Category Archives: phd

Sept 2008 UbiComp 2008 workshops

This week two of my students and some of my collaborators presented three workshop papers we had accepted at the UbiComp 2008 Workshops in Korea. These papers will form the basis for full paper submissions to future conferences and Journals as the methods, models and techniques are refined and validated through experiments (both user study and simulation).

  1. Rashid U. and Quigley A., “Ambient Displays in Academic Settings: Avoiding their Underutilization”, Ambient Information Systems Workshop at UbiComp 2008, September 21 COEX, Seoul, South Korea
  2. Clear A.K, Shannon R., Holland T., Dobson S., Quigley A. and Nixon P., “Multiverse: parallel visualisations of multivariate context information”, 2nd Workshop on Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation (USE ’08) at UbiComp 2008
  3. Kenny E., Shannon R. and Quigley A., “Stay-in-touch: a system for ambient social reminders”, Ambient Information Systems Workshop at UbiComp 2008, September 21 COEX, Seoul, South Korea

Aug 2008 VAST 2008 and congrats to Mike Farrugia

VAST
Congratulations to Mike Farrugia one of my MSc students as he is one of the VAST 2008 Challenge Award Winners. His node-link animation submission to the contest was given one of these awards due to the “innovative visualizations, excellent analysis, and outstanding functionality demonstrated in the visual analytic environments” shown. Congrats Mike! More details here when I get them.

Aug 2008 Three new papers and a poster accepted

Along with students and colleagues we had a series of workshop and poster papers accepted recently.

  1. Rashid U. and Quigley A., “Ambient Displays in Academic Settings: Avoiding their Underutilization”, Ambient Information Systems Workshop at UbiComp 2008, September 21 COEX, Seoul, South Korea
  2. Clear A.K, Shannon R., Holland T., Dobson S., Quigley A. and Nixon P., “Multiverse: parallel visualisations of multivariate context information”, 2nd Workshop on Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation (USE ’08) at UbiComp 2008
  3. Kenny E., Shannon R. and Quigley A., “Stay-in-touch: a system for ambient social reminders”, Ambient Information Systems Workshop at UbiComp 2008, September 21 COEX, Seoul, South Korea

  4. Duffy B., Carr H. and Quigley A., Efficient Clustering for Interval Trees, poster (non-archival publication) VisWeek 2008, October 19-24 in Columbus, Ohio, USA

June 2008 Lero – The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre

Lero

Today I am attending the Lero CSET year 2 review dry run in the UCD CASL. Our
colleagues from around Ireland have come together today to give an overview of
our research efforts to one another. We just heard from Professor Kevin Ryan
on the vision, mission, goals and achievements of Lero to date. Collectively
these have been very significant in terms of publications, graduate school,
industry engagement, conferences hosted in Ireland etc.

Professor Mike Hinchey who has just joined UL and is the research co-director for
Lero is giving us his personal vision and initial plans for Lero going forward to
years 3 and beyond. His background as Director of the Software Engineering
Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre will bring new vision and insight to the
problems of developing reliable and flexible evolving systems.

June 2008 VGV08 and Congrats to Mike Bennett

VGV logo
Irish Graduate Student Symposium on
Vision, Graphics and Visualisation(VGV08)
June 5th
Trinity College Dublin

On the back of an IRCSET exploratory Graduate Research Education Program
exploratory grant myself and colleagues in Dublin City University and Trinity
College Dublin organised VGV08
in June 2008. Our aim was to provide a stimulating space for young
researchers and Ph.D. students to present the results of their research
and to interact with their scientific peers, in a friendly and constructive environment.

Mike's PosterOne of my postgrads Mike Bennett received the best poster award at this event and
was presented with an award for his poster “Understanding Distance & How Humans
See Interfaces & Designs” from one of our industrial partners.

Thanks to Trinity College Dublin and Gerard Lacey for the lions share of the
organisation on this! It was a great atmosphere and very interesting to see the
work on display. I look forward to following up with students on quadruped animation and
large graph drawing. Thanks also to Gerry for allowing a number of our
ODCSSS research summer interns to attend.

Given the wealth of research across Ireland in Vision, Graphics and Visualisation
I hope this becomes an annual event for academics, graduate students and industry
partners alike! Roll on 2009!

May 2008 Session Chair AVI 2008

AVI LogoI am currently attending AVI 2008 where I am about to chair the session on Surface – Oriented Interaction. AVI 2008 is the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces and is held every 2 years in Italy. I’ve only attended AVI once before but my students have attended the past four conferences. I really enjoy AVI each time I’ve come as you get some of the most interesting topics and presenters coming to show their work.

In the session I’m chairing today we have papers which study how clusters of objects on screen could benefit for a “starburst” region selection method contrasted with standard vornoi selection methods. Two papers looks at tabletop interaction, one with physical objects for control from Terrenghi et. al and another from researchers at MERL who have combined the streaming Anoto system with the Diamondtouch to explore Bimanual Pen and Direct-Touch Interaction. Back in 2002 I worked with the previous (non streaming) Anoto system so I’m glad to see this technology has moved on (not yet into the mainstream sadly). This work can be nicely contrasted with the VoodooSketch from the University of Lancaster. Another paper explores one handed interaction methods in “TapTap and MagStick”. As an owner of an iPhone I look forward to TapTap becoming a standard feature on my phone.

Oct 2007 Tom Holland starts as IRCSET funded postgrad

I would like to welcome Tom Holland who recently started his Ph.D. with the Systems Research Group in the UCD Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory under my supervision with Prof. Paddy Nixon. Tom is starting his research in the area of richly sensorised pervasive computing environments. Tom has received a full scholarship from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET). He is already busy at work on the course work component of his structured PhD program, a small Ubisense location project and we have had initial contacts with an industrial partner for collaboration on his research. Tom completed his B.Sc. in Internet Computing at the University of Hull in 2006 and previously spent 3 years in commercial development roles with digital agencies in Newcastle Upon Tyne and most recently with Acknowledgement Ltd. in London. Welcome to the SRG Tom and your first paper deadline is April for UbiComp 2008!

Sept 2007 CellTransformer: A Tool to Generate Reaction Networks through Graph Transformation

Brendan Sheehan MSc, one of the PhD scholars I supervise is off to The Eighth International Conference on Systems Biology, Long Beach California Oct 1-6, 2007. He is attending various tutorials and presenting a poster on his research, namely: “CellTransformer: A Tool to Generate Reaction Networks through Graph Transformation“

ICSB 2007

Abstract:
Rule-based models provide a declarative means to construct a computational model of biological systems. Rules specify how the model can evolve over time by transforming the underlying data or model into its next state. Most rule-based systems operate on strings. Graph transformation systems (GTS) can provide a more direct and intuitive description of many kinds of biological data such as protein-interaction data and data relating to cell-signalling pathways. Here we implement the GTS based formalism defined by Blinov et al to help generate molecular reactions based on rules that describe interactions between protein domains. We use the GTS tool AGG to implement the tool as a plugin for the forthcoming version of CellDesigner.
by Sheehan and Quigley.