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

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).

Mar 2011: £600,000 Smart Tourism Grant

Professor Jon Oberlander at Smart Tourism launch event
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

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

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

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

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/.

Nov 2010 – Ambient Displays

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.

Dec 2010 – Two Journal Papers: Visualisation and Usability

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.

Aug 2010 BCS Interaction Specialist Group

“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

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.