This week I was a panellist at a UNSW session on Building better teams: Harnessing the power of diversity as part of the 2020 Engineering the Future series presented by UNSW Alumni and Engagement. We discussed how harnessing and cultivating diversity at every level creates a stronger workplace and greater opportunity for business success.

Panelists: Mashhuda Glencross, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and Jon Whittle (with moderator Aaron Quigley)

The distribution of the human species across the globe means that today there are people living in every single time zone on Earth. Some of these zones are sparsely populated due to their geographic location within large open ocean areas. Other time zones are densely populated. All areas need the demarcation of time zones to accommodate national and international priorities. Being in the same time zone as an economically powerful economy can have significant advantages for a developing economy. At the same time, governments whose countries span multiple time zones need to think carefully about the associated costs of not having your entire population within a single time zone. This gives rise to unusual choices for people living on the edge who may have extreme sunrise and sunset times – these decisions are needed simply for economic or political reasons. Nonetheless our distribution can be a source of strength and resilience for our species. People in certain geographies with skills and experiences can find themselves acting as social and economic bridges between different regions of the world. Entire businesses operate in certain geographic and temporal regions simply to service the 24 – 7 needs of the consumer globally.

In this talk we meet with a set of academics from the future. 17 hours from the future to be precise if you are living in San Francisco. Or 14 hours in the future if you are in New York or eight hours in the future if you’re in Germany. In this conversation we will discuss the future of work where our global distribution across economically developed and developing economies can be harnessed for our mutual benefit and what the implications are for the future of Human-Computer Interaction and the future of work.

From: http://cs.wellesley.edu/~mobileoffice/conversations/

SICSA is saying farewell to its Director, Professor Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews who has been appointed to the position of Head of School of Computing Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Aaron has been a huge supporter of the Scottish Informatics & Computing Science Alliance (SICSA)over the years and has been personally involved in the Pool since it commenced. He was one of SICSA’s original academic appointments and has served as the HCI Research Theme Leader, SICSA Deputy Director and Director of Knowledge Exchange and since July 2019 the SICSA Director.  Speaking of SICSA Aaron said “Working with colleagues from across Scotland in SICSA has been one of the highlights of my time here. Our research themes and national activities have afforded myself and my colleagues an exceptional research environment. Access to resources and expertise across SICSA has given me a new perspective on how computing and informatics is reshaping the reality of life and how we tackle problems.

I will be forever grateful for the support I received and the access to the world leading talent here”

Whilst in his role at Director of Knowledge Exchange he led the establishment of The Data Lab Innovation Centre.  Gillian Docherty OBE, CEO of The Data Lab said “Aaron has brought great energy to the role of SICSA Director to drive collaboration across the members and partner organisations.  His focus and drive have ensured SICSA are in a great position of leading into this next period of the Research Pool Strategy and Direction.

Aaron also made a significant personal and professional investment in the creation and ongoing support of The Data Lab, a huge advocate of the importance of data to Scotland’s strength and opportunity.  He is a great loss for SICSA and Scotland, but we wish him all the very best for his new role and Australia is not that far away”Polly Purvis, OBE, Former Chief Executive of ScotlandIS said “It’s been a pleasure working with Aaron over the last ten years, through his involvement with SICSA, the Aspekt project, the DataLab and as a member of the ScotlandIS board.  He’s a dedicated, energetic and very connected member of the academic community both here and internationally, and has worked  closely with industry, helping drive the adoption of innovation.   He’s also a great champion to have on your team and has always been generous in sharing his insights and knowledge and hugely supportive of his students and colleagues.
I shall miss him tremendously but wish him all the very best in his new role”

Aaron will be a huge loss to SICSA and Scotland, but we warmly congratulate him on his new position of Head of School at the UNSW and wish him the very best of luck in this new venture.

from https://www.sicsa.ac.uk/news/farewell-to-our-director-professor-aaron-quigley/

Alumni Stories: Discovery to Down Under

Pictured: Professor Aaron Quigley, Chair of Human Computer Interaction [HCI], School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, Scotland – and incoming Head of School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

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

Computer scientist Prof Aaron Quigley was perplexed to suddenly find hundreds of thousands of documented shipments of limes from Canada.

Limes? Really?

It was 2014 and the Dubliner was working as part of an interdisciplinary team on a project called Trading Consequences, which explored the commodities trade under British imperialism 200 years previously. 

Trading Consequences was a Digging Into Data funded collaboration between commodity historians, computational linguists, computer scientists and librarians who mined, analysed and visualised information extracted from over 200,000 historical documents. 

But the multitude of limes? Nobody on the team could understand why they had popped up in such numbers out of the blue.

“When you went back to the original source document you could see that they were writing the word “time”, not “lime”, but the fashion at the time was to cross the t very lightly. So “time” was turning into “lime”. There were tens of thousands of “limes” and because lime was a type of commodity too it was causing confusion. I guess those are the flaws of data processing.”

Working in an interdisciplinary team has its challenges too – though the reward makes the effort worthwhile – and Prof Quigley has been at the vanguard.  

Back in the mid-noughties when he worked at UCD Discovery’s predecessor CASL, interdisciplinary research was in its infancy.

“When I started I was a pure computer scientist. There was little need for interdisciplinary work at time. Now most of our projects require different areas of expertise to tackle problems,” says Prof Quigley, who is now Chair of Human Computer Interaction [HCI] in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews – and the incoming Head of School for the University of New South Wales’s Computer Science and Engineering in Sydney, Australia. He has a degree in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD from the Department of Computer Science from Newcastle University, Australia.

“The main thing I did at CASL (Discovery) is I brought over the Independent Living Team that had previously been in the School of Electrical Engineering. We then had one location for all the interdisciplinary research activities around falls detection and falls prevention in older people.”

He and Prof Paddy Nixon, then Vice Principal of the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, combined their skills to assess ways of determining somebody’s stability when standing, walking and moving. 

“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”. 

HCI is now very transdisciplinary and projects often have teams drawn from myriad academic worlds. 

“Everyone needs to learn some aspect of another discipline to make the work progress. You would expect that a physicist should learn about data sets from a data scientist, the data scientist learns from the ethnographer, the ethnographer learns from the cognitive psychologist, the cognitive psychologist learns from the material scientist. Everyone is going to have to learn about something else for the project to progress. So while everyone works as an ambassador for their own discipline, you also have to work to translate that discipline for other people,” he says, adding that each member of the team injects their own knowledge into the research.

“If I’m a computer scientist working with a historian, I’m going to learn about their work and they will learn something about the computer sciences side of things. It’s a two-way street. You learn to appreciate and understand how you differ in order for more interconnected work to progress.”

How does it work in practice? 

“Traditionally it’s a lot of language acquisition. ‘What do you call that? What do we call that? Why is that important to you?’ You’re looking at the language that people are using to describe problems. Understanding why something is an interesting problem to them is my greatest challenge as a computer scientist. Why is that research question burning them up? I can understand why my problems are interesting to me. But it’s equally important to understand why someone else’s problem is interesting to them.” 

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

I’m honoured to have been appointed as Computer Science and Engineering’s next Head of School in UNSW, Sydney Australia. I’m excited to join the faculty of Engineering in Australia’s Global University and such a renowned School. Having studied and worked in Australia, I’m looking forward to returning to work with committed global leaders in UNSW. Taking on this role will allow me to help grow and develop the staff, School and an excellent student experience so we can further excel as a world-leading School. Read more details here.

I will be sad to leave the University of St Andrews after ten years but the connections I’ve made with colleagues and students here and across the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance will remain strong.

As ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences and general co-chair for CHI 2021, this CHI conference in Glasgow will be a busy time. During the weekend before CHI I will serve as a mentor for the Early Career Development Symposium and chair of an ACM SIGCHI Conferences board meeting, along with attending the newcomers reception and the awards banquet. During the first two days at CHI I’ll be a session chair for Human Smartphone Interaction, meeting with the ACM SIGCHI Conferences working group, meeting with my 2021 co-chair and technical program chairs for CHI 21, presenting the ACM Europe Council best paper award along with attending the chair’s luncheon, diversity and inclusion lunch and the SIGCHI chapters meeting. In the final two days I’ll be preparing for the closing in my role as ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences, shadowing at various 2019/2020 handover meetings and attending the SICHI/CHI downhill and ECV lunch and 2019 committee dinner. Following CHI will be a full day SIGCHI executive committee meeting. In between all of this I hope to attend some sessions, demos and posters.

This SACHI blog post describes what everyone in SACHI will be upto at CHI, “Alongside 5 full papers, 2 workshop presentations and 4 student volunteers, we’ve also put together a SICSA poster that we will be giving away at CHI that represents and summarises HCI research in Scottish Universities!”