So, the time for my Inaugural Lecture has rolled around. Not the nine year wait I’d feared but not the month after I started as I’ve been here two years now. At the end of this October I’ll present my Inaugural Lecture entitled, Human Computer Interaction: “Bridging the digital physical divide”. In this talk I’ll lay out what Human Computer Interaction is, and where research in HCI is taking us to bridge the digital physical divide. I’ll be giving a dry run of this talk in Dublin in mid Sept so if you cannot make it to St Andrews, please come along then!
Author Archives: admin
Aug 2012, Associate Chair CHI 2013
I’ve been asked to be an Associate Chair for the he 31st ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013). I’m looking forward to serving in this role.
July 2012, SICSA Deputy Director/Director Knowledge Exchange
From the 1st of August 2012 I will be the SICSA Deputy Director/Director of Knowledge Exchange in Scotland. SICSA is the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance and is a collaboration of Scottish Universities whose goal is to develop and extend Scotland’s position as a world leader in Informatics and Computer Science research and education. See the SICSA website for more details.
June 2012, InfoVis for UbiComp data summer school reflections
In late May of 2012 I organised and delivered a week long workshop on Information Visualisation for UbiComp Data, as part of the UbiOulu summer school. On a scale from worst (1) to best (5) my workshop was scored 4.35 on average by 14 of the 23 participants from the workshop who responded to a survey request, so there is room for improvement. This blog post covers the background to the workshop, the schedule, the results of a survey and some discussion.
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| Professor Timo Ojala opening the UbiOulu Summer School 2012 |
Background to the workshop
I was invited by Professor Timo Ojala to run this workshop eight months before travelling to Oulu in Finland. Even with the time to prepare, it remained a slightly daunting task which worried me (as such things often do!). There were 23 graduate students from around Europe attending to learn about Infovis. When you consider they were collectively devoting half a person year to something, you want to make sure you make it worth their while! I have taught modules, courses and guest lectured about InfoVis on four different continents at this stage in my career. In addition I was a director of the Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School (ODCSSS) for four years which had over 80 interns through the process. I also organised the SICSA MMI Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism in St Andrews in June of 2011 with over twenty students and a dozen lecturers. None the less, this was the first time I had tackled this type of theory and practice experience.
Thankfully as all educators do, I was able to get advice from my colleagues. In SACHI, Dr. Miguel Nacenta provided some very useful advice and helped moderate some of my slightly more “ambitious” ideas. Dr Adrian Friday from the University of Lancaster was an instructor at the UbiOulu summer school in 2011 and was able to offer me invaluable advice (and healthy warnings about the social aspects of the program). Thanks also to Jean-Daniel Fekete from Inria and Professor Sheelagh Carpendale from Calgary who offered good advice on their experiences with such events. Thanks to all these folks and to the many authors whose work I drew on in covering InfoVis for UbiComp data. This preparation and consultation paid off, as on a scale from worst (1) to best (5) the “content” of the workshop was scored 4.42 on average by 14 of the 23 participants from the workshop who responded to the survey request. The style and delivery of the my workshop was rated as 4.53 by 13 participants.
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| Some of the possible directions Information Visualisation might take you. |
Schedule of workshop
For those interested in organising such a week long activity the schedule for the workshop was as follows:
1 Month before the workshop, 10 InfoVis papers from a range of areas.
Monday
9-12: 4th International Open Ubiquitous City Seminar (25 minute talks by instructors, Q&A with speaker panel)
12-13:30: Lunch break
13:30-14: Summer School kick off (auditorium)
14-16: Lecture: Setting the stage – 7 challenges with Visualising Ubiquitous Computing Data
18-24: Get Together Party
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| Aaron testing the robustness of the UbiOulu displays during the UbiOulu Summer School |
Tuesday
10 – 12.00: Lecture: Setting the stage – 7 challenges with Visualising Ubiquitous Computing Data
12.00 – 13.15: Lecture – Infovis – Data Types
13.15 – 14.15: Lunch
14.15 – 15.00: Lecture – Infovis – Data Types
15.00 – 16:00 Project – Surveying own and UbiOulu data types
16.00 – 17.00: Lecture – InfoVis toolkits
17.00 – 18.00: Project: Problem Identification Workshop (Small group discussion)
Wednesday
10.00 – 10.30 Design proposal presentations from all groups and workshop D groups
10.30 – 11.30 Lecture – Information Visualisation – Graph Layout
11.30 – 11.00: Project: Design Proposal Generation – paper prototypes, sketches/mockups (Small group workshop)
13.00 – 14.00: Lunch
15.00 – 17.30: Project: System Decomposition, Co-Design and Task Planning (workshop)
With lecturer, per group, technical Review of Design Sketches (Group discussion)
17.30 – 18.00: FastFoot session – Presentation of prototype plans (presentations)
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| Group work |
Thursday
10.00 – 13.00: Rapid Prototyping Session (team programming)
13.00 – 14.00: Lunch
14.00 – 15.00: Early Prototype Review and Feedback (group meetings with lecturer)
12.00 – 17.30: Rapid Prototyping Session (team programming)
17.30 – 18.00: FastFoot session – Presentation of prototypes (presentations)
Friday
10.00 – 13.00: Prototype Improvement Session (team programming)
13.00 – 14.00: Lunch
14.00 – 17.30: Prototyping and evaluation Session (teams)
17.30 – 18.00: FastFoot session – Presentation of prototypes (presentations)
Saturday
3hr exam
Final group presentations from all groups
Final social party, sauna, disco etc.
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| Team Black presenting their final InfoVis for UbiComp data prototype |
Survey Results
Following the workshop, Professor Timo Ojala surveyed all the UbiOulu participants and provided these survey results to the three workshop organisers. In developing this review of the survey, I’ve picked out what I feel is an honest sample of the positives and negatives from the free-form feedback.
Some of the things the students liked the most, relating to me were “Expertise and attitude of the lecturer”, “the energy from Aaron”, “Great lecturer”, “Really great guy and a great lecturer”, “The lectures were top notch”, “I like the style of Aaron how he presents things”, “Aaron was very good at running the workshop” and “the skill of the professor”. Of course, as any lecturer knows energy, engagement and motivation is a two way street, so my excitement and interest was largely fuelled by the motivation, dedication and hard work of the students. Those surveyed also commented that the workshop itself had, “thought out predefined groups”, “interesting project work”, “good balance between overview and in-depth information”, “Really hands-on work and experience, I mean REALLY. Not just some crappy pre-made work, but a real problem to be solved”, “hands on work was nice”, “Workshop was challenging, and the things it taught are definitely going to be useful in the future”, “how Aaron could take a seemingly complicated topic and make it easy to understand and enjoyable to sit through over three hours in an old classroom. The lectures were worth all the travel expenses alone!” and the “topic was as excellent as it was described in the school invitation”.
Of course, there are things to improve, and I’m focussing my attention on these in planning for future InfoVis courses, modules or summer schools. Things to improve include, “deepening of formal models of graph theory”, “data that was more ready to use”, “show different levels of evaluation”, “share some info regarding the tools needed in the workshop beforehand”, “post workshop reading list”, “More information of data parsing methods”, “Some examples using the workshop specific data would’ve been nice”, “data parsing methods would’ve been nice to discuss more about”, “What do you think about having multiple smaller “discovery” projects using a better packaged data set and applying different visualisations to research some given research questions?”, “I would definitely include one or two programming tutorials in the “reading package””, and “Oh, I did hate the exam, but that’s no biggie”.
The students surveyed had some very interesting things to say when asked, what was the most valuable thing you learned in your workshop. These included, “Visualisation techniques for the exploration of huge data sets”, “How to think about information visualisation in a new way which I had never thought of before”, “That information visualisation is not trivial and encompasses a lot of issues which are not immediately obvious to the lay person”, “How to approach Info Vis, in particular the user centred design of the visualisation” and of course that “The focus of any visualisation is the user”.
Discussion
I found the entire week and experience both refreshing, motivating and quite fun. Overall I was pleased with the structure of the workshop. There was enough time to cover some topics in detail, have some practical work, the local datasets were very useful, the fast foot sessions worked really well to have a clear daily focus for the teams, and the final session showed just want could be achieved. I’d like to improve the reading list, the approach to handling data, the upfront “pre-workshop” prep, the group matching and the availability of a “client” or “domain expert” for the data.
Going from the introduction to a topic to students delivering a prototype system 6 days later is very ambitious. When considering the majority of University teaching is delivered over the course of 3 months instead of 6 days it’s worth reflecting on the long term benefit each approach offers. The short sharp delivery, is, by its very nature an introductory and high level view of the subject. The prototypes, are needfully simple and directed to identifiable problems. However, the entire period is devoted to a single topic, everyone has come from far and wide with different educational backgrounds to learn about InfoVis. This allows both the educator and learner to maintain a singular focus, in quite a supportive and high energy learning environment. This is supported by a fun social program (see below) where invaluable learning on the topic continues, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning! At this summer school everyone put their lives on hold to focus on just InfoVis of UbiComp data for 6 days. Those who came to learn about InfoVis received a broad introduction and some practical experience. Those looking to go deeper into the subject, did, I hope receive valuable direction and the confidence to explore the topic further in their own research.
For myself, I rediscovered how fun InfoVis can be, how incredibly powerful it can be, how messy real data is, how empowering unlocking data and information can be and how much a small, yet focussed group can achieve in a short amount of time. It also revived my interest in running an InfoVis summer school in Scotland supported by my local and international colleagues. There are many students and researchers across Scotland who might benefit from a week long summer school supported by SICSA. I look forward to developing this workshop further in the future.
I’m going to follow up this post with an overview of the papers I asked the students to read, the topics I covered, the three hour exam and some slides from the student projects. Below you can see me trying my hand as DJ during the final farewell party. In “modest brag” terms I did manage to fill the dance floor (albeit with crowd pleasing tunes), while I spent the time considering the usability of the multi-part digital-physical interface before me.
ITS 2013 website goes live
Along with Professor Giulio Jacucci of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT I’m a general chair for ITS 2013. This post is version of our introductory message on that site.
“We wanted like to thank our web chair Jim Young for his hard work in getting this site underway and for managing it over the next two years. Thanks to Aaron Genest our social media chair for coordinating the online social presence with Google+, Facebook, Twitter and more. We would also like to thank our publicity chair Paul Marshall for arranging the postcard you see below. Printed copies of these are now being used to advertise the conference around the world at upcoming conferences. If you would like some of these postcards please do let us know. Thanks also to our PC chair Miguel Nacenta for his logo work and to our local chair Per Ola Kristensson for his hard work organising a multitude of things. A conference such as this is the culmination of work and often unseen efforts of many people. As general chairs we aim to highlight these efforts here through this blog over the next two years.
We would also like to thank all of our program chairs who over the coming months will be developing their plans in the form of committees, timelines, calls for papers all of which we aim to publish before the ITS conference in 2012. Following this will be the work of reviewing and determining the final program.
Giulio has already been to visit St Andrews for two days in late April 2012 to help assess the various conference facilities and plans for 2013. Aaron would like to thank Giulio for working on this conference with him, his valuable experience is already helping make our plans that much better!
ITS 2013 Postcard
Social TV and Second Screen Apps
Social television is “a general term for technology that supports communication and social interaction in either the context of watching television, or related to TV content” [1]. Each day millions of Facebook updates, Tweets or blog posts relate to television shows. Some of these comments relate to a particular TV show, at a particular moment and go stale very quickly. For example, during a live political debate a politician mis-quotes someone, makes an incorrect assertion or comments on a particular law. Quickly, the mass audience will post links to the law in question, post corrections or messages with links to past statements which contradict what is being said live on TV. Hashtags, lists, message boards or meta-pages rapidly emerge as hundreds, thousands or millions of people are simultaneously watching events unfold on screen. In other cases, viewers of a particular show will post trivia or links to images, videos or webpages related to the characters or real actors who are currently on screen. Generally, comments relate to a person, topic or location being discussed in a show, be it fictional or factual.
Social TV is “a growing force: the masses talking back through social media” [2]. Social TV, “It’s about allowing people to engage a little more than they have been able to in the past with what they’re watching, One of the great prompters of conversation is what you’re watching on the telly. In the past we sit in the lounge room and talk to the person sitting next to us, in the future it will become easier and easier to engage with people who are not in the same room.” [3] said ABC’s manager of new media services, Chris Winter. Considering how we have interacted around television in the past it was once a clear example of same-time, same-place interaction but now this is changing to same-time, different place interaction with many others.
Social television systems can “integrate voice communication, social media, text chat, presence and context awareness, TV recommendations, ratings, or video-conferencing with the TV content either directly on the screen or by using ancillary devices.” [1]
I’m teaching an Advanced Interactive Technologies module in the University of St Andrews and for our second (and group) assignment we have 8 groups taking on a user-centered interaction design process for the development of a Social TV and Second Screen Application.
Students are completing a survey and analysis, requirements capture, paper prototype, low-fidelity mockup, testing the mockup with users. Following this we expect them to refine their mockups. Along with a report each team is going to present their design and mockup in public.
For the purposes of this project student teams are going to focus on exploring the integration of social media both directly on the screen and on ancillary devices.
Firstly, as a group they need to survey how social media is currently used by people watching live(real-time) or recorded TV shows including news, documentaries, movies, fictional shows, political debates, sports, arts and reality TV. Looking at examples from the European, African, UK, USA, Japan, China, Indian and Australian TV markets will inform their requirements and design.
Each project team are taking on the role of a user-centred interaction design team who has been tasked to create a second screen Social TV experience with Social Media for an imaginary client “MyTVTube”.
I look forward to posting links to some examples of what the teams produce here in time!
- Social Television
- A Social- Media Decoder
- Social revolution coming to Australian TV [Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 23, 2012]
Trading Consequences blog post
As part of the launch of the Trading Consequences project site I have written the first blog post in which I emphasise that the question is key in this project. “To understand the consequences of our trading history, historians need to ask difficult, subtle, multifaceted and challenging questions. Questions which aren’t polluted by knowledge of the limitations of the methods and technologies we have today. These insightful questions won’t come from a focus on what the tools of today can support, what the analysis or visualisation methods can do or what data is available. ” see the full blog post here.Jan 2012 – New Grants, Research Fellow and PhD Scholarships
Along with colleagues in the Univeristies of Edinburgh and York we have achieved grant success with JISC. Our project “Trading Consequences” (Universities of Edinburgh, York and St Andrews) will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents through structured query and visualisation. There is a page on our research group’s website about this in more detail.
Along with Miguel Nacenta and colleagues from ADS and Historic Scotland we have been awarded a Smart Tourism grant named LADDIE or Large Augmented Digital Displays for Interactive Experiences of Historic Sites. In addition to this, along with colleagues from MUSA in St Andrews and Interface3 who have been awarded a second Smart Tourism Grant named SMART or Scotland’s Museums Augmented Reality Tourism. There is a page on our research group’s website about this in more detail.
I’m now advertising for a research fellow to work with me for 3 years (and beyond possibly). The deadline for applications 17th February 2012. We wish to recruit a Research Fellow in Human Computer Interaction to support a number of new and ongoing research projects in Ubiquitous User Interface development. Our research page has some more details but the primary advertisement and details can be found here on the vacancies site.
Finally, I am actively recruiting PhD students. If you are interested in postgraduate research in the area of Human Computer Interaction then please visit our scholarship page on our research group site further details and links.
Call for MobileHCI 2012 Tutorials
MobileHCI 2012 continues to build on the tradition of previous conferences with a high quality tutorial program. We invite proposals for 1, 2 or 3 hour tutorials on emerging and established areas of research and practice. Tutorials will be held on the first day of the conference and are expected to provide participants with new insights and skills relevant to the area.
A MobileHCI tutorial is an in-depth presentation of one or more state-of-the-art topics presented by researchers or practitioners within the field of Mobile HCI. The scope for tutorials is broad and includes topics such as new technologies, research approaches and methodologies, design practices, user/consumer insights, investigations into new services/applications/interfaces, and much more.
A tutorial should focus on its topic in detail and include references to the “must read” papers or materials within its domain. A participatory approach in which the tutorial participants actively engage in exercises is welcomed, though not required. In addition we welcome proposals incorporating hands-on work where the outcome is a working prototype. The tutorial organizers will work with the main session organisers to provide 2 spots in the demo session to showcase the best prototypes that emerge from the tutorial program.
The expected audience will vary in terms of prior knowledge, but will largely consist of researchers, Ph.D. students, practitioners, and educators.
We encourage you to review the scope and nature of the previous tutorial program at http://www.mobilehci2011.org/tutorials.
Submission Instructions:
- 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
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