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Dec 2008 Two Conference Papers Accepted.

Myself and three of my PhD students have recently had two papers accepted at leading international conferences. Both will be published in upcoming volumes on the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series.

Firstly, myself Ross, Tom, along with our colleagues Adrian, Simon and Paddy had “Situvis: a visual tool for modeling a user’s behaviour patterns in a pervasive environment” accepted at the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing in Nara Japan. This year the conference had a very low acceptance rate of 18.4% which makes this all the move satisfying personally. The back story to Sitvis is a very interesting one and is a great testament to our new structured PhD program in UCD. Tom developed the core Situvis visualisation framework as part of a project he developed in my InfoVis course in 2007. He worked with Ross on developing it into a graph drawing system by using coupled layouts. We then further developed the idea when Adrian came with the situation and sensor problems and proposed Situvis which we all worked on together. The ebb and flow of ideas in and out of the students areas of core interest goes to show what great outcomes we can have with structured learning.

Secondly, myself and Umer Rashid had a paper accepted at the HCI International Conference 2009 on “Interaction Techniques for Binding Smart Phones: A Desirability Evaluation“. It will be published by Springer in a multi-volume set in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. This conference will be held on 19-24 July 09 in San Diego, CA, USA.

Japan and the USA in 2009.. here we come for these and other papers to come…!

Dec 2008 AP2PS 2009 Invitation to program committee

Siena “Peer-to-peer systems have considerably evolved since their original conception, in the 90’s. The idea of distributing files using the user’s terminal as a relay has now been widely extended to embrace virtually any form of resource (e.g., computational and storage resources), data (e.g. files and real-time streams) and service (e.g., IP telephony, IP TV, collaboration).

More complex systems, however, require more sophisticated management solutions, and in this context P2P can become an interesting issue, playing the hole of both the target and the enabler of new management systems. Contributions are also expected address the management of P2P applications as well as the use of P2P technologies as management tools for traditional and modern systems.

The First International Conference on Advances in Peer-to-Peer Systems (AP2PS 2009) builds on the success of the First International Workshop on Computational P2P Networks ( ComP2P 2008 ) but has a broader focus. AP2PS 2009 aims at capturing the latest developments, findings and proposals in the general area of P2P computing, networking, services, and applications.”

AP2PS 2009 will take place on October 11-16, 2009, in Sliema, Malta.

Important deadlines:
Submission (full paper): May 20, 2009
Notification of acceptance: June 25, 2009
Registration: July 12, 2009
Camera-ready: July 15, 2009

Dec 2008 TRIL TTP – Tenure Success and Complete!

My tenure as Principal Investigator for the TRIL Technology Platform team is now drawing to a close. It’s been my great pleasure to have helped lead this excellent interdisciplinary team over the past 2 year period. Along with Professor Paddy Nixon of UCD and Michael McGrath, co-Principal Investigator from the Intel Digital Health Group we have grown this small team by over 50%. This growth has been to meet the needs of the clinical strands due to increasing levels of activity and secondly to increase the level of capabilities which can be utilised by the strands.

The function of the TTP is to provide TRIL with its technology research, interaction design capabilities and the software and hardware tools which support the research activities of the clinical strands namely Falls, Cognitive and Social. In the development and provisioning of these tools the TTP has adopted a philosophy, where possible, of a re-usable, open, modular platform to support the needs of the TRIL researchers and the wider research community. This has resulted in the development of the BioMOBIUS research platform. This platform is a combination of hardware, sensors, software and a graphical development environment that enables engineers and researchers to rapidly deploy technology solutions for biomedical research applications.
Some highlights of my tenure as TTP PI with our team have included:

The release of BioMOBIUS research platform in April 2008 to the research community
The growth of the TTP team by 50% and the relocation of this team to the research environment of the Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory UCD
The proposal, planning and delivery of 3 international workshops: Intel research Amberglen, Portland, EMBS Conference, Vancouver, Canada, University College Dublin with conjunction with the EMEA Research conference
The initiation of the specification process of TRIL clinical and central infrastructure setup
The deployment of technology into homes to support trials by the three clinical strands
The support of technology requirements for successful start-up of the TRIL clinic in St James’s
The submission of Journal and Conference papers and the publication of workshop papers.

I leave the TTP knowing that I we have a stronger and more vibrant team of researchers, engineers, interaction designers, postdocs, hardware engineers and managers than when I arrived in 2007. As I move onto two new major research initiatives with national and international collaborators I wish all the members of TRIL all the very best going forward.

Dec 2008 Conference Co-Chair, I-HCI 2009 the third conference of the Irish HCI Community

TCD - Venue for I-HCI 2009 I am the co-chair for the I-HCI 2009 along with Gavin Doherty from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. I-HCI 2009 is the third conference of the Irish HCI Community. Held in Trinity College Dublin on the 17th and 18th of September it is organised and sponsored by the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin and the School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin. This two day event aims to bring together researchers, students and practitioners through a paper program (long and short) and a range of new tracks and events for the 2009 conference. Human Computer Interaction research and developments are targetted at augmented human activity and enriching our life experiences.

The Irish HCI community is evolving with the establishment of the ACM SIGCHI chapter and as such the 2009 program will not be based around a specific theme. Instead, we encourage submissions on novel HCI concepts, insightful surveys of existing work, or concrete, significant, transferable research based on the implementation and evaluation of a working system. In addition, we encourage more speculative short papers (upto 4 pages) may report work in progress or an interesting idea that is not yet fully developed.

I-HCI 2009 follows on from the great success of the past two conference events, I-HCI 2008 at the University College Cork, September 19th & 20th and I-HCI 2007 in the University of Limerick on May 2nd.

Dec 2008 Workshop Chair, Pervasive 2010 – The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing

May 2010, Helsinki Finland

Festival Hall at the University of Helsinki

I have been invited to be one of the Workshop Chairs for Pervasive 2010, The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing 17-20 May 2010. Our workshops and the main conference will be held in the Festival Hall at the University of Helsinki Finland. While this event is over 17 months away we will be soliciting targeted workshops and large Pervasive Computing project organisers to come to Helsinki. Example workshops might be collocated with an FP7 project review eg. (day 1 project meeting and day 2 open Pervasive 2010 workshop). Other workshops will be solicited directly from leading research groups in areas of interest to Pervasive but which have not traditionally had a strong presence here. Finally, we will be issuing a general calls for workshops to the entire community, as always.

We expect the open call, targeted call and invited workshops to provide a stimulating and exciting workshop program to compliment the main conference in 2010. If you have an idea now for a workshop, please do get in touch.

Dec 2008 Tutorials Chair, IEEE Tabletop and Interactive Surfaces 2009

Nov 2009 in Banff Canada…

TableTop 2009
I have been invited to be chair of the tutorials track for the Symposium on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces 2009 to be held on Nov 23 to 25 in Banff Canada. This is the fourth event of this series and we expect this tutorial session to be an excellent opportunity for students, academics and practitioners to learn from leaders in this field.

The use of the tabletop as an input/output device is an exciting and emerging research area. This cross-disciplinary domain brings together experts in projector based display systems, augmented reality, user interface technologies, multi-modal interaction, input and sensing technologies, CSCW, and information visualization.

Dec 2008 Program Co-Chair, Pervasive Advertising Workshop @ Pervasive 2009

Website goes live.
May 2009 in Nara Japan…..

“The Pervasive Advertising workshop focusses on how Pervasive Technology is shaping the future of advertising. Technologies including digital signage, ambient displays, mobile phones, haptic interfaces and e-newspapers create a pervasive media environment that disrupts established advertising business models such as sponsorship, publishing houses, out-of-home (e.g. billboard) advertising and TV advertising. We believe that pervasive advertising will soon affect a majority of the world’s urban population, both positively and negatively. Potential opportunities
will centre on the ubiquitous provision of calm and interesting information.

Particular threats are pervasive SPAM and pervasive surveillance, as advertisers try to establish who looks at their ads. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers to forecast opportunities and threats from this development and shape the future of urban citizen. We encourage participants who are excited by or afraid of pervasive advertising to apply to attend this workshop.”

Dec 2008 SIGCHI Ireland Launch Sponsorship

Today we had the SIGCHI Ireland Inaugural Lecture by Professor Alan Dix. He gave an inspiring talk on “Human-Computer Interaction in the early 21st century: a stable discipline, a nascent science, and the growth of the long tail“. Thanks to the research startup support my School of Computer Science and Informatics has given me, I was able to sponsor Prof. Dix’s trip. The School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin sponsored the launch reception after hosting the talk itself! A great event was had by all and we look forward to many such events in the future.

Nov 2008 Two CHI 2009 workshop papers accepted.

Myself and members of my research group have had two of our workshop position papers accepted for CHI 2009.

The first paper entitled “Designing for Collaboration: Professional Information Management (PIM) in Research Communities” by Umer Rashid and Dr. Aaron Quigley has been accepted for the CHI 2009 workshop on The Changing Face of Digital Science: New Practices in Scientific Collaborations. The workshop will take place on Sunday, April 5, 2009 in Boston. In this paper, we report on the results of a case study exploring the use of collaborative tools in a research community. We conducted a questionnaire-based survey among 30 researchers to establish their preferences for different tools to collaborate with their research group, school and remote colleagues. Based on the results of this survey, we offer design guidelines for collaboration tools.

The second paper entitled “Do Pattern Languages help us Structure Evaluations in Healthcare Technologies?” by Dr. Julie Doyle, Dr. Aaron Quigley and Prof. Paddy Nixon has been accepted for the proceedings of the CHI (Computer Human Interaction) 2009 workshop ‘Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare: Challenges and Approaches’.

As healthcare technologies are becoming increasingly pervasive, moving from controlled clinical and laboratory settings to large numbers of home deployments, new challenges arise in evaluating the impact of healthcare technologies and interactions in their context of use. This paper examines the potential benefits of using pattern languages to help structure such evaluations. Pattern languages can capture experience, guidelines and methods for evaluation of new healthcare technologies and ultimately help healthcare professionals and researchers to design effective evaluations.

This workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to share experiences and ideas on how to conduct evaluations that will allow assessment of the overall impact of technology in its context of use. The workshop will take place in Boston, on April 4th 2009.

Nov 2008 ODCSSS 2009 – Theme Announced “Technologies for bridging the digital-physical divide: sensing the environment”

We have announced the theme for ODCSSS 2009 “Technologies for bridging the digital-physical divide: sensing the environment”.

ODCSSS is 12 week undergraduate summer research internship program between the University College Dublin (UCD) and Dublin City University (DCU) Ireland. This program offers a distributed and interdisciplinary research environment at the forefront of ICT research.

Each ODCSSS student is engaged in a research project with a faculty member and mentor which provides them an opportunity to experience research. The program offers paid internship awards and opens for applications in December of each year for the following summer. The selection of interns is highly competitive but we encourage anyone interested in research who is eligible to apply. Our Introduction page and Objectives pages have more details on the overall program. Our News page has extensive updates of the ongoing ODCSSS activities each year and our Students page has details of our over 60 past students.