Month: October 2011

Amazon presentation

Amazon is looking for outstanding software developers to join their development centre in Edinburgh. Come and learn about the company, and about our work in Scotland, devising, creating and growing major features and websites for Amazon worldwide. Our developers, designers and leaders work in small teams across the company, contributing to Amazon’s systems which are used by over 144 million active Amazon customer accounts, over 2 million active seller accounts and hundreds of thousands of external developers. From interactive UI design to large-scale distributed systems and machine learning, we do whatever it takes to deliver great experiences for our customers. Our freedom to execute effectively against broad, ambitious goals offers boundless opportunities for talented, innovative engineers.

Target students all software development engineer students, in particular final years, however we are keen to start developing a relationship with all high performing students in this space.

Event details

  • When: 25th October 2011 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a

Evolution of Radio Access Networks: Lighting up IQ by Francisco J. Garcia, Agilent Technologies

In this talk we will introduce how new mobile base station architectures are evolving not only to meet demand but also to become “greener” since at current rates of deployment, mobile networks are becoming very large CO2 contributors. These new base station architectures are also becoming enablers for new Radio Access Networks (RANs) where the same infrastructure can support multiple radio technologies simultaneously by backhauling their baseband leading towards distributed antenna systems and distributed base station architectures. Some would argue that this represents a paradigm shift towards “cloud” enabled mobile networks. In the talk we will cover the reasons why things are progressing this way, how this is being enabled through technology innovation, and what Agilent has done to meet some of the test and measurement challenges in this evolved 4G wireless communications space.

Event details

  • When: 27th February 2012 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium

Creating personalized digital human models of perception for visual analytics

Speaker: Aaron Quigley, SACHI University of St Andrews

Abstract:

Our bodies shape our experience of the world, and our bodies influence what we design. How important are the physical differences between people? Can we model the physiological differences and use the models to adapt and personalize designs, user interfaces and artifacts? Within many disciplines Digital Human Models and Standard Observer Models are widely used and have proven to be very useful for modeling users and simulating humans. In this paper, we create personalized digital human models of perception (Individual Observer Models), particularly focused on how humans see. Individual Observer Models capture how our bodies shape our perceptions. Individual Observer Models are useful for adapting and personalizing user interfaces and artifacts to suit individual users’ bodies and perceptions. We introduce and demonstrate an Individual Observer Model of human eyesight, which we use to simulate 3600 biologically valid human eyes. An evaluation of the simulated eyes finds that they see eye charts the same as humans. Also demonstrated is the Individual Observer Model successfully making predictions about how easy or hard it is to see visual information and visual designs. The ability to predict and adapt visual information to maximize how effective it is is an important problem in visual design and analytics.

About Aaron:

In this talk Professor Aaron Quigley will present a talk for a paper he is presenting at the User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP) conference 2011 on July 12th in Barcelona Spain. This work on Creating Personalized Digital Human Models of Perception for Visual Analytics is the work with and of his former PhD student Dr. Mike Bennett and now postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology in Stanford University.

Professor Aaron Quigley is the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. He is the director of SACHI and his appointment is part of SICSA, the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance. Aaron’s research interests include surface and multi-display computing, human computer interaction, pervasive and ubiquitous computing and information visualisation.

Event details

  • When: 15th November 2011 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar