UNSW Sydney’s Sunswift 7 solar-powered electric car has claimed a Guinness World Record by going 1000km on a single charge in under 12 hours. The car, designed and built by students, posted a verified time of 11 hours 52.08 minutes for the distance at the Australian Automotive Research Centre (AARC) in Wensleydale, Victoria. That equates to an average speed of nearly 85km/h and secured the Sunswift Racing team the record for the ‘Fastest EV over 1000km on a single charge’.

I was delighted to help supervise the software engineering team within SunSwift from 2020 – 2023 as part of the team. The official honour – and Guinness World Record certificate – was conferred a few days later once timing information and car telemetry data had been analysed and confirmed by a team of experts.

Read more here on the UNSW Website

Software Engineering Academic SunSwift 2020-2023

Sunswift Racing is a student led team of innovators working to redefine the future of sustainable transport through the research and development of solar electric vehicle technologies.

In December 2022, the students took their SunSwift 7 car to the Adelaide 500 to demonstrate their solar car and their remote driving technology on the race track.

Along with meeting the public we were able to join one of the racing teams as they competed, and placed first and second. The entire experience was an excellent learning opportunity for the students. With an overall team lead, each department e.g. Software Engineering, has a group of students, an academic liaison and an academic lead to help guide the students.

However, all the decisions on design, development, production, programming and driving are made by the students!

Along with Simon See from Nvidia, I’m co-chairing the SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Doctoral Consortium in Sydney in December 2023.

The Doctoral Consortium is an opportunity to spend a day with an experienced group of mentors, supervisors, practitioners and industry experts who have published on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM UIST, IEEE VR, ACM CHI, IEEE ISMAR along with many other leading conferences related to Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.   

We expect that each student accepted to the Doctoral Consortium will be assigned a mentor, whom they will meet before the conference. During the Doctoral Consortium you will have the opportunity to meet and discuss your work with each other and a panel of experienced researchers. 

Applications from current PhD students studying within the full range of disciplines and approaches that contribute to the SIGGRAPH Asia community are welcome!

https://asia.siggraph.org/2023/

Keynote: OzCHI 2022

The Impact of HCI

“Research impact is the contribution that research makes to the economy, society, environment or culture, beyond the contribution to academic research.” In the ACRA statement we say “the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) proposes consideration of the importance of the research problem solved, the approach taken and properties of the solution, the output describing such an approach, and how the approach in the research output has been built on or applied, including concrete evidence of impact.” 

In this talk, we will take a journey back in time to see what impact Research in Human-Computer Interaction has had on the world. In this journey, we will travel back through examples in the digital computing and predigital computing space. We will then explore yesterday’s tomorrow before exploring today’s tomorrow and finally tomorrow’s tomorrow. 

Along the way, we will discover the dimensions of impact and how you may plan your own research journey to maximise the potential for the impact of your own work. We will see examples of HCI research from falls Prediction to text prediction, from sensory substitution to sense making, from Data Visualization to Discreet Computing, or visualisation to core values, and Radar to recommender systems. 

We will end with a call to Extend Our Capabilities by Augmenting Interactions with the world around our bodies and the impact this can have for the 8 billion people alive today and the unborn generations to come.

Professor Aaron Quigley is Head of School in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia and is an ACM Distinguished Member and a Senior Member of IEEE. He is the technical program chair for the ACM EICS conference in 2022 and he co-chaired the ACM CHI Conference in 2021. He is a member of the ACM CHI conference steering committee and the ACM Europe Council Conferences Working Group.

• ACRA joint statement

At this year’s User Interface Software Technology conference UIST my colleague, Don presented our work on Towards using Involuntary Body Gestures for Measuring the User Engagement in VR Gaming.

• Don Samitha Elvitigala, Rukshani Somarathna, Yijun Yan, Gelareh Mohammadi, and Aaron Quigley. 2022. Towards using Involuntary Body Gestures for Measuring the User Engagement in VR Gaming. In The Adjunct Publication of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’22 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 5, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1145/3526114.3558691

During the conference, he was able to meet one of our co-authors Professor Koike, who was presenting a posters related to one of our papers from last year’s UIST 2021.

• Erwin Wu, Ye Yuan, Hui-Shyong Yeo, Aaron Quigley, Hideki Koike, and Kris M. Kitani. 2020. Back-Hand-Pose: 3D Hand Pose Estimation for a Wrist-worn Camera via Dorsum Deformation Network. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1147–1160. https://doi.org/10.1145/3379337.3415897

At this year’s international symposium on mixed an augmented reality ISMAR 2022 we had two papers presented in collaboration with our colleagues in Slovenia and Germany.

• M. Weerasinghe et al., “VocabulARy: Learning Vocabulary in AR Supported by Keyword Visualisations,” in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 28, no. 11, pp. 3748-3758, Nov. 2022, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3203116.
• M. Weerasinghe, A. Quigley, K. Č. Pucihar, A. Toniolo, A. Miguel and M. Kljun, “Arigatō: Effects of Adaptive Guidance on Engagement and Performance in Augmented Reality Learning Environments,” in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 28, no. 11, pp. 3737-3747, Nov. 2022, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3203088.

This conference will be hosted in Sydney Australia in 2023, for which I am a member of the conference advisory group.

For ISMAR 2023 myself and my colleague Tomasz Bednarz (Director of Strategic Researcher Engagement APAC and EMEA at NVIDIA) are members of the conference advisory group supporting our local chairs who are bringing this conference to Sydney Australia in October 2023.

Adding new posts

Prof Aaron Quigley

Head of School Computer Science & Engineering, UNSW

Level 3, Building K17, UNSW, Sydney 2052, Australia

cse.ea

www: www.cse.unsw.edu.au

This year was a technical program chair for the engineering interactive computer systems conference 2022 which was held in Antibes, France,

• Juan E. Garrido, Philippe Palanque, Aaron Quigley, and Marco Winckler. 2022. Engineering Awareness in Interfaces: Focus on Automation and Visualization. In Companion of the 2022 ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS ’22 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 54–58. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531706.3536453
• Kris Luyten, Philippe Palanque, Aaron John Quigley, and Marco Winckler. 2022. Engineering Interactive Computing Systems 2022: Editorial Introduction. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, EICS, Article 149 (June 2022), 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532089

Turning 18th century shipping records – written in cursive pen on faded paper – into modern data sets is understandably tricky. (read more)

“Today most of the bigger questions require that type of transdisciplinary approach – it’s the nature of the general societal challenges we’re facing,” explains Prof Quigley, giving the examples of “wellbeing, sustainability and sustainable societies and creating environments for the future of work”. 

https://www.ucd.ie/discovery/storiesofdiscovery/alumnistoriesdiscoverytodownunder.html