Category Archives: postgraduate

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 2008 Lero Postgraduate Posts

The LERO Graduate School in Software Engineering – LGSSE – the main education initiative of LERO- offers a four year PhD Programme jointly provided by the four Irish Universities involved in LERO (The University of Limerick, UCD, TCD aand DCU). LGSSE is now offering 12 generous four-year PhD studentships covering stipend, equipment and fees, awarded on a competitive basis.

For full detasils, please see the LGSSE website at http://www.lgsse.ie Please note that there is no fixed closing date. Applications are processed on a rolling basis.

[ more ]

Jan 2008 Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization – Next Steps

aquigley UMS2 image 2 aquigley UMS2 image 1

Since 2005 I have been teaching a Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization (COMP40340) course in UCD as part of our Higher Diploma/M.Sc. in Ubiquitous and Multimedia Systems. I inherited this course from a colleague and while I have made some in-roads in the attention to algorithmic details and practical issues in the realisation of Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization it has remained relatively unchanged. This is now changing from 2008 onwards.

Students wishing to take my COMP40610 Computer Science: Information Visualisation course should attend this course where they will be given assignments and research reading distinct from the COMP40340 cohort. However, the core course material will remain the same. Classes are from 3-5pm each Wed.

Algorithm animation of a 3D force directed layout of DWA512 (Matrix Market) built as an interactive VRML animation.

I intend this new course to focus on Information Visualisation as the driver for the exploration of issues in Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization. I aim to equip the students with a solid grounding in mathematical and algorithmic details while ensuring they can rapidly deliver applied visual tools for exploring voluminous data sets (using the Processing framework which I will cover).

The old course drew on the following texts. Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice by Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes. Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke the VRML 2.0 Sourcebook by Andrea L. Amea, David R. Nadeau and John Moreland. Graph Drawing: Algorithms for the Visualization of Graphs by Giuseppe Di Battista, Peter Eades, Roberto Tamassia, Ioannis G. Tollis, Information Visualization : Perception for Design by Colin Ware and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative; Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte.

UMS Student Image
3D rectangular tree-map of a hard disc. Hierarchy reresented by inclusion, each rectangular box is a directory, size represents voume of data and height represents distance from the root of the file system.

Circular 3D tree-map of a hard disc.

This update to the course takes an innovative approach to the teaching of Information Visualisation in terms of Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization principles. In the teaching and applied learning in this course we will adopt a version of the SECI model(Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995) for knowledge creation. While we will not labour under the SECI model it does provide a framework for identifying a series of check points and guides to the delivery, discussion, active learning and knowledge formation required by students in this course.

In practice we will weekly engage in a seven times through a two week cycle consisting or a series of activities in learning about core concepts in Information Visualisation.

Information Visualisation is typically driven by the need to identify questions. We will achieve this through an open-forum with questions and answers, brainstorming, peer work or team work (Socialisation). This forms the tacit to tacit SECI step. Next the course lecturer will engage in a period of tacit to explicit knowledge transfer, helping to convert the tacit ideas discussed earlier into explicit ideas and concepts (including code, mathematical and algorithmic details, infovis methods etc.). This forms the Externalisation step in the SECI model. The next two steps require active student learning and require more time for reflection on the work in the Socialisation and Externalisation steps. A dedicated time for the Combination of the knowledge presented with a specific end-user task is needed. Weekly practical sessions guided by a domain expert or other will aid the students in combining knowledge. Finally, by combining knowledge in this way with a clear task in mind students will start the process of Internalisation whereby explicit knoweldge becomes tacit.

A visual timeline of Winston Churchill’s life, divided into years, months, weeks and days presented on “Lifeline”, a fifteen metre-long interactive table in the Churchill Museum London.

Population movement visualisation from “From Migrations to Population Concentration”, Gaudin B., Bennett M., Sheehan B. & Quigley A., Best Poster IBM Dublin CASCON 2006

Be attempting to complete this SECI process a number of times (spiral) during this module we aim to move the students up through a series of levels whereby evermore advanced information visualisation concepts are conveyed and realised through practical work.

The students will explore the problem inherent in trying to visually display and explore voluminous data sets from sources including web navigation, books, papers/citations, game scores, scientific data, biological data, shopping data, social networks, stock/finance data and news sources. Along with considering the pipeline model of information visualisation we will explore more iterative models dealing with data capture, modeling, filtering, management, processing, refinement, representation and interaction. Students will learn from both research papers and in-class lecture material covering multi-dimensional data, geographical data, biological data, time series data, relational data and methods such as scatter plots, graph drawings and tree layouts.

Reference books for this course include:
Visualizing Data by Ben Fry

Card Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think Written and edited by Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman

Processing A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas and Ben Fry

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!

June 2007 SRG students attend Software Engineering Research Summer School

Lipari

As part of the project SPL1 – Visualisation of Software Project Lines, UCD@Lero the Irish Software Engineering Research centre is providing support for Luke O’Malley one of my MSc students to the attend a summer school on software engineering which will take place from July 9th to July 21st on the island of Lipari, Italy. The school is chaired by Prof. Alfredo Ferro form the University of Catania and Prof. Egon Boerger from the University of Pisa. The courses offered will cover a wide range of software engineering topics, including

Domain Engineering, Prof. Dines Bjoerner, Technical University of Denmark, DK.
Feature Modularity in Software Product Lines, Prof Don Batory, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
Requirements Engineering, Prof. Florin Spanachi, SAP Research Karlsruhe.
Evolvable Software Products, Prof. Peter Sestoft, Department of Natural Sciences, Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, DK.
Web Services, Prof. Boualem Benatallah, The University of New South Wales, Australia.
High-Level Modeling Patterns, Prof. Egon Boerger, University of Pisa, Italy.
Principles and challenges of software architecture evolution, Prof. Carlo Ghezzi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
Distributed Systems Security, Prof. Dieter Gollmann, Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH),Germany

Luke hopes to gain a better understanding of software engineering and in particular learn more on the topic of software product lines which is directly related to his research. In addition he hopes to engage and discuss with other students at the school about their particular research topics. – Luke O’Malley

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June 2007 Hdip and ODCSSS Feeds

The School of Computer Science in UCD has been running a very successful and popular H. Dip. in Computer Science for a number of year. As the new course director I have started to revamp this course and improve its industrial relevance starting in 2007. Ongoing developments will solidify our role as the leading conversion course for non-computing majors into computer science in Ireland. I maintain an RSS feed which you can subscribe to in a number of ways: Higher Diploma Computer Science News Feed

The H. Dip. in Computer Science UCD is a conversion course which gives graduates from non-computing disciplines a sound theoretical foundation and practical exposure to Computer Science. In addition, the course may qualify participants to study for an M.Sc. in Computer Science. The course is made up of 10 modules of Computer Science, where a module typically consists of 24 lectures and additional practical sessions.

June 5th saw 12 students join us in Computer Science and Informatics in UCD for the UREKA (SFI) funded ODCSSS research summer school. In total there are 24 International research undergraduate projects in Ireland for “Technologies for Aiding Human Memory”. ODCSSS 2007 News

ODCSSS the Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School is a paid research internship program for undergraduate students funded in part by the Science Foundation Ireland under their UREKA program. ODCSSS is a four-year collaborative internship program between the School of Computer Science and Informatics at the University College Dublin and the School of Computing at the Dublin City University.

This year we had over 100 applications from around the world. In 2007 we have students coming from Universities in Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Slovenia, Spain, Thailand and the USA. The primary goal of this research program is to afford exceptional undergraduate students the opportunity to participate and contribute to exciting yet challenging research projects and to inspire them to go on to undertake research careers.

Apr 2007 Graduate Research Education: Sweden

SICS

On April 18th I took part in an IRCSET funded GREP research visit with my colleague Gavin Doherty from Trinity College Dublin. IRCSET funded an exploratory grant which supported this trip for the development of a Graduate Programme in Visualisation, Graphics and Vision.

We attended an Open Day of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and the Interactive Institute in Stockholm Sweden hosted by Dr. Jim Dowling. The aim of this visit was document best practice in graduate research education and to understand how stronger links with industry and research labs can be developed. While this was only a one day event we managed to speak with over 20 academics and graduate students from around Sweden representing 6 different Universities.

The following day a group of HCI academics in Uppsala very graciously gave us many hours of their time for an in depth discussion of graduate education in Sweden. Their combined experience has brought about their inter-disciplinary Master in HCI. From their description of the years of effort in creating this program and the strong industry links it’s clear this will be the gold standard in graduate HCI education.

Our meeting in Uppsala was a very productive and informative half-day event. We are very thankful to Professor Mats Lind, Professor Jan Gulliksen, Professor Bengt Sandblad and all their team for their time and efforts with us. Graduate Education both taught and at the post doctoral level is markedly different between Sweden and Ireland. We aim to learn from these differences. We hope our proposed GREP can establish strong links with this world class HCI program.

Mar 2007 Director of HDip, Higher Diploma in Computing

Aaron Quigley will be taking over from Henry McLoughlin as the Director of the Higher Diploma in Computer Science in Computer Science and Informatics.

Professor Aaron Quigley

Science Director and Deputy Director of CSIRO’s Data61