Category Archives: research

Jan 2009 New Translational Research Project Dviz & Senior Software Architect post

IADT logo UCD crest

Representatives of UCD, IADT and Twelve Horses in late December 2008 signed a two year contract with the NDRC for the Dviz digital media technologies project. I am the UCD PI, Hilary Kenna in the IADT PI and Gabrielle Stafford leads the project with Twelve Horses Ltd.

The Dviz project 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.

Dviz itself is an online platform to facilitate the contextualisation of statistical data in realtime using dynamic visualisation technology. The ultimate objective of this project is to unlock the value of data by creating a platform that will enable users to visualise, manipulate and track data in a way that is meaningful for them. The resultant dynamic visualisations can then be used to investigate causal relationships to influence decision and policy making with evidence based conclusions.

Jan 6, 2009: The Dviz team is hiring a Senior Software Architect Link: http://tinyurl.com/7lr7lt

Draft Advert: Senior Software Architect – Dviz – (check Twelve Horses link for full and up to date advert).

The Senior Architect will be tasked with conceiving, designing, presenting and realising software and architectural approaches for the DViz platform and applications.

The ideal candidate must be fluent in modern enterprise and open source technologies, and must be able to apply these to a distributed system environment. A solid understanding of Web application technologies, databases, and performance parameters is a must. The ability to work independently as well as having excellent written and verbal communication skills is required.

The Senior Software Architect will be expected to technically review and manage the software development lifecycle, ensuring best practise process and techniques are deployed throughout design, implementation and testing, and appropriate metrics utilised to control and monitor the integrity and maintainability of the technical solution. Both conventional and Agile development lifecycle models will be used where appropriate, and full configuration management of all versions and variants will be maintained.

The Senior Architect will be expected to lead the following tasks:

* analysis of the requirements
* ensuring that the architectural design of the solution is consistent with the component architecture, and that all requirements are met
* providing guidance and refinements on the modelling and design process
* ensuring that the architecture fully covers all requirements, and has full traceability to requirements
* identification of any study, risk reduction, or prototyping stages that need to be planned into the development

Qualifications and/or Skills

* Minimum of 7 years Experience as Software Engineer
* Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science or related field (Advanced degree preferred)
* Experience as technical lead in designing and architecting scalable enterprise solutions
* Strong programming skills in Java and J2EE required
* Web Services, GUI, SOA, JSP, and XML desired.
* Extensive knowledge of Object Oriented (OO) Analysis and Design

Dec 2008 Tutorials Co-Chair Clifton Forlines Tabletop 2009

Clifton from MERL I’m delighted to announce that Clifton Forlines, a Research Associate and Technical Staff member from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge MA will be joining me as Co-Chair for the Tabletop 2009 Tutorials program. This is a fantastic development as Clifton has a vast range of experience in the area of Tabletop computing and has been a prolific publisher in the field. I trust our complementary academic and industry insights will allow us to develop an exciting and high impact program for these, the first ever Tabletop tutorials.

“Clifton Forlines is Research Associate at MERL. His research interests include the design and evaluation of novel user interfaces. Current research projects span from three-dimensional presentation of and navigation through recorded digital video, to collaborative tabletop user interfaces, to using hand-held projectors for augmented reality. He is currently leading the evaluation of three projects, MediaFinder, TimeTunnel, and DiamondSpin. Before coming to MERL, Clifton worked on Carnegie Mellon’s Alice project, which aimed at teaching programming to children through building interactive 3D worlds.” [ more ]

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.