Author Archives: admin

Feb 2009 Just for Ross

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

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

Feb 2009 Program Committee P2P 2009

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

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

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

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

[ Read More ]

Feb 2009 Program Committee, Conference on Smart Spaces

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

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

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

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

[ Read More ]

Feb 2009 Open posts for Clique Research Cluster

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

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

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

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

Feb 2009 CHI 2009 Work In Progress paper

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

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

Jan 2009 Two new Journal papers published

Congrats to two of my students Umer and Ross on our two new journal papers which are soon to appear.

Shannon R., Eugene K. and Quigley A., “Using Ambient Social Reminders to Stay in Touch with Friends”, International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence, 1(2), 70-78, April-June 2009

Rashid R. and Quigley A., “Ambient Displays in Academic Settings: Avoiding their Underutilization, “International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence, 1(2), 31-38, April-June 2009

Jan 2009 VDA 2009 San Jose

VDA 2009

I presented our paper on the Visual data exploration of temporal graph data at the Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis 2009 which was Part of IS&T/SPIE’s International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 2009. This event was held on the 19-20 January 2009 in San Jose, California, USA. The paper was co-authored by Mike Farrugia and myself and is based on Mike’s masters research and his submission to the IEEE VAST 2008 contest (which he won a Cell phone Mini Challenge award).

The event itself was quite interesting due to the co-location with a number of other conferences on Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation. I also got to meet a number of interesting researchers including Katy Börner who presented a inspiring paper on “Teaching children the structure of science”. Katy is the director for the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at the School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University. I enjoyed our discussions and hearing more about the Network Workbench which will be of great interest for an upcoming project we are starting. I also enjoyed discussing research infrastructures with the highly energetic Russell Duhon. He discussed EpiC: A Computational Infrastructure for Epidemics Research with me and gave a talk on Creating Marketplaces for Science.

This is worth watching too.

Jan 2009 New Translational Research Project Dviz & Senior Software Architect post

12 HorsesIADT logoUCD crestNDRC logo

Representatives of UCD, IADT and Twelve Horses in late December 2008 signed a two year contract with the NDRC for the Dviz digital media technologies project. I am the UCD PI, Hilary Kenna in the IADT PI and Gabrielle Stafford leads the project with Twelve Horses Ltd.

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

Dviz itself is an online platform to facilitate the contextualisation of statistical data in realtime using dynamic visualisation technology. The ultimate objective of this project is to unlock the value of data by creating a platform that will enable users to visualise, manipulate and track data in a way that is meaningful for them. The resultant dynamic visualisations can then be used to investigate causal relationships to influence decision and policy making with evidence based conclusions.

Jan 6, 2009: The Dviz team is hiring a Senior Software Architect Link: http://tinyurl.com/7lr7lt

Draft Advert: Senior Software Architect – Dviz – (check Twelve Horses link for full and up to date advert).

The Senior Architect will be tasked with conceiving, designing, presenting and realising software and architectural approaches for the DViz platform and applications.

The ideal candidate must be fluent in modern enterprise and open source technologies, and must be able to apply these to a distributed system environment. A solid understanding of Web application technologies, databases, and performance parameters is a must. The ability to work independently as well as having excellent written and verbal communication skills is required.

The Senior Software Architect will be expected to technically review and manage the software development lifecycle, ensuring best practise process and techniques are deployed throughout design, implementation and testing, and appropriate metrics utilised to control and monitor the integrity and maintainability of the technical solution. Both conventional and Agile development lifecycle models will be used where appropriate, and full configuration management of all versions and variants will be maintained.

The Senior Architect will be expected to lead the following tasks:

* analysis of the requirements
* ensuring that the architectural design of the solution is consistent with the component architecture, and that all requirements are met
* providing guidance and refinements on the modelling and design process
* ensuring that the architecture fully covers all requirements, and has full traceability to requirements
* identification of any study, risk reduction, or prototyping stages that need to be planned into the development

Qualifications and/or Skills

* Minimum of 7 years Experience as Software Engineer
* Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science or related field (Advanced degree preferred)
* Experience as technical lead in designing and architecting scalable enterprise solutions
* Strong programming skills in Java and J2EE required
* Web Services, GUI, SOA, JSP, and XML desired.
* Extensive knowledge of Object Oriented (OO) Analysis and Design

Dec 2008 Tutorials Co-Chair Clifton Forlines Tabletop 2009

Clifton from MERLI’m delighted to announce that Clifton Forlines, a Research Associate and Technical Staff member from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge MA will be joining me as Co-Chair for the Tabletop 2009 Tutorials program. This is a fantastic development as Clifton has a vast range of experience in the area of Tabletop computing and has been a prolific publisher in the field. I trust our complementary academic and industry insights will allow us to develop an exciting and high impact program for these, the first ever Tabletop tutorials.

“Clifton Forlines is Research Associate at MERL. His research interests include the design and evaluation of novel user interfaces. Current research projects span from three-dimensional presentation of and navigation through recorded digital video, to collaborative tabletop user interfaces, to using hand-held projectors for augmented reality. He is currently leading the evaluation of three projects, MediaFinder, TimeTunnel, and DiamondSpin. Before coming to MERL, Clifton worked on Carnegie Mellon’s Alice project, which aimed at teaching programming to children through building interactive 3D worlds.” [ more ]