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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:
  1. 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.


  2. 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

Doctoral Consortium Chairs

  • Elaine M. Huang, University of Zurich, Switzerland


  • Aaron Quigley, University of St. Andrews, UK

Short Papers HCI 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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.

July 2011 Professional Activities

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

Some of the equipment for Summer School

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.

Graduation address – Aaron Quigley Thursday 23 June 2011

Aaron Quigley delivering a graduation address

Graduation address – Aaron Quigley

Thursday 23 June 2011
 

Chancellor, honoured guests, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. Firstly, I would like to offer my heartfelt or congratulations to all of our new graduates.

We all join you in celebrating your accomplishments and for graduating from the University of St Andrews today. You join a distinguished Alumni who over the past six centuries have taken what they learned here to help change the world.

Yes, we have many famous alumni including nobel prize winners, great writers, politicians and even the founder of the Presbyterian church John Knox.

However, we also count amongst our alumni many teachers, mathematicians, medics and members of the armed forces who have each had an important impact on our world, as I hope will you.

It’s easy to forget while in such auspicious surrounding that all of our graduates have sat where you are today. From the nurse to the nobel prize winner, or indeed the prince to the programmer, they each had the same potential as you do now, to make our world a better place. And just like you, they were all surely thinking, “What do I do now”?

However, before we look forward to your future, let us take a moment to look back and to offer three notes of thanks. Firstly, I would like to thank you, our graduates. On behalf of my colleagues, I thank you for coming to your early morning lectures, for being prepared for your tutorials, for submitting your assignments on
time, and for studying diligently for your exams. We live in an often jaded world, so it’s always refreshing to us to meet students who are passionate about learning. This might be the second years in an early
morning tutorial arguing over the finer details of a question, to a class of fourth years presenting their final projects and thesis. It has been our great privilege and pleasure, to share this journey of learning with you.

One of my colleagues once described the job of academics as both coach and umpire. For the most part we have been your coach and I hope we gave the best of ourselves in your learning experience. Personally, I think this is why academics are here, we want to educate you so that you are equipped with the skills sets, graduate attributes and the ability for analytical thinking that is needed in the wider world.

Of course, we have also been your umpire from time to time, and I hope you will agree that maintaining high standards is a hallmark of this University. I’ve worked in half a dozen Universities around the world, and I can assure you, that the commitment to teaching excellence and standards I have seen here, is beyond compare. This is certainly why this University is consistently ranked among the United Kingdom’s top
ten, across all the university league tables. However today, we are neither coach nor umpire, your time on the team is over, you are finished this stage in your journey, be proud of what you have achieved.
Today, we step back, while you step forward.

Second, and on your behalf, I would like to thank the staff of the University of St Andrews and the people of this fine town. They are very proud of you, and justifiably so. Last year I attended the golf graduation and I sat in the back of the balcony. Beside me sat two
retired teachers from Dundee who live in town, and these ladies told me that they often come to graduations here, as do many of their friends.
Perhaps they are here today? This rare pride the townsfolk have in the University and in our graduates is unparalleled in my experience and is a testament to the great love and respect the people of St Andrews, Fife and Scotland have for this ancient University.

Now, some people describe a University as an iceberg, with 90% of it hidden from view. Myself, I prefer to think of it as a Swan, graceful and elegant above the water but madly kicking it’s webbed feet below. In
your time here, you have interacted with many of the academic staff but it’s often too easy to forget the hundreds of general staff of St Andrews who help administer degrees, run the library and IT systems,
clean and cook meals or maintain our fine buildings. To each of these members of staff, I pay particular thanks for their often unseen efforts.

At the risk of labouring the metaphor, then if the University is a swan, she is best thought of inflight, soaring, majestic, with all her parts equally important to help keep her balanced and aloft, not simply floating down the river!

My final note of thanks goes to your family; your parents and partners, your brothers and sisters, or your boy-friend or girl-friend. They have been with you, supported you, loved you and cared for you every step of the way. I’m certain you appreciate the sacrifices they have made for you, and I would like to thank them for their support. Remember to thank them today, or if they cannot be here, then in the days ahead.
And so, onto your future.

After being invited to give this graduatio address I did extensive research on what is involved in one, I am afterall an academic, research, it’s what we do! So along with pithy quotes and punchy tales I discovered that no one really thinks you will recall anything I say!

So, together, lets try to change this status quo. I’m
going to ask you to remember only one thing, and it’s this, invest your time wisely. I will be asking questions afterwards in the quad, so I do suggest you remember it! Let me say it again, invest your time wisely. For whatever future you have in mind, your time is all you have that is truly yours, so don’t waste it. You have only one life to live, so live it well. Follow your dreams and don’t let life grind you down. Don’t waste your time in life. Don’t waste your time doing a job you are
not passionate, proud and interested in. Live a life true to yourself, and not the life others expect of you. For no matter what changes in technology, society or government brings, it’s up to you to invest your
time so that your dreams don’t go unfulfilled.

Of course, you have already made one good investment here in your education. This is an investment which has equipped you for the
challenges ahead and will pay off over the rest of your life. Of course it means you have the skills and knowledge to apply for different jobs, or to go onto further postgraduate study.

However, it’s the less obvious returns which will pay off in more rewarding ways. Every decision that
you make, every choice presented to you now, can be viewed through this prism of critical thinking and a mindset your education has equipped you
with.

I would hope our honorand today Dame Stephanie Shirley agrees with the advice on investing your time wisely. She has spent much of her life
investing her time carefully in her work and philanthropic efforts.

And so to conclude, enjoy the rest of your day, thank your family and make sure to reintroduce them to this wonderful University and town. Be proud of what you have achieved in your time here. And please remember to come back and visit, or tell us how you are doing in life.

As you leave Younger Hall today, onto the next step of your journey, I say again, your most precious asset is your time, spend it wisely, spend it well.

from: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2011/title,70433,en.php