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 edi ce 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On June 12th at 7.30pm 2009 I organised TEDxDublin which was hosted by the Science Gallery. While I founded TEDxDublin, it was truly was a team effort. The TEDxDublin series of event, which started small, has now happened nine times upto 2016.
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.
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.”
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 ]
