR, Microsoft and Google are all on engaged." The academics involved in this project are from across the SICSA (Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance) SFC-funded research pool.

SICSA is a collaboration of leading Scottish Universities. Our aim is to work together to consolidate and develop Scotland's position as an international research leader in informatics and computer science (ICS). In Scotland, we have one of the five biggest top-quality research clusters in ICS in the world, with more than 200 world-class academic researchers. We are the foremost cluster of ICS research in the UK: about a sixth of the very best research output comes from Scotland. Smart Tourism helps implement our Knowledge Exchange strategy, which aims to inspire, equip and nurture researchers in Scotland, at all levels, so that they can make a greater economic and social impact.

A dedicated website for this project will come online in due course.

Feb 2011: Workshop calls for position papers published

2011-02-24T13:04:00.001Z

SACHI (http://sachi.org.uk/) members are organising two workshops in conjunction with the 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction in Newcastle on July 5th 2011. Aaron and Miguel are co-organisers for the workshop on Coupled Multi-display Environments (MDEs) in Classrooms (PPD'11) you can find the call for papers here. Tristan is co-organising the Health, Wealth and Identity Theft: designing and evaluating usable privacy and security mechanisms for online happiness workshop, the website is here.

Feb 2011: IDEAS Executive Committee membership

2011-02-15T11:03:00.000Z

I have been invited to join the IDEAS Executive Committee as the external member, and will contribute to guiding the strategic direction of IDEAS. IDEAS is a new multi-disciplinary research centre encompassing the disciplines of Engineering, Computing, Architecture & Built Environment and Art & Design.

Feb 2011: Expert Board Membership: BRAID

2011-02-01T13:01:00.000Z

Aaron Quigley from the SACHI research group has been appointed an expert board member for the EU FP7 coordinating action called BRAID. Prior to joining the University of St Andrews he was the director for the HITLab Australia one of the project partners in BRAID. He was part of the team which successfully applied for the BRAID grant in 2009. He was previously the coordinator for the EU FP7 project CAPSIL in the University of College Dublin in Ireland. You can read more about this project here or visit the BRAID website.

Jan 2011: Editor-in-Chief for the Journal Computers

2011-01-31T10:00:00.004Z

I have been invited to serve as the founding Editor-in-Chief for the Journal Computers. Computers is an international, open access journal which provides an advanced forum for computer sciences. Computers is an online journal, with its Editorial Office located in Basel, Switzerland and a branch office in Beijing. The preliminary aims and topics are given at http://www.mdpi.com/journal/computers/about/.

Dec 2010 - Two Journal Papers: Visualisation and Usability

2010-12-09T21:43:00.001Z

Along with Julie Doyle and Brian O'Mullane we have had our paper on "Usability by Proxy – Killing 2-N Birds with One Stone?" accepted to the Journal of Usability Studies. A controversial paper we look forward to its publication stimulating follow on research and debate.

Abstract:
Usability testing is a critical part of the design process for applications, which can require many iterations of testing with, often-times, many different groups of users. As such, the cost of testing is typically significantly high. In this article we propose a new UEM to address this problem, which we call Usability by Proxy. Usability by Proxy involves studying usability measures with a cohort at one level of expertise or ability to identify the expected values at the next level of expertise or ability. In this article, we begin the process of evaluating the effectiveness of this method through a usability study of the BioMOBIUS™ biomedical research platform, an application with intended usage by both biomedical engineers and clinicians. We ask whether testing usability with each specific user group is beneficial in identifying additional significant usability problems, or whether the costs in terms of time and resources outweigh these potential benefits

Along with Michael Farrugia we had had our paper on "Effective temporal graph layout: a comparative study of animation versus static display methods" accepted to the Journal of Information Visulisation. Again, this is a paper which turns some conventional wisdom in dynamic display on its head, in a small scale study followed up with a larger online study. Again, we look forward to this paper stimulate follow on work and the realisation of new forms of dynamic information display.

Abstract:

Graph drawing algorithms have classically addressed the layout of static graphs. However, the need to draw evolving or dynamic graphs has brought into question many of the assumptions, conventions and layout methods designed to date. For example, social scientists studying evolving social networks have created a demand for visual representations of graphs changing over time. Two common approaches to represent temporal information in graphs include animation of the network and use of static snapshots of the network at di erent points in time. Here we report on two experiments, one in a laboratory environment and another using an asynchronous remote web based platform, Mechanical Turk, to compare the e ciency of animated displays versus static displays. Four tasks are studied with each visual representation, two characterise overview level information presentation, and two characterise micro level analytical tasks. The results of this study indicate that static representations are generally more e ective particularly in terms to time performance, when compared to fully animated movie representations of dynamic networks.

Nov 2010 - Ambient Displays and Changing Behaviours - (Yvonne Rogers - Dec 8)

2010-11-12T11:58:00.003Z

Last week Umer Rashid, one of my graduates students presented at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010. Umer recently moved to St. Andrews after completing an internship with Nokia Research. Thanks to his very pro-active nature we were able to arrange for Yvonne Rogers to come and visit us in St. Andrews for a day in December. Along with meeting researchers and graduate students working in HCI she will be presenting a very interesting and timely seminar.

Ambient Displays and Changing Behaviours

"Choice Moments: Can Ubiquitous Technology Change People's Everyday Behaviour?"

Date/Time: ~~December 8th 2010~~ (Postponed due to weather)

Location: School of Computer Science, University of St. Andrews

Abstract

It is well known that when making a decision – be it buying food, choosing what to wear or even selecting a partner – people often ignore most of the available information in the environment and rely instead on a few important cues. At the same time, recent surveys have shown that people are becoming increasingly aware of the consequences of their decisions, and want to know more about what they buy, consume or wear. How can we help people make more informed decisions given their tendency to make snap judgements? In my talk, I will describe a new genre of mobile, social and ambient devices that are currently being developed to change people’s behaviour.

Biography

Yvonne Rogers is a professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Computing Department at the Open University and directs the Pervasive Interaction Lab. She is also a visiting professor of Informatics at Indiana University (where she was from 2003-2006). Yvonne is internationally known for her work in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work and has published widely in both. She is interested in new paradigms for computing, especially ubiquitous, pervasive, and tangible interfaces. A particular focus is augmenting everyday learning and work activities with novel technologies. This involves designing enhanced and engaging user experiences through using a diversity of technologies, including mobile, wireless, handheld and pervasive computing. With colleagues she edited the influential report on Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020. From 1992-2003 she was at the former School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at Sussex University. She has also spent sabbaticals at Apple, Stanford University, University California San Diego, and the University of Queensland in Australia.

Sept 2010 - HCI 2010 Dundee, UK

2010-11-12T11:50:00.000Z

In Sept I attended HCI 2010 24th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction.

Ben Shneiderman kicked off the conference with a keynote on Getting Serious About Social Media:  Strategies for Increasing Civic Participation  . He also spent sometime covering some of his past research which you will be familiar with if you know his work. He demonstrated a number of points drawing examples from his recent book "Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World" [1]. The following day his co-author Marc Smith tweeted a link to a NodeXL layout he produced overnight showing "Connections among the Twitter users who recently mentioned #HCI2010 when queried on September 8, 2010 scaled by numbers of followers".

1. Hansen, M., Shneiderman, B, and Smith, M. A., Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (2010).

He is clearly now impassioned about social participation [2] and specifically getting the HCI community to advocate and lobby government on the various challenges we face. He has run a couple of workshops on "Technology-mediated social participation". The website has details of the events along with links to various position papers. As these comes from people working at funding agencies and industry they are worth a read.

[2] Preece, J. and Shneiderman, B., The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating technology-mediated social participation, AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction 1, 1 (March 2009), 13-32, available at http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5/

Sept 2010 - iHCI 2010 Dublin, Ireland

2010-09-10T10:52:00.005+01:00

I recently attended the fourth Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference iHCI 2010, which took place at Dublin City University on September 2nd & 3rd 2010. Along with serving on the program committee for iHCI, I also chaired a session during the conference. Usefully, the proceedings are available for you to download in pdf. Of the student papers presented on the first day, I enjoyed hearing about the work of Ingi Helgason from the University of Edinburgh Napier on "Interaction design: learning from new-media art". I will be tracking this work based on my own interest in Public and Private display systems (see for example our latest PPD10 workshop).

On the afternoon of the first day we had an industry session co-organised by the IxDA Dublin and Limerick. Ben Arent from the IxDA Dublin will be uploading some videos (to their IxDA Dublin YouTube channel I suspect or here) from this day. If you want to know when these videos are online, follow Ben on twitter. In this session I was pleased to hear an update from Hilary Kenna of the IADT on the NDRC Vizi project which I help found when based in UCD Ireland. This project seems like a lifetime ago now but development has moved on of course. "Vizi is an online platform to facilitate the contextualisation of statistical data in realtime using dynamic visualisation technology. The ultimate objective of this project is to unlock the value of data by creating a platform that will enable users to visualise, manipulate and track data in a way that is meaningful for them. The resultant dynamic visualisations can then be used to investigate causal relationships to influence decision and policy making with evidence based conclusions." I've not been involved in the project (which used to be called DVIZ) for a while but I'm glad to see the work is progressing to the next stage of commercialisation.

Richard Harper at iHCI 2010

The second day of iHCI2010 started out with a Keynote from Richard Harper a Principal Researcher in Socio-Digital Systems at Microsoft Research entitled "Do we communicate too much". A very good question for me as I tweet and even write this blog! Richard's abstract states, "In this talk I will reflect on contemporary human expression when it is often said that everyone is suffering from communications overload. I will ask how we might measure communication, and draw a contrast between different ways of doing so." In this image Richard refers to his new MIT Press book "Texture Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload" (Richard H. R. Harper) coming out in November. If you are interested in the threads, seams, weaving, interweaving and our fabric of day to day communication, then this book will be of interest to you (well it is to me). As Keynotes go, this was excellent, it provoked many discussions during the rest of the conference and even in the days and week afterwards.

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.

Cognitive Load Theory and mLearning

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.

Aug 2010 BCS Interaction Specialist Group

2010-08-16T11:03:00.000+01:00

"Founded in 1984, Interaction (or the BCS Interaction Specialist Group) is a specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society (BCS). It provides an organisation for all those working on human-computer interaction - the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of technologies for human use."

In moving to my new role in St. Andrews I've joined the executive of the BCS Interaction Specialist Group. I'm looking forward to taking an active role in both this group and more broadly in promoting interest in next generation HCI challenges across the UK.

My own focus in Human Computer Interaction is on bridging the digital-physical divide. We live our lives in a physical world. I contend the current generation of human computer interfaces are very limited in their support for heads up, face to face or face to world interaction as apposed to the heads down interfaces as we currently have. The range of mobile (handheld or tablet/pad), laptop/netbook and desktop interfaces focusses our heads down and away from the world around us. As a result, many day to day tasks or even forms of work are poorly supported by access to appropriate digital information. Myself along with my students are exploring a variety of ways in which we can bridge this divide, bringing digital information into its context of use in our physical world. This is the theme of my research in the University of St. Andrews.

HCI2010
6th - 10th September Dundee

As part of my involvement with this BCS group I will be attending the 24th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction - HCI2010 in Dundee this September. This year the conference has as its theme, Play is a serious business. I would certainly agree with this theme. As we move beyond mere usability issues, interfaces must be engaging, persuasive and even elicit an emotional attachment if we want people to love using them, not simply suffer them.

I expect to attend the following workshop on the 6th of September, East meets West: Challenges and opportunities in complementary approaches to HCI. Experience suggests the approach to research (funding/publication/direction/style/graduation etc.) can be markedly different between the east and west. While this can be over emphasised, I'm looking forward to this workshop to help scratch beneath surface of this.

The conference itself runs from Wednesday the 8th until Friday the 10th of September and again this will be an excellent opportunity for me to become familiar with the breath of HCI work across the UK, while reconnecting with colleagues old and new.

On the 7th September my PhD student Jakub Dostal will present an outline of his multi-modal research questions, aims and plans at the HCI2010 Doctoral Colloquium at the University of Abertay Dundee. It is a great opportunity for him and impressive as he made his submission to attend the DC on his first day here in the University of St. Andrews. I hasten to point out he has been developing the ideas for a number of months while a visiting student in HITLab Australia the University of Tasmania. I don't expect all my students to be ready to submit for a doctoral colloquium on their first day of postgraduate study.

Jakub will give a 20-minute presentation of his work to a panel and the other participants. I expect he will be completing a dry run of his presentation here in St. Andrews on August 31st.

July 2010 - International Workshop on Mobile Collaborative Augmented Reality

2010-07-28T10:37:00.003+01:00

I'm been invited to serve on the program committee for a very interesting workshop on mobile collaborative augmented reality which is part of ISMAR 2010. I've been interested in AR for a number of years as a means to bridge the digital physical divide. While we have many methods for bring digital information down into our physical world currently our means of bringing information into the digital is limited to mobile, desktop, gaming interfaces and sensor systems. While we look at new means of bringing the digital into our physical day to day life (such as MobileAR, which can overload us) we do need to explore methods to ease the movement of information from our physical world (without burdening people in the provision of input or obtrusive sensing).

"Mobile Augmented Reality For Art Interaction" (image from thesis)
by Laurence Judge University College Dublin Ireland

"Augmented reality is a direct or indirect view of real world scenes in which physical objects are annotated with, or overlaid by computer generated graphics. The past two decades have seen a fast growing body of research and development dedicated to techniques and technologies for augmented reality. In particular, advances in hardware and networking have made possible a wide use of augmented reality for remote collaboration. However, in order to develop systems that are truly useful and comfortable for end users, many challenges need to be addressed first.

Two of those challenges include handling environmental constraints and understanding human needs. The former requires that systems can handle ever changing real word conditions to be continuously functional, while the latter requires that systems are constructed in ways with which end users can work effectively and comfortably. To address these challenges, we invite you to a one-day workshop on research issues specific to mobile augmented reality for remote collaborations.

This workshop aims to bring industrial and academic researchers together and to provide a platform to foster discussions among participants on the current state of art and future directions for mobile collaborative augmented reality. The workshop will be held on October 13, 2010 in Seoul, Korea, in conjunction with ISMAR2010. We solicit high quality research and position papers for the workshop. Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by our highly regarded international program committee members. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Currently we are investigating the possibility of including the proceedings in ACM or IEEE Digital Library, and inviting selected papers for a special issue of a journal."

Please see the website at http://research.ict.csiro.au/conferences/collaborative-augmented-reality/ for more details.

July 2010 - First week as a Professor - From Golf to New Jobs and EU funding

2010-07-16T17:18:00.005+01:00

So today is the end of the first week in my new role as Professor in the Chair of Human Computer Interaction at the School of Computer Science in St. Andrews University Scotland. While it's been a relatively quiet week within the University it's been a hectic time outside as the Golf Open Championship started here on Thursday. On Tuesday I was invited to attend an Open Golf Graduation where Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Padraig Harrington were awarded Honorary Degrees by the University in a public ceremony. In the past I've not been a great fan of such degrees but having seen the event myself, the caliber of the recipients and the nature of the honorary degree I think I was wrong about such awards. Thankfully the campus closes down for two days to help facilitate the tournament. Given the traffic and numbers in town I think this is the wise (and financially opportune) thing to do.

As for the University, it's well and true enmeshed within St. Andrews itself. It's an idyllic setting overlooking the sea, cliffs and beaches and is a quintessential University town. During the graduation ceremony I was able to sit beside two retired ladies from St. Andrews. Their knowledge and pride in the institution is a testament to the high esteem the people of the area hold the University in. Across the board I feel a sense of great academic and community pride throughout St. Andrews. It's difficult to pick out what is and isn't part of the University, so much so the whole place feels like the campus. However, my part of the University with Computer Science (shown to the right), Mathematics, Biomedical Science, Physics etc. is one of the few clearly defined "campuses" around. We are on the edge of the town where our teaching, research, office and lab space is more characteristic of a more modern campus. None the less, the character, caliber and ethos remains very much the same.

Along with the usual paper, reviewing deadlines and work on existing grants I've been getting settled in. I've assumed my teaching duties for HCI and Graphics along with coordination for Knowledge Transfer and as Honours project coordinator. I'm looking forward to the teaching where I hope to weave in some of the latest findings from CHI, UIST, ITS etc. And with graphics to explore the fundamental aspects while pushing into mobile and algorithmic methods to exploit more recent graphics hardware. The Knowledge Transfer role should be an interesting challenge. Moving research findings out to the broader community to encourage dissemination and impact creation. As part of this role I'm going to attend an FP7 (EU) Information and Communication Technologies Funding Day in Edinburgh on the 20th of July. I've been involved in a number of EU projects in the past and I think the range of EU opportunities affords us some timely knowledge transfer pathways.

Finally, my new school is seeking applications for a lectureship in human-computer interaction and a lectureship in Software Engineering which each have a closing date of 15 September 2010. The lectureship in human-computer interaction is funded by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA). "The overall objectives of SICSA are to build a world-class Scottish computer science research community and to promote cultural change so that researchers in Scotland work collaboratively rather than in competition. The SICSA research themes of Next-generation Internet, Multi-modal Interaction, Modelling and Abstraction and Complex Systems Engineering."

I'm looking forward to some fun and exciting times here.

June 2010 - MUM2010 and AutomotiveUI 2010

2010-06-14T10:31:00.000+01:00

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee for MUM 2010. This is "a leading annual international conference, which provides a forum for presenting the latest research results on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. The conference brings together experts from both academia and industry for a fruitful exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges".

The 9^th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2010) will be in Limassol, Cyprus, 1^st - 3^rd December, 2010. It is organized by Cyprus University of Technology and Frederick University, Cyprus. (website http://www.mum2010.org/)

I've also been invited to serve on the Program Committee for Automotive UI 2010 which will be held in Pittsburgh, 11-12 November 2010.

"In-car electronic devices are becoming ubiquitous. Drivers and passengers use these devices because they perceive them as providing a valuable service. Some of these devices, such as collision warning systems, assist drivers in performing the primary task in a vehicle which is driving. Others provide information on myriad subjects or entertain the driver and passengers. A problem that arises from the proliferation of in-car devices is that they may distract drivers from the primary task of driving, with possibly disastrous results. Thus, one of the three major goals of the Automotive UI 2010 conference is to explore ways in which in-car user interfaces can be designed so as to avoid distracting the driver while still providing a valuable service. This is a challenging task, especially given that the design of in-car devices, which was historically the responsibility of car manufacturers and OEMs, is now a shared responsibility between a large and ever-changing group of parties. This group includes the car manufacturers and OEMs, but also the designers of devices that are brought in to the car, such as portable personal navigation devices and MP3 players." (website http://www.auto-ui.org/10/)

May 2010 - Workshop on coupled display visual interfaces

2010-05-01T16:21:00.002+01:00

PPD’10 our workshop on coupled display visual interfaces has been accepted as a workshop of the 10th International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2010). This workshop will be on May 25th, immediately preceding the main conference on May 26-28th. The website for this workshop can be found here PPD10. A Media Release from the HITLab Australia on this workshop can be found here - January 31 International Workshop on coupled display visual interfaces.

May 2010 - Keynote Talk - IDEs for Pervasive Computing

2010-05-01T01:42:00.000+01:00

I have been invited to give a keynote talk at the First International Workshop on Programming Methods for Mobile and Pervasive Systems (PMMPS 10) which will be held in Helsinki, Finland on May 17, 2010 and is co-located with Pervasive 2010. The topic I have choosen for this talk is the Challenges in Producing Integrated Development Environments for Pervasive Computing. It's a topic I've been worrying about for a number of years and with my move to St. Andrews where there are world class Software Engineering and Pervasive Computing academics, it's something I hope to help address.
Integrated Development Environments or IDEs are single software applications that provide a comprehensive range of features to aid in the software development process. Features include the ability to author, edit, compile, test, debug and deploy software onto a range of target platforms. Moderns IDEs support developers creating software applications for desktop platforms, mobile phones, set-top boxes, and PDAs. However, Pervasive Computing or Ubiquitous Computing consists of a myriad of hardware, software, systems and services which act as the computational edifice around which we need to build systems to afford natural or “invisible” interaction styles. This is driven by the evolution from the notion of a computer as a single device, to the notion of a computing space comprising personal and peripheral computing elements and services all connected and communicating as required. Further complications arise when we consider the range of GUI applications which might be deployed which in some contexts may have access to 1 display and in others 10.

In this context, with varying hardware, software, services and sensors being available throughout the context of use for a particular "pervasive application", what challenges do we face in the development of suitable IDEs and is this even the correct paradigm? This talk will survey the approaches taken to date in this space and will seek to motivate a broader interest in the challenge of increasing developer productivity through IDEs which are not fragile to the vagaries of Pervasive Computing contexts of use.

Apr 2010 - Professor in the Chair of Human Computer Interaction

2010-04-09T14:38:00.007+01:00

I will be moving to Scotland in July of 2010 to start my new appointment as Professor in the Chair of Human Computer Interaction at the School of Computer Science in St. Andrews University Scotland.

"St Andrews (founded in 1411) is the oldest university in Scotland. It has won international renown for both research and education and consistently features among the highest ranking British universities in league tables compiled, for example, by the Times Higher Education Supplement".

"The School of Computer Science organises its research by working within small but highly motivated teams. These teams are often fluid, acquiring and losing researchers as the focus of interest shifts. To stimulate such a dynamic high-quality environment, the School’s research is organised into a three overlapping themes that cover four areas of theoretical and practical Computer Science:

Networked and distributed systems including computer networking, distributed systems engineering and systems architecture
Complex systems engineering including software engineering, system dependability, middleware and social informatics
Artificial intelligence and symbolic computation including computational algebra, computational logic, natural language processing, constraint programming, intelligent computation, automated reasoning and image processing."

The School is a host institution in the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), which is providing partial funding for my post (www.sicsa.ac.uk).

"The overall objectives of SICSA are to build a world-class Scottish computer science research community and to promote cultural change so that researchers in Scotland work collaboratively rather than in competition. The SISCA research themes of Next-generation Internet, Multi-modal Interaction, Modelling & Abstraction and Complex Systems Engineering."

Jan 2010 - Six PhD scholarships at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory Australia

2010-01-29T09:40:00.004Z

The Human Interface Technology Laboratory Australia (HITLab AU) is pleased to announce that applications are now open for 6 fully funded PhD scholarships within the lab starting in 2010.

The deadline for applications is Mar 1st 2010.

The topics of these projects include:

- Interactive Surface User Interfaces

- Tangible User interfaces

- Hybrid AR Tracking

- Mixed Reality for Digital Museums

- Digital Physical Gaming

We are looking for exceptionally well-qualified, motivated candidates who want to be part of the first phase of our development into a leading international research laboratory in interface technology research.

For more details please visit: http://www.hitlab.utas.edu.au/wiki/Jan_2010_PhD_Scholarships

Dec 2009 ISAmI 2010

2009-12-21T07:11:00.001Z

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

2009-12-10T14:40:00.001Z

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

2009-12-01T10:18:00.037Z

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

2009-11-29T10:57:00.033Z

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

2009-11-25T08:40:00.028Z

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

2009-11-21T20:23:00.000Z

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)?

2009-09-28T13:38:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-09T18:05:00.007+01:00

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 edice 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

2009-09-03T23:18:00.007+01:00

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

2009-09-03T21:42:00.008+01:00

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

2009-08-25T19:38:00.005+01:00

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

2009-07-13T09:59:00.016+01:00

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:

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?
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?
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).
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).
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".
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.
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.

2009-07-11T18:35:00.004+01:00

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

2009-07-02T16:04:00.001+01:00

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

2009-06-24T16:59:00.004+01:00

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

2009-06-15T22:46:00.012+01:00

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

2009-06-07T22:37:00.005+01:00

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

2009-06-05T15:26:00.004+01:00

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

2009-06-01T17:29:00.004+01:00

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

2009-06-01T00:20:00.007+01:00

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

2009-05-28T01:31:00.004+01:00

"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

2009-05-25T10:54:00.003+01:00

----------------------------------------------------------------------
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

2009-05-17T19:17:00.002+01:00

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

2009-05-13T02:32:00.008+01:00

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

2009-05-11T04:37:00.008+01:00

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

2009-04-20T22:27:00.005+01:00

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

2009-04-15T08:50:00.002+01:00

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. "

April 2009 - Face to face collaborative interfaces

2009-04-06T22:13:00.005+01:00

New Book Chapter

Myself and one of my Masters students Florian Bodea from last year had a chapter on our research on Face to face collaborative interfaces published recently in the book on Human-Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence by Elsevier [1]. This is edited by Hamid Aghajan, Stanford University, USA, Juan Carlos Augusto, University of Ulster, UK and Ramon Delgado, University of Granada, Spain.

Their description of the book states:
To create truly effective human-centric ambient intelligence systems both engineering and computing methods are needed. This is the first book to bridge data processing and intelligent reasoning methods for the creation of human-centered ambient intelligence systems. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book covers topics such as multi-modal interfaces, human-computer interaction, smart environments and pervasive computing, addressing principles, paradigms, methods and applications.

This book will be an ideal reference for university researchers, R&D engineers, computer engineers, and graduate students working in signal, speech and video processing, multi-modal interfaces, human-computer interaction and applications of ambient intelligence.

The Abstract of our chapter:

The presentation of information on large displays and their use to support collaboration in face to face activities has long been commonplace. Computationally enhanced displays relying on the form-factor of whiteboards, surfaces, tables, benches and desks now afford forms of face to face computer supported interaction and collaboration not possible with classical desktop or mobile computing. This chapter provides an introduction to the research and developments of multitouch input technologies which can be used to realise large interactive tabletop or “surface user interfaces”. Such hardware systems along with supporting software allow for applications which can be controlled through direct touch or multi-touch. Further, a review of gestural interactions and design guidelines for surface user interface design for collaboration are provided.

Key words: Tabletop, HCI, Surface User Interface, Gestural Interface, Design Guidelines

Quigley A and Bodea F., Face to face collaborative interfaces, Book Chapter in Human Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence, Elsevier 2009

April 2009 - Proceedings of LoCA 2009

2009-04-06T18:24:00.005+01:00

New Edited Proceedings

The Proceedings of LoCA 2009 are now online

Location and Context Awareness
4th International Symposium, LoCA 2009 Tokyo, Japan, May 7-8, 2009 Proceedings
Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Subseries: Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI , Vol. 5561
Choudhury, T.; Quigley, A.; Strang, Th.; Suginuma, K. (Eds.)
2009, VIII, 283 p., ISBN: 978-3-642-01720-9
[ Springer-Verlag Site ]

April 2009 - P2P (papers and conferences)

2009-04-06T16:13:00.015+01:00

New Book Chapter and New Paper

Daniel Cutting first got me interested in P2P computing with implicit group messaging while in Australia. We recently published a new book chapter together entitled Serendipity reloaded: fair loading in event-based messaging in the Handbook of Research on Advanced Distributed Event-Based Systems, Publish/Subscribe and Message Filtering Technologies together [5].

My new graduate student Neil Cowzer in UCD Ireland continues this research in new and interesting ways. His current focus is on addressing the needs of location based services across a P2P network. This is an area of cross over research for me between P2P and location and context awareness [4].

A Peer to Peer system consists of a number (typically very large) of networked computers (peers) which collectively perform an operation where each peer typically has equivalent capabilities and responsibilities. Given the proliferation of peer-to-peer file sharing systems, starting with Napster and more recently the BitTorrent protocol the term has become synonymous with just this activity.

However, the concept of peer to peer computing goes far beyond mundane file exchange. It is the subject of global research and development. These efforts are exploring the use of P2P systems for intensive tasks, globally scalable services and novel applications, that would typically be supported by central servers only. Examples of such applications include Joost (TV), Chinook, PAST, IGM (messaging), Skype (telephone) and SETI@home(research).

I wanted to pass on my congratulations to Neil Cowzer on having his first paper accepted at the 5th International Workshop on Collaborative Peer-to-Peer Systems (COPS 2009) for his paper on GeoIGM: a Location-Aware IGM Platform. In recent years, peer-to-peer systems have gained traction in a number of important areas including; file-sharing, VoIP and scientific research vehicles such as the Grid. In this paper we argue that this merely scratches the surface of the potential of peer-to-peer systems. We propose a novel peer-to-peer system, GeoIGM, well suited to the highly collaborative style of tagging and development of context-aware services, particularly with location[4]. With the provision of two fundamental operations; geographically-scoped multicasting and queries, GeoIGM eases the development of next-generation location-aware systems[1].

I also wanted to note the upcoming deadline in April for the Ninth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Systems from the 8 - 11 September 2009 to be held in Seattle, Washington, USA [2]. It's an excellent conference series with a range of research presented, from the highly theoretical in systems demonstrated though simulation alone to clearly applied, real-world results. I'm on the PC again this year and I look forward to an exciting range of papers to review. I'd also like to mention the deadline of next month for AP2PS the First International Conference on Advances in Peer-to-Peer Systems to be held on 11-16 October 2009, in Sliema, Malta [3].

The range of small focused workshops along with leading international conferences demonstrates the strength of research interest and activity in this area beyond the mundane applications noted before.

Cowzer N. and Quigley A., "GeoIGM: a Location-Aware IGM Platform", 5th International Workshop on Collaborative Peer-to-Peer Systems (COPS 2009)
P2P 2009 the 9th International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Systems from the 8 - 11 September 2009, in Seattle, USA
AP2PS the First International Conference on Advances in Peer-to-Peer Systems, 11-16 October 2009, in Sliema, Malta
Choudhury, T.; Quigley, A.; Strang, Th.; Suginuma, K. (Eds.), Location and Context Awareness, 4th International Symposium, LoCA 2009 Tokyo, Japan, May 7-8, ISBN: 978-3-642-01720-9, LNCS Vol. 5561
Cutting A and Quigley A, Serendipity reloaded: fair loading in event-based messaging, Handbook of Research on Advanced Distributed Event-Based Systems, Publish/Subscribe and Message Filtering Technologies, IGI Global 2009

April 2009 - Four invited Pervasive 2010 Workshops

2009-04-01T07:00:00.002+01:00

[ Download PDF ] [ Visit Workshop Website ]

Pervasive 2010, the 8th International Conference on Pervasive Computing will be held in Helsinki, Finland, 17-20 May.

As workshop chairs for 2010 we have decided the program will be different than in past years as invited projects, invited topics and a call for workshops will all form part of the 2010 program:

A number of leading and relevant large pan-European FP7 projects have been invited to host a targeted workshop during Pervasive 2010
Leading research groups have been targeted to develop workshops in areas that have been underrepresented in past Pervasive programs
A two-phased call for workshop proposals will be made across the research community.

If you would like to be added to the mailing list for this call, please email:
pervasive2010-workshops-list@cs.helsinki.fi

At this stage four targeted groups will be developing workshop programs for 2010. These workshops represent an opportunity for the Pervasive community to reach into new yet related areas while also connecting into large EU funded Pervasive projects.
Up-to-date information about the Pervasive workshops is available at http://www.pervasive2010.org

Workshop Co-Chairs

Aaron Quigley, University College Dublin, Ireland
Petteri Nurmi, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland

Invited Workshops

Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive Applications

Energy conservation is a growing area of interest for pervasive computing. Recently the problem of conserving energy through involvement of consumers has become topical. The multidisciplinary challenges for pervasive applications are numerous, including pervasive sensing of energy consumption, energy efficient infrastructures for sensing energy and users, and designing engaging applications that do not disrupt but support everyday activities.

This workshop follows a number of previous workshops on sustainability as a general theme at Ubicomp and Pervasive conferences. This is the first workshop focused on energy awareness and conservation that brings together research excellence from Far East (Japan) and Europe.
Organizers

Adj. Prof. Giulio Jacucci, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland
Prof. Tatsuo Nakajima, Waseda University, Japan
Prof. Marko Turpeinen, KTH, Sweden
Prof. Luciano Gamberini, University of Padova, Italy
Prof. Anna Spagnolli, University of Padova, Italy

Multimodal Location Based Techniques for Extreme Navigation

Location-based data and services for geographical and navigational information (such as electronic maps and GPS directions) are usually presented using visual displays. With the increasing complexity of information, and the variety of contexts of use, it becomes important to consider how other non-visual sensory channels, such as audition and touch, can be used to communicate necessary and timely information to users. Activities such as running, rock-climbing and cycling, are all examples of activities where navigational and geographical information may be needed, but where the visual modality is unsuitable. Additionally, there are a number of user groups such as visually impaired people and the emergency services, who also require non-visual access to geo-data. This workshop will provide a forum for sharing research
ideas and findings about new interaction and perceptualization metaphors, novel application contexts, multimodal and context-aware technologies for mobility – thereby creating a solid foundation for further exploration of pervasive extreme navigation.

Organizers

Assoc. Prof. Charlotte Magnusson, Lund University, Sweden
David McGookin, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Margarita Anastassova, CEA, LIST, France
Wilko Heuten, OFFIS, Germany
Arantxa Rentería, Robotiker-Tecnalia, Spain
Prof. Susanne Boll, University of Oldenburg, Germany

Pervasive Personalisation

Personalisation is intrinsic to many of the core goals of pervasive computing. The workshop will address the broad range of issues around pervasive personalisation that is based on an explicit user model. One set of key areas concerns the ways that pervasive computing can inform the content of such a model which may be used in the long term for a range of personalised applications. Another set of important topics concern the ways that the model is used for personalisation within a particular application. Common to both of these are the issues of privacy and security of the user model.

Organizers

Prof. Judy Kay, University of Sydney, Australia
Assoc. Prof. Bob Kummerfeld, University of Sydney, Australia

Ubiquitous Virtual Reality

This workshop on Ubiquitous Virtual Reality aims to bring together researchers working in both pervasive computing and mixed reality to explore the convergence on the two domains. Emerging new computing paradigms accelerate the convergence among different technologies and thus make the border between the real and virtual worlds indistinguishable. In addition, mobile (or handheld) devices with integrated sensors have been established as an important platform for both Pervasive Computing and Augmented Reality that have become part of our daily lives. The goals of the workshop are to: (1) better understand the concept of "mobile AR life in dual spaces" (2) identify research issues that are unique to "mobile AR life in dual spaces" (3) aid those developing possible new applications by sharing ideas and designs.

Organizers:

Prof. Mark Billinghurst, HITLabNZ, New Zealand
Prof. Woontack Woo, GIST, Republic of Korea

Mar 2009 Holiday! What holiday?

2009-03-27T18:48:00.016Z

March 15 - 21st was a week of CAPSIL events in the USA which I've blogged about previously. The week after was intended as a family holiday week. However due to various deadlines and upcoming events I had to slot in some work tasks along the way. Looking back at what I did this week made me realise I accomplished more "work" tasks during my holidays than most people do in a good work week. Normally I try to disconnect but I think this blend of holiday activity and work (during travel times) worked out quite well. Sweden is a big place so there were lots of opportunities while travelling from A to B.

Ice Hotel

The first part of the week was spent in Kiruna mainly at the Ice Hotel. We got to go hiking, dog sledding, sleeping in our Ice Room and drinking in the Ice Bar along with other activities. Some of these pics are below.

FP7

During the week I worked on the final versions of my contributions to an EU FP7 grant submission. Along with colleagues in 8 European countries we are submitting a request for a new support action. Some late evenings were required and work on trains and flights but the new workpackages look very strong.

COST action

In parallel to the FP7 submission I also submitted a pre-proposal to the COST framework. Following a number of past events and special journal issues a set of academics around Europe and the world came to the realise we need the support a COST action can offer to help develop the field of multi-device surface user interfaces. A Surface User Interface is a class of user interface that relies on a self illuminated (e.g. LCD, PDA or iPhone) or projected horizontal, vertical or spherical interactive surface (e.g. a touch-screen or video wall) tied with the control of computation in the same physical surface. New applications with interfaces that transcend one device onto a class of other devices (i.e. multi-device surface user interfaces) are now emerging. When one considers applications that support multi-device, multi-touch or multi-hand (e.g. an iPhone working with a Microsoft Surface or a PDA working with a public touch-screen) then the underlying interface assumptions break down. There are real problems in terms of knowledge of suitable design, seamless operation, coupling, gesture interaction, middleware, interaction design, usability study and evaluation. Sharing and documenting knowledge for all around these problems is the central goal of our very timely proposal. Take for example Ann Morrison in HITT who has been involved in the FP6 Integrated project on Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments called IPCity. Last year she presented some of their group work at PPD08 in Naples and with a support like this COST action we can have student and researcher exchange to work with their very novel systems and setup in Helsinki. This is but one example of the many projects ongoing in this space.

Spring Summit Umeå Institute of Design

Later in the week, thanks to a tweet from an Interaction Designer I hired for TRIL on the Umeå Institute of Design I discovered they were having a conference called "Sensing And Sensuality" the day I was in town. This spring summit 2009 was held on Friday March 27, 2009 at 10:00 and was hosted by the Umeå Institute of Design & Tellart. Sadly I couldn't attend the entire day but I got to hear some very interesting presentations from speakers including, Mikael Wiberg on “Interaction & Textures”, Matt Cottam from Tellart & Rhode Island School of Design and Lennart Andersson on “Industrial Design meets Interaction Design”. There were many pragmatic design solutions presented along with a number of artistic endeavours. Having just come from the Ice Hotel in Kiruna I wasn't convinced by Mikael Wiberg's talk on their work with the Ice Bar in Copenhagen "Purity with a twist". The idea is interesting but blending low-res led displays with the amazing ice cut from the Torne river struck me as Neanderthal Man making "art" on cave walls with stone. It's art but this attempt to blend the digital and the physical is sadly misguided. There was also too much focus on the invisibility of pervasive systems. As a community I think we have come to realise we need "invisibility in action" not literal invisibility to progress our user interfaces. Other talks on interaction design and industrial design struck a better cord with me.

Research Assistant

[ Academic Jobs EU advert ]

My advert for a new research assistant also required my attention during this week and went live towards the end of the week.
I am looking for a Research Assistant for a 20 month period to work on 'Tabletop, Mobile and Interactive Surfaces". This is a funded research project and based in UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics working with me based in the Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory.
This project forms the first part of a phased program of research exploring the role of tabletop computing along with coupled public and private displays in rehabilitation, gaming and computer supported corporative work. The research assistant is expected to explore questions posed by the project lead and other team members. A large component of this post will be the development of research prototypes, using off the shelf development toolkits along with contributing to our open source developments in this area. Strong programming skills along with the ability to work with software and hardware co-design. The research assistant is further expected to support and maintain the tabletop physical hardware systems in place within the CASL along with developing new forms of system is called upon in the course of this research.

LoCA 2009

Over the past two weeks I've been working with Springer Verlag on getting the final copy correct for the proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA) which will be held on May 7–8, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan. Location and context awareness are fundaments to next-generation mobile and pervasive computing systems. Pervasive computing is a model of computing in which computation is everywhere and computer functions are integrated into everything. The ultimate aim is to make information, applications and services available anywhere and at anytime in the human environment in a fluid manner appropriate to our current context. In addition to working on the final copy of the proceedings I announced our keynote Dr. Atsushi Shionozak's title and abstract on our website. The title of his keynote will be From PlaceEngine to Location Amplifier: Rolling Out Commercial Location Based Services.

Overall

So the lesson is I need to leave my laptop at home if I want to relax I suppose? However, given these deadlines and the fact I'm involved in collaborative research efforts this week required me online. The other way to look at this is I need to take more holidays to boost my productivity!

Mar 2009 New Pervasive and Autonomic Research Papers

2009-03-16T20:48:00.009Z

Congrats to my postgraduate student Ross Shannon and postdoctoral colleague Emil Vassev on their recent success with 3 new papers from our group.

Ross is coming towards the end of his doctoral studies. His emerging interest in pervasive advertising [ 1,2 ] stems from his desire to explore novel methods in the commercialisation of his research after his PhD.

In this regard Ross, along with some of his peers, are taking part in a Campus Company Development Programme this year around "pervasive advertising". The NovaUCD Campus Company Development Programme (CCDP) is a part-time enterprise support initiative designed to suit the timetable of busy researchers and academics. It comprises a mix of practical training and consultancy support including 12 half-day workshops, one-to-one advice and consultancy meetings, and a series of networking events.

Ross will already be in Japan along with myself and others from the SRG in UCD as we have a full paper in the main conference [ 5 ]. Ross is already an accomplished entrepreneur with some of his web endeavours having thousands of visitors per week [ 3 ].

Emil joined us here in UCD late last year and is already making his presence felt with numerous new collaborations and many research papers submitted. Emil will be going to the NASA Ames Conference Center, Moffett Field, California, USA to present [ 4 ] our paper related to his research in Autonomic Computing with Lero.

Shannon R. and Quigley A., "From intrusive to supportive: recommendations for pervasive advertising", proceedings of the Pervasive 2009 workshop on Pervasive Advertising, Nara Japan, May 2009
Shannon R., Stabeler M. and Quigley A., "Profiling and targeting opportunities in pervasive advertising", proceedings of the Pervasive 2009 workshop on Pervasive Advertising, Nara Japan, May 2009
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/
Vassev E., Hinchey M. and Quigley A., "Model Checking for Autonomic Systems Specified with ASSL, Proc. First NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM 2009), National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Clear A.K., Shannon R., Holland T., Quigley A., Dobson S., and Nixon P., "Situvis: A Visual Tool for Modeling a User's Behaviour Patterns in a Pervasive Environment", in proceedings of Pervasive 2009, the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 11-14, 2009 in Nara, Japan.

Mar 2009 Hiring a Surface Computing research assistant

2009-03-13T09:18:00.004Z

(updated March 13th 2009)

Research Assistant – Human Computer Interfaces
Post Duration 20 Months

A Research Assistant is sought for a 20 month period to work on 'Tabletop, Mobile and Interactive Surfaces", a funded research project and based in UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics with Dr. Aaron Quigley based in the Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory. NOTE: The formal advertisement for this will go online in the coming weeks so I will update this post with links to the UCD advertisement and application process then.

This project forms the first part of a phased program of research exploring the role of tabletop computing along with coupled public and private displays in rehabilitation, gaming and computer supported corporative work. The research assistant is expected to explore questions posed by the project lead and other team members. A large component of this post will be the development of research prototypes, using off the shelf development toolkits along with contributing to our open source developments in this area. Strong programming skills along with the ability to work with software and hardware co-design. The research assistant is further expected to support and maintain the tabletop physical hardware systems in place within the CASL along with developing new forms of system as called upon in the course of this research.

Recent developments have seen the wide spread proliferation of both large shared displays and small display technologies. In parallel we have seen the emergence of new classes of device which support both touch or multi touch interaction. Examples of small touch driven devices include PDAs, Tablets and iPhones and examples of large interactive surfaces (mutli-touch driven displays) include the Diamondtouch and Microsoft Surface Computing. Interactive surfaces offer great potential for face-to-face work and social interaction and provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects whereas small devices afford the individual a personal workspace or "scratch space" to formulate ideas before bringing them to a wider audience. Advanced visual interfaces can be built around a combination of both private and public touch driven displays. Such computer mediated multi-device interaction between local touch-driven displays and shared public ones presents a number of novel and challenging research problems.

The Research Assistant will work under the direction of the Project Leader, Dr Aaron Quigley. Candidates for the position must have an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or Computer Engineering. Demonstrated experience with hardware or image or video processing is a plus. The post would suit an exceptional recent graduate or a graduate with 1-3 years development experience. Given the highly specialised nature of this research, candidates are not expected to have development experience with tabletop or surface computing, however demonstrated experience with the development of novel or exceptional user interfaces is a plus.

Candidates should have very good research skills, an ability to work independently to a tight schedule, and experience in writing and editing reports. The appointment may begin on the 1st of June 2009. The project will be managed by Dr. Aaron Quigley and collaborations with CLARITY researchers may form part of this project going forward. The annual salary for this post is €26,000 - €29,000 per annum.

Please note that although the job is based in Dublin there will be opportunities to travel for conferences and collaborative activities elsewhere (travel and accommodation provision will be made for this.)

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

Responsible for the development of demonstrator or proof of concept prototypes will tabletop systems.
Responsible for maintenance, support and development of the tabletop hardware systems in this project.
Responsible for developing high quality code (suitable for open source release), as well as stand-alone proof-of-concepts and prototypes on mobile platforms (eg. iPhone).
Responsible for developing multi-device (coupled) applications software and robust prototypes.
Writing standards-compliant APIs.
Work with other team members, including postgraduate, postdoctoral and researchers as directed by the project lead.

Selection Criteria
Mandatory

Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or Computer
Engineering.
Strong programming skills.
Excellent communication skills.
Strong understanding of interfaces.
The ablity to adapt to changing priorities and to thrive in a fast-paced work environment.
Fluency in the English language.

Desirable

Experience with hardware or image or video processing.
Understanding of basics of Usability, Human Computer Interaction, and Design Guidelines.

Mar 2009 NCOA Panel Las Vegas

2009-03-10T19:03:00.003Z

[ See Details ] Along with colleagues from around the world we are having a panel on Technologies for Successful Aging at the Aging in America Conference in Las Vegas on March 17th. While my family and friends are enjoying St. Patrick's day in Ireland, I'll be busy at work at this conference and panel! I will also be busy with a series of one on one meetings on the 16th and morning of the 17th with researchers and others interested in our roadmap and CAPSILs of knowledge. I'm seeing at least one St. Patrick's festival event in Dublin before I leave.

This panel represents an opportunity for you to learn more about "Technologies for Successful Aging" from leading experts from the USA, Japan and Europe (EU). Members of the CAPSIL consortium along with representatives of the European Commission will present state of the art overviews on technology for the EU, US, and Asia. CAPSIL is an EU "support action" which is developing a series of "CAPSILs" see [ Wiki ] of knowledge along with a technology detailed roadmap for future research to achieve effective and sustainable solutions to independent living. This panel session will also provide you an opportunity to hear more about this roadmap along with posing questions to the panel on current and future directions.

Panel Members:
Dr. Terry Dishongh, Intel - Digital Health Group, USA
Prof. Shuji Hashimoto, Waseda University, Tokyo Japan
Prof. Holly Jimison, Oregon Health and Science University, USA
Dr. Benjamin Knapp, Queen's University, Belfast UK
Prof. Misha Pavel, Oregon Health and Science University, USA
Dr. Aaron Quigley, University College Dublin, Ireland
Peter Wintlev-Jensen, European Commission, eInclusion directorate, Brussels, Belgium

Agenda:
Welcome and CAPSIL overview
State of the art technology review - USA
State of the art technology review - Japan
State of the art technology review - Europe
CAPSIL roadmap for future research
Question and Answer Session

This panel session is an action of CAPSIL and International Support of a Common Awareness and Knowledge Platform for Studying and Enabling Independent Living.

Mar 2009 Dviz hiring two more staff - Deadline March 20th!

2009-03-09T22:55:00.001Z

Detailed advert links

Web Developer (n-tier)

Ref: : 5/09
Location: : The Digital Hub - Central Dublin
Rate: € 47.7 to € 54.6 K (permanent)

Front –end Web Application Developer

Ref: : 6/09
Location: : The Digital Hub - Central Dublin
Rate: € 47.7 to € 54.6 K (permanent)

Mar 2009 Keynote talk ruSMART 2009 St.Petersburg, Russia

2009-03-08T19:17:00.005Z

I've been invited to present a keynote talk at the 2nd Conference on Smart Spaces ruSMART 2009 to be held from the September 15-16, 2009 in St.Petersburg, Russia. This event is co-located with The 9th International Conference on Next Generation Wired/Wireless Advanced Networking NEW2AN 2009. The topic of my talk is Ubiquitous computing User Interfaces, next generation effects and challenges.

Keynote “Ubiquitous computing User Interfaces (UUI)”, Dr. Aaron J. Quigley (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Abstract

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. Ubiquitous Computing or UbiComp consists of hardware, software, systems and services which act as the computational edifice around which we need to build our user interfaces to afford natural or “invisible” interaction styles. This is driven by the evolution from the notion of a computer as a single device, to the notion of a computing space comprising personal and peripheral computing elements and services all connected and communicating as required. This presentation discusses research and developments in the realisation of User Interfaces for UbiComp and in particular Smart Spaces. Examples are drawn from research and development groups around the world who are exploring mobile and embedded devices in almost every type of physical artefact including cars, toys, tools, homes, appliances, clothing and work surfaces.

Mar 2009 Session Chair Pervasive 2009

2009-03-08T19:03:00.003Z

I've been asked to be a session chair on Navigation during Pervasive 2009. This is the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing which will be held May 11-14, 2009 in Nara, Japan. This session includes papers I'm looking forward to hearing more about including, "Realistic Driving Trips for Location Privacy" by John Krumm, "Enhancing Navigation Information with Tactile Output Embedded into the Steering Wheel" by Dagmar Kern, Eva Hornecker, Paul Marshall, Albrecht Schmidt, Yvonne Rogers, "Landmark-Based Pedestrian Navigation with Enhanced Spatial Reasoning" by Harlan Hile, Radek Grzeszczuk, Alan Liu, Ramakrishna Vedantham, Jana Kosecka, Gaetano Borriello.

This annual conference is the premier forum for researchers to present their latest results in all areas related to architecture, design, implementation, application and evaluation of pervasive computing. My colleague Albrecht will chair the session our paper is in on the final morning of the conference.

Read more about the program or register for the conference.

March 2009 Higher Diploma in Computer Science UCD

2009-03-08T13:38:00.004Z

My two years as Director of the Higher Diploma in Computer Science in Computer Science and Informatics in UCD are now at an end and my colleague Dr. Eleni Mangina is now taking over this role. She, along with colleagues in CSI are re-launching the HDip in Computer Science with some new and innovative aspects for the 2009 programme. If you have any questions on this new program please contact: csi.secretary@ucd.ie.

Thanks to all the lecturing staff for their help and students who have undertaken the Higher Diploma over the past two years. As always, many of these students have gone onto great things with several now undertaking postdoctoral study in UCD.

March 2009 CAPSIL events in the USA

2009-03-08T12:55:00.003Z

From March 16th - 20th the CAPSIL consortium comes together in the USA for several leading events we have organised to reach out to the independent living research and development community and the US based policy and funding bodies. We are doing this by having events from panel sessions with members of the European Commission to small meetings between the European Commission, CAPSIL and US funding agencies. I fly to Las Vegas on the 15th and then to Washington DC on the evening of the 17th, I fly back to Dublin on the evening of the 20th, so it's a packed week of events.

On the March 17 at 1-2pm in Bally's – Las Vegas 4 (South Tower - Third Floor) CAPSIL with host a panel session on Technologies for Successful Aging. This panel is part of the Aging in America conference, the 2009 Annual Conference of the American Society on Aging and the National Council on Aging. This panel includes an Overview of CAPSIL, State of the Art of Technology in Aging in the EU, US and Asia along with our Roadmap – Recommendations for the Future.

From the 18th to the 20th of March the CAPSIL consortium comes together in Washington DC for our 4th General Assembly, 4th working session along with a very large program of events with US based funding and decision makers. Our 3 days of events are being hosted at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville Maryland.

The CAPSIL consortium will be holding our 4th general assembly during this time along with further time devoted to roadmap development. Over the course of three days CAPSIL will host bilateral meetings between representatives from the EU with representatives from the US. Those from the EU include, members of CAPSIL, representatives of the Delegation of the European Commission in Washington DC, representatives of the European Commission, Information Society & Media D-G and representatives of the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme. Those from the US for example include, representatives of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), specifically the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Further meetings with the NSF and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering will happen during this three day period.

The goal for these bilateral meetings is to further understand the activities underway in each area focussed on independent living supported by technology and to strengthen the opportunities for EU and US researchers to collaborate. There are many funded and unfunded research and development programs in the EU, US and Japan and if the agencies can aid, rely and build on each others efforts then the collective efforts of not just one region but all can be brought to bear on the challenges in independent living.

Mar 2009 Pervasive Advertising. "A sin by any name"?

2009-03-05T19:40:00.004Z

Myself and my co-chairs Jörg Müller, Albrecht Schmidt and Bo Begole are currently busy reviewing the submissions to our Workshop on Pervasive Advertising in conjunction with Pervasive 2009 to be held on May 11, 2009 in Nara, Japan.

I've been amused by one of the negative reactions the idea for this workshop has already generated. The aim of this workshop is to allow people to come together to "build a community to forecast and create the upcoming era of advertising in pervasive information environments."

This community will allow for the full and frank discussion of all aspects of advertising both positive and negative which will be possible as further advancements in pervasive information environments come to pass. As people knew Spam would come with email, banner/blinking/adwords with the web we can clearly predict advertising, in some form will come hand in hand with the wide-spread deployment of devices, displays, services which form the edifice of future pervasive computing environments. Ignoring this fact won't make it go away, discussing it to ensure appropriate measures to allow us to opt-in or out, government regulation, self-directed policy etc. is the responsibility of our research community.

The trend toward such infrastructure is already taking place. This article drew my interest as it states that "The market for Digital Signage is set to grow rapidly over the next few years. A recent report by MultiMedia Intelligence predicts that the digital signage market will more than double in size by 2012 to consume 2.3 million displays, having grown by 34% from 2007 to 2008 to 1.1 million displays." [1] "Digital Signage" is a clear example of the ubiquitous infrastructure required to realise many of the pervasive computing scenarios we envisage for the future. However, without a discussion aorund their use, first and foremost in advertising we cannot hope to understand how they might be used in alternate contexts.

If this topic is of interest to you I encourage you to submit by May 1, 2009 one-page submission to allow you to join the workshop as a participant.

IBC points the way in digital signage

Mar 2009 Dviz hiring two more staff

2009-03-04T15:48:00.004Z

The Dviz project is a collaborative digital technology research project between Twelve Horses, IADT and UCD, and is funded by the NDRC [ more blog posts ]. This project brings together a diverse skill set from both its commercial partner and institutional research teams to realise an innovative visualisation platform with strong commercial potential. [ Vacancies PDF ]

Applications are invited for appointment to the following two year fixed term contract posts:

Web Developer (n-tier) Ref: 5/09
Front–end Web Application Developer Ref: 6/09

Inclusive salary scale: €47,675 to €54,642 (5 points)

Further details on the above posts are available on our website www.iadt.ie or by contacting: The Human Resource Office, Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Kill Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin. Telephone: (01) 239 4601, Fax: (01) 239 4700, Email: recruitment@iadt.ie

Applications by way of letter of application highlighting your key competencies, skills, knowledge and experience to date which you believe match those required to successfully deliver on the responsibilities of the post holder should be submitted not later than: 12 Noon, Friday 20th March 2009. A copy of your current Curriculum Vitae should also be submitted with your letter of application. Late Applications will not be accepted IADT is an equal opportunities employer.

[ IADT Website ] [ Vacancies PDF ]

Advert to appear in print on Friday (click to see larger version):

March 2009 Cloud Computing

2009-03-03T16:20:00.009Z

As part of our applied research project Dviz I've been building up an understanding and appreciation of the incredibly over-hyped area of cloud computing. However, for Dviz it is important as it allows us to develop a scaleable approach to the delivery of the infrastructure. Dviz is a collaborative digital technology research project between Twelve Horses, IADT and UCD, and is funded by the NDRC. This project brings together a diverse skill set from both its commercial partner and university research teams to realise an innovative visualisation platform with strong commercial potential.

Cloud computing refers to a style of computing in which resources are provided as a service over the Internet to users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure. The canonical example is Google Docs, a functional word processing office app delivered entirely via one's web browser [1]. The level of interest in Cloud Computing as an accessible service for the realisation of new web based applications has been growing over the past year with both academic research [6] and is also leaking into mainstream discussion [5]. Discussion on how the cloud will impact high performance computing [4] and other areas such as its use in Green IT are also ongoing.

Quote: "Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT." [4]

Some of the different application areas where cloud computing might make an impact include [2]:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Storage-as-a-Service
Data-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service

UCSB & IBM T.J. Watson Research five-layer grouping.

Discussions on cloud ontologies have come to light that provide a great starting point for taxonomy discussions [3].

References:

Feb 2009 - LoCA program chair meeting and decisions

2009-02-27T00:20:00.008Z

Myself and Tanzeem Choudhury from Dartmouth College are the program chairs for the Fourth International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness to be held in Tokyo Japan from the 7-8 May 2009. LoCA 2009 is colocated with Pervasive 2009 the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, which will be held May 11-14, 2009 in Nara, Japan.

A total of 77 abstracts and 54 papers were submitted to LoCA 2009 and after careful peer review by the program committee and discussion by the chairs, 18 papers were selected to form what we feel is a high-quality program. Best paper and presentation awards will be presented during the symposium. And all accepted papers will be contained in the symposium proceedings which will be published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer.

While we had more good papers than we could accept, those in the program will form an exciting and engaging research program for everyone who attends LoCA 2009. Some of the terms and expressions (adapted a little to preserve anonymity) used in the reviews of these accepted papers include:

"New Concept", "Novel Concept", "An interesting novel idea"
"...the research jumps head-on into a large open problem"
"...strong rigorous evaluations which are well written and well argued"
"...the authors offer insightful descriptions"
"... well written, well explained, and thoroughly evaluated research contribution that is quite relevant for ..."
"... an interesting paper, well-presented and -evaluated and addressing an important problem."
"..the paper makes good use of state-of-the art techniques to solve the problem of ..."
"..I think this is a real problem of interest to the community"

Peer review can be a both upliftting and shocking process but the tireless efforts of all those on the LoCA PC are to be very much commended as hundreds of reviews had to be written to help select just 18 papers.

Dr.Shonozaki of Koozyt (PlaceEngine) will be a Keynote Speaker for LoCA 2009 and the early bird registration for LoCA 2009 is March 5.

I would like to thank all the members of the PC, our reviewers, general and local chairs and in particular my program co-chair Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury for a very smooth, professional and high quality peer-review process for LoCA 2009.

東京でお会い

Feb 2009 Clique Strategic Research Cluster funded: €3.56 million

2009-02-25T23:35:00.007Z

I am one of the six principal investigators for Clique which was announced by the Irish Tánaiste as an Science Foundation Ireland funded (SFI) Strategic Research Cluster. Our industry partners, in this joint initiative are IBM, Idiro Technologies and Norkom Technologies. Our academic partners are UCD and DERI in Galway. Clique runs from 2009 - 2013 and has a focus on the analysis and visualisation of large graphs and networks, specifically social and biological networks. This is a very exciting development for my research as it will allow me to hire a number of postdocs and postgraduates but more importantly to work in a research eco-system with domain experts, industry partners, rich data sources and collaborators interested in various aspects of the end-to-end problems in visual analytics.

Many of the Clique team will be based in the UCD CASL

While these companies are providing matching funding and resources the SFI is providing €3.56 million over the course of 5 years. In total with industry and SFI funding the program has funding in excess of €5 million. The academic principal investigators involved are, Prof. Pádraig Cunningham, Prof. Denis Shields, Prof. Brendan Murphy, Dr. Aaron Quigley, Dr. Neil Hurley and Dr. Conor Hayes. The funding will be used to hire postdoctoral researchers and pay postgraduate scholarships.

The development of this research cluster has been a long time in the making. I've been an IBM visiting scientist since 2005 and others have been collaborating with Idiro and Norkom over a number of years. This cluster was first proposed over 1 year ago when 40 similar clusters were proposed to the SFI. The process to select these five from the forty has included a preliminary expression of interest (then review), full detailed proposal (then reviews), site visit (international panel), SFI review and board review and final the official announcement by the government! It's a very rigourous process aimed to ensure the best research is funded, the value for the Irish tax payer is strong and the potential for industry is high.

I look forward to blogging about new team members, new research ideas, papers, outputs and commercilisation in the years to come!

[ Read SFI News Release ]

"SFI Strategic Research Clusters (SRCs) will help link scientists and engineers in partnerships across academia and industry to address crucial research questions, foster the development of new and existing Irish-based technology companies, and grow partnerships with industry that could make an important contribution to Ireland and its economy.

The SRC programme has been designed to facilitate the clustering of outstanding researchers to carry out joint research activities in areas of strategic importance to Ireland (in ICT and/or BioTech sectors), while also giving the time and resources to attract and cultivate strong industry partnerships that can inform and enhance their research programmes."

Feb 2009 CHI Workshop and Surface User Interfaces

2009-02-25T01:58:00.000Z

I just blogged about Surface User Interfaces on the "Evaluating new interactions in healthcare" blog. We have a paper [1] on "Design Patterns" at this workshop during CHI which this blog is being used to support. While I don't think I can attend the workshop myself as I have trips to the USA, Sweden, Germany and Australia in the next two months my colleague Julie Doyle will attend. My PhD student Ross Shannon will also attend to present our paper on "Time Sequences" during the work in progress at CHI in Boston.

Figure 1: SharePic photo sharing system [3]

[1] Doyle J., Quigley A. and Nixon P., "Do Pattern Languages help us Structure Evaluations in Healthcare Technologies?" proceedings of the CHI 2009 Workshop on Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare: Challenges and Approaches, Boston USA, April 2009.

[2] Shannon R., Quigley A. and Nixon P. (2009). Time Sequences. In CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY. (in press)

[3] Apted, T., Kay, J., and Quigley, A. 2006. Tabletop sharing of digital photographs for the elderly. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 781-790.

Feb 2009 Just for Ross

2009-02-24T21:45:00.000Z

Just for Ross, one of my PhD students, I've moved to some proper
blogging software. Previously I used Feeder, a mac based software app,
which I was very happy with. However, this didn't allow for linking,
commenting etc.. hence wasn't really "blogging" instead mere note
taking. So after migrating 160 posts to blogger (o, by the way blogger
thanks for making this impossible to do automatically) here I am
emailing my blog this post! If this mail2blogger actually works I will
be well impressed.

Thanks also to Umer for taking the time out to demo a visualisation
application on our MERL Diamondtouch multi-touch surface. I will be
posting more on this as we develop our tutorial program for http://www.tis2009.org/ TableTop 2009

Feb 2009 Program Committee P2P 2009

2009-02-21T23:30:00.000Z

I've been invited to join the PC for the P2P 2009 the Ninth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Systems from the 8 - 11 September 2009 to be held in Seattle, Washington, USA. I've been to a number of P2P conferences over the years and also served on a number of past program committees. It's an excellent conference series with a range of research presented, from the highly theoretical in systems demonstrated though simulation alone to clearly applied, real-world results.

"Topics that relate to Peer-to-Peer systems, Peer-to-Peer applications, Grid systems, large-scale distributed systems, and overlay networks are open for consideration. Experience with applications, and papers with the potential to open up new directions for research are especially encouraged.

Topics of interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:

* P2P applications and services
* Performance and robustness of P2P systems
* Commercial applications
* Security in P2P systems
* Self-organization in P2P systems
* P2P information retrieval
* Higher-level query support in P2P systems
* Semantic overlay networks and semantic query routing in P2P systems
* Trust, Reputation and Fairness in P2P Systems
* Cooperation and collaboration in P2P systems
* Overlay architectures and topologies
* P2P overlay interaction with underlying infrastructure
* Overlay monitoring and management
* Social networks
* P2P systems over mobile networks
* Delay-tolerant P2P systems
* P2P workload characterization and simulation
* P2P economics
* P2P grids "

[ Read More ]

Feb 2009 Program Committee, Conference on Smart Spaces

2009-02-18T23:29:00.000Z

I've been invited to join the PC for the 2nd Conference on Smart Spaces ruSMART 2009 to be held in St.Petersburg, Russia from September 15-16, 2009. I like the outline for this event and topics it covers. The program from 2008 also looks very good.

"Recent advances in the field of wireless networks have moved them beyond their traditional areas of application to a much broader scope. They form a space where users can access a number of wireless technologies to interact with various services. Similarly, existent and future services form a space providing an unlimited set of possibilities ranging from browsing to interactive video conversations. All these layers form a smart environment that can harmonize a number of technologies at each architectural layer to provide the best user experience.

This conference will explore and explain the scope and challenges of smart spaces. In this regard, the conference aims to bring together research professionals from diverse fields including but not limited to wireless communication, ubiquitous networks, software development, multimedia, services, and business in both academia and industry.

The 2nd Conference on Smart Spaces ruSMART 2009 will take place on September 15 - 16, 2009. It will be co-located with the 9th International Conference Next Generation Wired/Wireless Advanced Networking NEW2AN 2009. ruSMART proceedings will be published by SpringerLNCS in joint volume."

[ Read More ]

Feb 2009 Open posts for Clique Research Cluster

2009-02-16T23:29:00.001Z

I am one of the principal investigators for the Clique Research Cluster in Graph, Network Analysis and Visualisation based at University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland, Galway.

We are inviting applications for the following posts and funded PhD positions:

Senior postdoctoral researcher (UCD ref 003756)
Postdoctoral researcher in probablistic network modelling (UCD ref
003755)
Postdoctoral researcher in analysis of information diffusion in social networks (NUIG-Clique-02)
6-8 funded PhD studentships to address research challenges in
- anomaly detection
- biological network analysis
- computational techniques in network analysis
- information visualisation
- models of information flow
- probabilistic network models.

Please note, the closing date for this round of applications is 8th
March 2009. Please see the Clique Cluster vacancies page for more details.

Feb 2009 CHI 2009 Work In Progress paper

2009-02-16T23:28:00.001Z

Congrats to Ross on having his work in progress paper accepted to CHI 2009 to be published as an extended abstract.

Shannon R., Quigley A. and Nixon P. (2009). Time Sequences. In CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY. (in press)

Feb 2009 Chartered IT Professional (CITP)

2009-02-05T23:27:00.000Z

I'm now a Chartered IT Professional (CITP). Which is a professional certification awarded under a UK Royal Charter to IT professionals by the Council of the British Computer Society.