Category Archives: research

June 2008 EMBC Workshop Accepted

EMBC 2008 logo

Along with colleagues in the TTP in TRIL we had our proposal for a pre-workshop event at EMBC 2008 accepted. Our event is called “Platform Oriented Approaches to Biomedical Application Development for In-lab and In-home Deployments” to be held at the 30th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society August 20-24, 2008 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. If you are interested in rapid application development, data collection in biomedical research (in lab or in home), remote and home monitoring then please come along to this event where we will cover much of the related work and demonstrate our BioMOBIUS research platform.

The success of biomedical systems that enable research both in lab and in the home is predicated on the available of ICT solutions which can be used throughout the research community. The success of technology in other domains such as the internet, personal computers has been based on a set of fundamental tools is necessary to ensure interoperability, rapid development, and user confidence. This workshop will review the challenges associated with development of systems to support biomedical research both in the laboratory and in the home. The key characteristics of a reusable toolbox will be defined. These tools, by necessity, will be heterogeneous and diverse – ranging from body sensor networks to mobile communication devices to home based monitoring systems. Practical demonstrations of how the features have been realized in an open, extensible and reusable toolbox will be based on the TRIL’s centre BioMOBIUS™ research platform will be included through out the workshop.
BIOMOBIUS comprises of both hardware and software components that support rapid application prototyping and development of biomedical research systems which incorporate a wide range of monitoring capabilities.

May 2008 Co-Chair PPD’08 – Naples Italy

PPD LogoAVI is going well but this Saturday I am co-chairing an international workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for coupled public and private displays along with Shahram Izadi from Microsoft Research UK and Sriram Subramanian from Bristol University UK. The program for this workshop is now online and if you take a look you will see the range of very interesting workshop papers and participants. The objective of this workshop is to focus on the opportunities afforded by the combination of touch sensitive small private input displays coupled with large touch sensitive public displays. The main goals are to identify research challenges in the technology, application and evaluation of devices in such settings.

Workshop attendees will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to a special issue of Springer’s Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. The goal is to have the authors submit extended versions of their papers by Sept 2008 (we realize CHI is around the corner, but we have a tight deadline from Springer). More details on this will be available at the Workshop and linked from the website.

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.

May 2008 Pervasive 2008 comes to an end

Pervasive 2008 LogoToday saw the end of my responsibilities for Pervasive 2008 the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, which was held in Sydney. Congratulations and thanks to all the organisers for their hardwork and dedication in bringing this event off without a hitch. I quite enjoyed the conference and it was nice to catch up with some old colleagues along with seeing some younger colleagues progress both their research and their careers. During the conference I was the co-chair for the Late Breaking Results, Video and Demo one-minute madness with my LBR co-chair Dr. Rene Mayrhofer who is a Guest Prof. for Mobile Computing in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Vienna. Rene was a pleasure to work with on the late breaking results and I’d like to compliment him for his professionalism and high level of attention to detail through the review, discussion and shepherding process. It’s fair to say I also enjoyed the session as I got to wield a cricket bat to those who went over their time on stage (harmless I promise [ see pic ]). The following day I was a session chair for the Lessons learned from displays, games, and health applications which saw three good quality papers and presentations on a range of user experience issues. The day after (today) was the final day of the conference and along with 7 other colleagues I presented a one hour tutorial on Context-Rich but Keyboard-Free Pervasive Computing: Pervasive Computing User Interfaces. There is a book available for this day long tutorial.

LoCA 2009

I look forward to seeing everyone at LOCA 2009 the 4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA) which will be held in Tokyo Japan in May 2009 just before Pervasive 2009 (which will be in Nara).
The important dates for LoCA are:

  • 18 December 2008 Submission Deadline
  • 13 February 2009 Author Notifications
  • 27 February 2009 Camera Ready Copy
  • 7-8 May 2009 Symposium (Tokyo, Japan)

Loca logo

May 2008 Pervasive Computing @ Home Workshop

Today I attended and presented at the Pervasive Computing @ Home workshop in Sydney. This workshop was focused on Pervasive Technology as applied specifically to a home environment. What was discussed was what distinguishes the home from other sites of technological innovation, approaches to studying behavior in a home setting including in-situ studies and living laboratories, and lessons learned from building and studying pervasive technologies intended for use in homes. I was mainly interested in this workshop for our TRIL research and development.
Presentations Included:

  • Pervasive Computing@ICS-Forth – C. Stephanidis, A. Argyros, D. Grammenos, X. Zabulis
  • Home Deployments for Independent Living – A. Quigley, M. McGrath, P. Nixon, and T. Dishongh
  • The eHome – a Practical Smart Home Implementation – L. Kaila, J. Mikkonen, A. Vainio, J. Vanhala End-User Programming for the Home: a Challenge – J. Couta
  • Bringing IMS Services to the DLNA Connected Home – J. Hjelm, T. Oda, A. Fasbender, S. Murakami, A. Damola
  • Adding Convenience to “Cohabitation of Conveience” – U. Rashid and A. Quigley
  • Connecting People Who Connect Devices – M. Newman and M. Ackerman

May 2008 Tabletop’08 PC – IEEE Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces 2008

I was today invited to serve on the Program Committee for Tabletop’08 the 3rd IEEE Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces Conference in Amsterdam in October this year.

TableTop Logo
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.

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together leading researchers in the field so that they can present and exchange current results of ongoing investigations.
The 3rd IEEE TABLETOP Workshop will be held on October 2-3, 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Sriram Subramanian & Shahram Izadi TABLETOP 2008 Co-Chairs

May 2008 LoCA 2009 Co-Chair

LoCA 2009 Logo

Along with Tanzeem Choudhury of Dartmouth College, USA I am the program co-chair for LoCA 2009 in Tokyo Japan.

4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness
May 7th-8th, 2009. Tokyo, Japan

The 2009 Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA) seeks new and significant research on systems, services, and applications to detect, interpret and use location and other contextual information. Context includes physiological, environmental and computational data whether sensed or inferred. In addition, context includes users’ activities, goals, abilities, preferences, interruptibility, affordances, and surroundings. With context, we can expect computers to deliver information, services, and entertainment in a way that maximises convenience and minimises intrusion. Developing awareness involves research in sensing, systems, machine learning, human computer interaction, and design.

LoCA 2009 Poster [ Download Poster ]

May 2008 Paper Accepted IV08: Structural Clustering

Gaudin A. and Quigley A., “Interactive Structural Clustering of Graphs based on Multi-Representations”, 12th International Conference on Information Visualisation IV08, 9 – 11 July 2008 in LSBU, London, UK (to appear)

Work based on Marie Curie International Re-Integration Grant. CoViAn: Comparative Visual Analytic techniques (e.g. structure plot, city plot and graph drawing) and their effectiveness in the exploration of large scale relational data sets. This research project operated at the junction of two sub-topics, namely large-scale relational information visualisation (graph drawing) and visual analytics. The aim was to build on our own research and existing research in these fields, and to provide a targeted comparison of three contrasting views of relational data display and exploration. Our hypothesis which we have proven through our empirical research, is simply that graph drawing techniques alone, for the exploration and navigation of large graphs are not sufficient and that a hybrid approach which incorporates multiple views of the data should be taken.