Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Digital tabletops: in the lab and in the wild by Patrick Olivier, Newcastle University

SACHI seminar

Title: Digital tabletops: in the lab and in the wild

Speaker: Patrick Olivier, Culture Lab, Newcastle University

Abstract:
The purpose of this talk will be to introduce Culture Lab’s past and current interaction design research into digital tabletops. The talk will span our interaction techniques and technologies research (including pen-based interaction, authentication and actuated tangibles) but also application domains (education, play therapy and creative practice) by reference to four Culture Lab tabletop studies: (1) Digital Mysteries (Ahmed Kharrufa’s classroom-based higher order thinking skills application); (2) Waves (Jon Hook’s expressive performance environment for VJs); (3) Magic Land (Olga Pykhtina’s tabletop play therapy tool); and (4) StoryCrate (Tom Bartindale’s collaborative TV production tool). I’ll focus on a number of specific challenges for digital tabletop research, including selection of appropriate design approaches, the role and character of evaluation, the importance of appropriate “in the wild” settings, and avoiding the trap of simple remediation when working in multidisciplinary teams.

Bio:
Patrick Olivier is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University. He leads the Digital Interaction Group in Culture Lab, Newcastle’s centre for interdisciplinary practice-based research in digital technologies. Their main interest is interaction design for everyday life settings and Patrick is particularly interested in the application of pervasive computing to education, creative practice, and health and wellbeing, as well as the development of new technologies for interaction (such as novel sensing platforms and interaction techniques).

Event details

  • When: 7th May 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Subtle Gaze-Dependent Techniques for Visualising Display Changes in Multi-Display Environments, by Jakub Dostal, University of St. Andrews

Abstract:

Modern computer workstation setups regularly include multiple displays in various configurations. With such multi-monitor or multi-display setups we have reached a stage where we have more display real-estate available than we are able to comfortably attend to. This talk will present the results of an exploration of techniques for visualising display changes in multi-display environments. Apart from four subtle gaze-dependent techniques for visualising change on unattended displays, it will cover the technology used to enable quick and cost-effective deployment to workstations. An evaluation of the technology as well as the techniques themselves will be presented as well. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion on the challenges in evaluating subtle interaction techniques. Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 5th March 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Sinhalese Text Entry Research by Shyam Reyal, University of St. Andrews

More info

The Sinhalese language (which falls into the family of Indo-Aryan languages) is spoken, read and written by over 22 million users worldwide (and by almost all the citizens of Sri Lanka). The language itself is very rich and complex – with over 60 base characters + 13 vowel variations for each, and also in terms of contextual phrases and idioms, which are much more diverse than Western languages. Nevertheless, very little work has been done in terms of creating efficient, user friendly text entry mechanisms for Sinhalese, in both computers and mobile devices. As present, despite attempts to standardize input methods, no such single main-stream popular method of text entry has surfaced. Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 5th February 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Seminar by Leo Liberti on “Symmetry in Mathematical Programming”, 19th Nov, 11am

Leo Liberti, the director of the Optimisation and Sustainable Development Chair at Ecole Polytechnique, will be giving a seminar on Monday 19th November, 2012, at 11am-12, in Jack Cole 1.33a.

Symmetry in Mathematical Programming

Abstract: When solving Mathematical Programming (MP) problems (be they linear or nonlinear, continuous or mixed-integer) using Branch-and-Bound (BB), the presence of symmetries of the solution set results in BB taking longer than strictly needed, due to the symmetries induced on the BB tree. I shall illustrate a class of “symmetry breaking” methods based on reformulating the symmetric MPs so that some of the symmetric optima become infeasible. I shall show how to automatically detect MP formulation symmetries by reducing MP to graphs, and how to automatically generate reformulated MPs with (hopefully) fewer symmetric optima. Although computational tests show that reformulations may not always succeed in making BB terminate faster, they can be applied very efficiently – so they can be considered an efficient “pre-solving step” to running BB.

Event details

  • When: 19th November 2012 11:00 - 12:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

School Seminar – Mari Ostendorf

Professor Mari Ostendorf of the University of Washington is visiting
Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews as part of a SICSA Distinguishing
Fellowship.

Title: Rich Speech Transcription for Spoken Document Processing

Abstract:
As storage costs drop and bandwidth increases, there has been rapid growth of spoken information available via the web or in online archives — including radio and TV broadcasts, oral histories, legislative proceedings, call center recordings, etc. — raising problems of document retrieval, information extraction, summarization and translation for spoken language. While there is a long tradition of research in these technologies for text, new challenges arise when moving from written to spoken language. In this talk, we look at differences between speech and text, and how we can leverage the information in the speech signal beyond the words to provide a rich, automatically generated transcript that better serves language processing applications. In particular, we look at how prosodic cues can be used to recognize segmentation, emphasis and intent in spoken language, and how this information can impact tasks such as topic detection, information extraction, translation, and social group analysis.

Event details

  • When: 27th November 2012 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Format: Seminar