Category Archives: phd

Sept 2009 Congratulations to Dr. Bennett

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.

Congrats once again. His site has copies of his papers and thesis.

ps. Mike your gift is in the post 😉

March 2009 Cloud Computing

As part of our applied research project Dviz I’ve been building up an understanding and appreciation of the incredibly over-hyped area of cloud computing. However, for Dviz it is important as it allows us to develop a scaleable approach to the delivery of the infrastructure. Dviz 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.

Cloud computing refers to a style of computing in which resources are provided as a service over the Internet to users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure. The canonical example is Google Docs, a functional word processing office app delivered entirely via one’s web browser [1]. The level of interest in Cloud Computing as an accessible service for the realisation of new web based applications has been growing over the past year with both academic research [6] and is also leaking into mainstream discussion [5]. Discussion on how the cloud will impact high performance computing [4] and other areas such as its use in Green IT are also ongoing.

Quote: “Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT.” [4]

Some of the different application areas where cloud computing might make an impact include [2]:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service
  • Storage-as-a-Service
  • Data-as-a-Service
  • Platform-as-a-Service
  • Software-as-a-Service

UCSB & IBM T.J. Watson Research five-layer grouping.

Discussions on cloud ontologies have come to light that provide a great starting point for taxonomy discussions [3].

References:

  1. Cloud computing: Threat or Menace?
  2. A crack in the madness of clouds
  3. A better way to understand cloud computing
  4. Berkeley Releases Cloud Computing Study Detailed Report [ PDF ]
  5. Cloud computing ascends the mainstream
  6. Tech Titans Building Boom
  7. Cloud Computing Journal

Feb 2009 CHI Workshop and Surface User Interfaces

I just blogged about Surface User Interfaces on the “Evaluating new interactions in healthcare” blog. We have a paper [1] on “Design Patterns” at this workshop during CHI which this blog is being used to support. While I don’t think I can attend the workshop myself as I have trips to the USA, Sweden, Germany and Australia in the next two months my colleague Julie Doyle will attend. My PhD student Ross Shannon will also attend to present our paper on “Time Sequences” during the work in progress at CHI in Boston.

Figure 1: SharePic photo sharing system [3]

[1] Doyle J., Quigley A. and Nixon P., “Do Pattern Languages help us Structure Evaluations in Healthcare Technologies?” proceedings of the CHI 2009 Workshop on Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare: Challenges and Approaches, Boston USA, April 2009.

[2] 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)

[3] Apted, T., Kay, J., and Quigley, A. 2006. Tabletop sharing of digital photographs for the elderly. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 – 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI ’06. ACM, New York, NY, 781-790.

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

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

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…!

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 Two Journal Papers Published

Congrats to two of my students Brendan and Ross on our recent journal papers which have been published in high profile venues with high impact factors. The work on both of these projects continues so I expect we will have more Journal papers in the future on these topics.

  • Sheehan B., Quigley A., Gaudin B. and Dobson S., A relation based measure of semantic similarity for gene ontology annotations. BMC Bioinformatics 2008, 9:468 (4 November 2008)
  • Knox A., Clear A., Shannon R., Coyle L., Dobson S., Quigley A. and Nixon P., Scatterbox: a Context-Aware Message Forwarding Platform, 2008, Journal Revue d’Intelligence Artificielle pp.549-568, RSTI serie RIA – Volume 22 No 5/2008, (ISBN 978-2-7462-2261-8)

Oct 2008 Neil Cowzer start as an IRCSET funded postgrad

Neil CowzerNeil Cowzer has joined me this week as a postgraduate in the SRG. Neil recently completed his undergraduate in UCD and achieved a 1:1 in BSc Computer Science for his efforts. An ODCSSS 06 alumni, Neil has undertaken numerous research internships; taking part in IBM Extreme Blue 08 as one of their top placed hires and working with the Machine Learning Group (MLG) under the supervision of Pádraig Cunnigham, who Neil continued to work with on his final year project. Neil is based on the 3rd floor in CASL so he can collaborate with other researchers in the SRG.

Neil has been awarded an IRCSET scholarship researching Software Engineering of Pervasive Computing Systems. His initial focus is on the application of dataflow programming principles in pervasive computing, with a view to developing a suitable framework for the development of future pervasive/ubiquitous systems. The SRG has become a hot-bed of development in this area. With this in mind, Neil hopes to collaborate with a number of researchers in the group, in particular we expect Neil to be working closely with Umer Rashid.

Sept 2008 VAST Challenge committee travel grant to Mike Farrugia

Mike Farrugia won an award for his submission to the IEEE VAST research contest. As part of this he will be presenting in the USA next month.

Animating Multivariate Dynamic Social Networks Node-Link Animation (Cell Phone mini challenge) – Michael Farrugia, Aaron Quigley

The VAST Challenge committee chairs have also awarded him a travel grant to support his attendance at the conference from the NSF SEMVAST (Scientific Evaluation Methods for Visual Analytics Science and Technology) grant. This is a great achievement for a graduate student holding down a full time job and working on his graduate studies part time. Kudos to Mike and his employers for supporting his time with this.