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Jan 2020: Welcome CHI

In January 2020 I was invited to deliver the closing seminar at the RIEC International Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction – Welcome CHI 2021, thinking of the future of HCI together at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication Tohoku University Sendai, Japan.

“To assure quality of life of people in a society in which the information level has been highly developed, the importance of human-technology and human-computer interaction further increases. The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction, and provides a place where researchers and practitioners gather from across the world to discuss the latest topics. It has been annually held mainly in North America and Europe since 1982, and the CHI 2021 will be the first CHI to be held in Japan. It is expected to be the largest ever, having more than 4,000 participants from more than 50 countries or regions. In addition, it is also expected to be the best CHI ever with enhanced rich content. For this purpose, this symposium invites internationally active researchers including key CHI 2021 committee members to discuss and think the future of HCI together.

人と情報システムの相互作用について，情報科学，認知科学，心理学，デザイン学等，多岐に渡る分野の研究者や技術者，学生等が世界中から集まり議論する学際的な場として，ACM SIGCHI が主催する国際会議CHIは，この分野で最大かつ最も権威がある国際会議として1982年から毎年開催されてきました．これまで北米と欧州を中心に開催されてきましたが，2021年5月には初めて日本で開催されます．そしてCHI 2021には世界50か国から4000人以上が参加し，これまでで最大のCHIになると予想されています．またプログラム等の内容もそれに見合うように充実させ，皆さんの記憶に長く残るCHIとすることが期待されています．そこで本シンポジウムではこの機会に，CHI 2021のCommitteeを務めるキーメンバーを中心に国際的にご活躍中の皆さんに集まっていただき，人と情報システムの相互作用やHuman Computer Interactionとばれる分野の未来を一緒に考えてみたいと思います． “

Designing Realities 2019

Following up on our Blended Reality Summer School in Singapore I was invited to present at a two-day seminar on “Designing for the Future: Virtual, Augmented and Blended Realities” at the National University of Singapore on December 16 and 17, 2019.

“Virtual Reality (VR) generate graphics and sounds to place you in a spectacular imaginary world and Augmented Reality (AR) overlays virtual elements to augment your real-world environment. Mixed Reality (MR) maps real-world environments to overlay and interact with virtual objects, and we believe that this enables the implementation of novel interactions such as providing passive haptic feedback as natural wall borders or table surfaces for game physics. This form of MR – we like to call “Blended Reality (BR)”, inter-connects the digital and the physical by harnessing the knowledge of augmented and virtual reality, tangible user interfaces, radar sensing, computer vision, wearable computing, discreet computing and ubiquitous computing. This blend of technology allows us to explore and design discreet interactions which weave computing into the literal or figurative fabric of day to day life.”

2019: ACM SIGCHI China Chapter’s 15th Anniversary

As part of the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program I delivered a distinguished lecture as part of the ACM SIGCHI China Chapter’s 15th Anniversary event this November in Beijing.

As the SIGCHI site notes

“SIGCHI Local Chapters help the ACM SIGCHI community to promote and advance human-computer interaction locally and around the globe. For the developing parts of the world, Local Chapters often serve as the first front to promote HCI education, research and practice in the region. SIGCHI Local Chapters are unique in building bridges between academics, practitioners and students in the field of HCI.


There are 50 SIGCHI Local Chapters on 6 continents, in over 30 countries, impacting over 4,000 chapter members. While each chapter has its own unique approach, the professional and student chapters organize meetings, offer presentations from invited speakers, networking opportunities, discussion forums, job boards, and other special events year-round. Many chapters host their own local conferences and hold contests for HCI students.“

Keynote at Mensch und Computer (MuC) 2019

Last week I was one of the three keynote speakers at the Mensch und Computer (MuC) conference in Germany. I joined Margaret Urban, Senior Interaction Designer, Google, Mountain View, CA and Mark Billinghurst from the University of Auckland and South Australia. I spoke about Discreet computing while Margaret spoke about conversational interfaces and Mark looked forward to the next 20 years of augmented reality. I was honoured to be in such esteemed company and to present to nearly 1,000 delegates.

This is the “annual conference organised by the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.) and the German Usability Professionals Association (German UPA)” with nearly 1,000 participants from industry and academia is a great way to learn all about what’s going on with HCI research and practice at the heart of Europe. It’s also one of the largest German-speaking IT conferences and the largest HCI conference in Europe when CHI isn’t in Europe.

Discreet Computing keynote Hamburg 2019

Today I was a keynote speaker at the Mensch-und-Computer conference 2019. This blog post contains to links to all the papers I mentioned which are in the ACM digital library. You can click on these links to get all these papers for no charge via the ACM Author-Izer service. This is a “service that enables ACM authors to generate and post links on both their homepage and institutional repository for visitors to download the definitive version of their articles from the ACM Digital Library at no charge.”

  • Slide 76: Opisthenar: Hand Poses and Gestures Recognition by Observing Back of Hand Using Embedded Wrist Camera (to appear UIST 2019) 

Philippines DSP Tour

In August of 2019 I undertook a distinguished speaker lecture tour to the Philippines hosted by the ACM SIGCHI Chapter in Manila. During this time I undertook a series of research visits to the University of the Philippines and De La Salle University (DLSU). [ACM DSP]

ACM Computing Surveys Search Committee

Earlier this year I was invited to serve on the ACM Computing Surveys Search Committee and our call for nominations is now public.

ACM Computing Surveys:

Editor-in-Chief Call for Nominations

The term of the current Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)is coming to an end, and the ACM Publications Board has established a search committee to assist the Board with selecting the next EiC, which will be Chaired by Chris Hankin.

In addition to this search process, the ACM Publications Board is in the initial stages of developing a plan to substantially expand the scope of the journal, with the goals of (1) providing broader coverage of the computing field, including an increased focus on key expanding research and application areas; and (2) strengthening ACM’s overall portfolio with high-impact, relevant, and timely publications of interest to our community and society at large. 

As a result, the ACM Publications Board is open to bold suggestions for the future of CSUR. This may include a vision that transforms CSUR as a single conventional journal into a subtitled series that includes greater representation of computing and AI, multidisciplinary computing relevant to specific domains, the impact of computing on human society, and similar major trends. It may also include a vision that transforms the style, impact, and readership base of CSUR to inject more future-directed critical reviews, of greater interest to a broad reader constituency, and with a far higher impact.

The successful Editor-in-Chief candidate will be the one whose proposed vision aligns with future directions and aims of the ACM Publications Board, as well as the candidate who is most experienced and best positioned to implement that vision. Nominations, including self-nominations, are welcome from June 20 through August 1 2019. 

Nominations should include a:

  1. Detailed description of the candidate’s vision for the future of ACM Computing Surveys
  2. List of qualifications for the EiC role
  3. Current CV

Please note that any candidate must be willing and able to commit to an initial three-year term in order to implement the anticipated major changes. ACM EiC appointments all have a maximum of two three-year terms. The position of EiC is an entirely voluntary one, which comes with administrative support from ACM. Beyond planning and implementing strategic editorial changes for this publication, the EiC will be responsible for maintaining high quality editorial standards, setting the technical direction of paper content and style, and maintaining a reasonable pipeline of articles that match the publication schedule.

Interested candidates should contact the Chair of the search committee for an initial discussion, and to learn more about ACM’s aims for this important publication. Please send all nominations to the ACM Computing SurveysEiC Search Chair at:    Chris Hankin, c.hankin@imperial.ac.uk

The search committee members are:

Chris Hankin (Imperial College London, Chair, UK)

Azzedine Boukerche (University of Ottawa, Canada)

Diane Cook (Washington State University, US)

Enrico Nardelli (University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy)

Sharon Oviatt (Monash University, Australia)

Aaron Quigley (University of St Andrews, UK)

Hao Yu (Southern University of Science and Technology of China, China)

Divesh Srivastava (AT&T Labs, Publications Board Liaison, US)

Thank you,

ACM Publications Board

TVX 2019: Best Student Paper for Deb8: A Tool for Collaborative Analysis of Video

Congratulations to Guilherme, one of my PhD students, for receiving a best student paper award for the work on Deb8: A Tool for Collaborative Analysis of Video.

Guilherme Carneiro, Miguel Nacenta, Alice Toniolo, Gonzalo Mendez, and Aaron J Quigley. 2019. Deb8: A Tool for Collaborative Analysis of Video. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video (TVX ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 47–58. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3317697.3323358

Abstract: Public, parliamentary and television debates are commonplace in modern democracies. However, developing an understanding and communicating with others is often limited to passive viewing or, at best, textual discussion on social media. To address this, we present the design and implementation of Deb8, a tool that allows collaborative analysis of video-based TV debates. The tool provides a novel UI designed to enable and capture rich synchronous collaborative discussion of videos based on argumentation graphs that link quotes of the video, opinions, questions, and external evidence. Deb8 supports the creation of rich idea structures based on argumentation theory as well as collaborative tagging of the relevance, support and trustworthiness of the different elements. We report an evaluation of the tool design and a reflection on the challenges involved.

2019 SG:D Immersive Analytics @ PIXEL

This talk is for anyone interested in data analysis, data exploration, immersion or using data to solve problem in-situ, in real-time rather than after the event away from the sources of the data. This talk is about Immersive Analytics, an emerging field of research and development which seeks a deeper engagement with the analysis and data in an immersive sense in virtual or augmented reality.

13th June, 06:00 PM-08:30 PM, PIXEL Singapore

What is it about?
This talk introduces and discusses many examples of immersion, data analysis and hence immersive analytics.
The first thing to understand is that there are many meanings of the term “immersive” alongside different approaches to analytics. There are two primary facets related to the term immersive analytics. The first, and more literal aspect, is to be immersed or submerged in the data and analytic task. This gives rise to the examination of the range of human senses, modalities and technologies which might allow one to have their various senses fully immersed. A second facet, is the provision of computational analysis methods which facilitate a deep mental involvement with the task and data. Smooth interaction with the data and analytic task might allow people to concentrate and focus their attention, allowing them to enter a “flow state” which affords them the depth of thought required to be fully immersed.

2019 SICSA appoints new Director

SICSA has appointed Professor Aaron Quigley of the University of St Andrews as its new Director. Professor Quigley commences the role on July 4th 2019.

Professor Quigley is the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. He co-founded SACHI (St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group) and served as its Director until 2018.

He is currently the ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences (members of the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee), member of the ACM Europe Council Conferences Working Group, a board member of ScotlandIS and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He will also be general co-chair for the ACM CHI conference in Asia in 2021.

He is no stranger to SICSA, having previously served as Deputy Director/Director for Knowledge Exchange and as Co-leader for the SICSA Human Computer Interaction Research Theme for several years. We are delighted that he will return as Director in the summer.

(from: https://www.sicsa.ac.uk/news/sicsa-appoints-new-director/