This post contains links to systems and technologies I mentioned during my talk on the “Digital Tourist” on March 12th in the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. I have linked from bit.ly/stasmart to this page for ease of update. The SFC funded projects described can be found from our SACHI page here.

Slide 2
St Andrews HCI – http://sachi.org.uk
www.visionsofcomputing.org – visions of computing and videos related to computing as predicted in the past or now   

Slide 3
Ubiquitous Computing www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html‎

Slide 7
Pine, J. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1999.

Slide 11
5 I’s: Inspirational, Inviting, Iconic, Imagery, Interactive
What makes this location different from other places
Easy access to maps, brochures, calendars, videos, apps etc.
http://www.austria.info/uk

Slide 12
http://www.greenland.com/en/

Slide 13
http://www.visitscotland.com/
Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics/

Slide 14

• Tripadvisor http://www.tripadvisor.com/
• Tripit http://www.tripit.com
• AirBnB http://www.airbnb.com
• Kayak http://www.kayak.com
• Skyscanner http://www.skyscanner.com
• Lonely Planet http://www.lonelyplanet.com/
• ThornTree http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/
• Expedia http://www.expedia.com
• Weather Channel http://uk.weather.com/
• Hipmunk http://www.hipmunk.com
• timeanddate.com
• XE http://www.xe.com
• Twitter http://www.twitter.com/aquigley
• Google Maps https://www.google.com/maps
• Discover Ireland on YouTube www.youtube.com/user/discoverireland‎
• BitCoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
• Zinio http://www.zinio.com
• Google Earth http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earth/
• Google Business View http://maps.google.com/help/maps/businessphotos/

• Google Translate
• UrbanSpoon http://www.UrbanSpoon.com
• FlightRadar http://www.flightradar24.com/51.5,-0.13/7
• Hailo https://hailocab.com/
• TripLens http://www.hipgeo.com/ (now closed)
• Tinder http://www.tinder.com
• Tripso http://www.triposo.com/

Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism

SICSA Summer School

St Andrews, Scotland, June 27th – July 1, 2011

Summer School Website: www.sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt
The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation.

We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice. Mornings are devoted to seminars from our international speakers followed by guided group work sessions or focussed time for project development. We are providing a dedicated lab with development machines for the duration of the school along with access to a Diamondtouch, a Microsoft Surface (v1.0), a range of mobile devices, arduinos, phidget kits, pico-projectors, Kinects and haptic displays. As we expect participants from a range of backgrounds to attend we will form groups who will, through a guided process, propose a demonstrator they can realise during the summer school which they will demonstrate and showcase on the final day.

In addition, Ben Arent a leading interaction designer based in Dublin has agreed to host (subject to sufficient interest) a day long Arduino workshop for interested participants on Sunday June 26th.

Seminar Topics

• Multimodal Interaction for Digital Tourism
• Multimodal Interaction with the Android platform
• Creating Engaging Visitor Experiences in Museums and Heritage sites
• Multimodal Interaction with spatial data
• Speech-driven, hands-free, eyes-free navigation
• Haptic Tabletop Interaction for Digital Tourism
• Natural language generation for Multimodal Interaction
• Mobility as a challenge for interaction design, Tourism as a special case
• Multimodal Augmented-Reality Interaction for Digital Tourism
• Designing context aware-systems

Speakers

• Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow
• Tristan Henderson, University of St Andrews
• Eva Hornecker, University of Strathclyde
• Antonio Krüger, Saarland University
• William Mackaness, University of Edinburgh
• Miguel Nacenta, University of Calgary
• Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
• Antti Oulasvirta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
• Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews
• Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart

The deadline for applications to attend is May 3rd, with notifications by May 9th. Participation is limited to 30 and we expect a mix of both national and international participants. The registration fee is £450, which covers four nights of accommodation (Mon – Fri) in St Andrews, breakfast, lunch, dinner and summer school materials. Also included is a welcome reception and farewell dinner. An optional Arduino workshop (with Sunday night accommodation) is an additional £70. The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) is providing 16 grants to cover the £450 registration fee for PhD students from most Scottish Universities. See SICSA website for details: http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/
See the summer school website for a full programme, biographies of speakers and full details for applications: http://sachi.org.uk/mmi-dt
The school is directed by Aaron Quigley (University of St Andrews), Eva Hornecker (University of Strathclyde), Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh) and Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow).

Professor Jon Oberlander at Smart Tourism launch event March 29th

Along with colleagues from across SICSA we have been awarded a grant valued at up to £600,000 from the Horizon Fund by the Scottish Funding Council towards the cost of the SMART Tourism project on digital tourism translational research. There are many academic and industry partners involved in this project and we hope this is a first step towards a more sustained and broad based engagement between industry and academia in this area. Within SACHI this programme will closely align with our upcoming summer school of multi-modal interfaces for digital tourism and ongoing digital tourism related research.

The 13 SMEs in the project are technology SMEs with an interest in tourism challenges around Scotland’s visitor attractions. They range from AmbieSense in Aberdeen to Eagle Gardens in Kelso, and from SymetrIQ in Glasgow to Loc8 Solutions in Edinburgh. Commenting on the project, the lead academic Professor Jon Oberlander noted, “The project is built around challenges identified by key stakeholders who operate significant visitor attractions, especially Historic Scotland, Festivals Edinburgh, and Glasgow City Museums. Global ICT players are partnering with us, providing cash and in-kind support: NCR, Microsoft and Google are all on engaged.”  The academics involved in this project are from across the SICSA (Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance) SFC-funded research pool.

SICSA is a collaboration of leading Scottish Universities. Our aim is to work together to consolidate and develop Scotland’s position as an international research leader in informatics and computer science (ICS). In Scotland, we have one of the five biggest top-quality research clusters in ICS in the world, with more than 200 world-class academic researchers. We are the foremost cluster of  ICS research in the UK: about a sixth of the very best research output comes from Scotland. Smart Tourism helps implement our Knowledge Exchange strategy, which aims to inspire, equip and nurture researchers in Scotland, at all levels, so that they can make a greater economic and social impact.

A dedicated website for this project will come online in due course.