Congratulations to Anne-Marie Mann, who successfully defended her thesis yesterday. She is pictured with Internal examiner Dr Colin Allison and external examiner Dr Paul Marshall, from UCL.
Research Groups
Infection Group Journal Club
Michael Pitcher will be presenting to the School of Medicine’s Infection Group next Thursday. The talk will be a Journal Club meeting, where he will be discussing the following article from the Lancet Infectious Diseases:
The Personal View piece discusses the need for a new interpretation of the life cycle of Tuberculosis with reference to both the timescales of infection and the localisation within the lung of varying stages of the infection.
The meeting is at 10:00am Thursday 26th January in Seminar Room 1, School of Medicine.
Best poster award: Sidetap and Slingshot Gestures on Unmodified Smartwatches
Congratulations to Hui-Shyong Yeo, Professor Aaron Quigley and colleagues, who won best poster at UIST2016.
Their paper Sidetap and Slingshot Gestures on Unmodified Smartwatches, is available through the ACM digital library.
RadarCat presented at UIST2016
SACHI research project RadarCat (Radar Categorization for Input & Interaction), highlighted earlier this year in the University news, the Courier and Gizmodo and in a Google I/O ATAP 2016 session, will be presented at UIST2016 this week.
RadarCat is a small, versatile radar-based system for material and object classification which enables new forms of everyday proximate interaction with digital devices. SACHI’s contribution to Project Soli featured in a previous blog post SACHI contribute to Google’s Project Soli, in May. Read more about RadarCat for object recognition on the SACHI blog.
Google’s Project Soli workshop in March 2016
Visit by the new Principal and Vice-Chancellor Professor Sally Mapstone
On Tuesday the 5th of October we were pleased to host our new Principal and Vice-Chancellor Professor Sally Mapstone to visit the School of Computer Science. During this visit she was able to meet with staff and students, visit our teaching spaces and visit some of our research labs. We discussed our new Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in Computer Science, our PhD programme, our new and existing MSc programmes, our growth in undergraduate single, joint and MSci degree programmes along with changes to our teaching and research space over the past few years.
From left to right, Simon Dobson, Ruth Letham, Steve Linton, Sally Mapstone, Aaron Quigley, Robin Nabel and Dharini Balasubramaniam
We were also able to showcase some of our ongoing research which included a short talk from Adam Barker, on Distributed Systems and his recent time with Google, and demonstrations from Chris Jefferson, on visualisation of constraints, Vinodh Rajan Sampath, on Scribal Behaviour and Digital Palaeography, Gonzalo Mendez, on iVolver, Gergely Flamich and Patrick Schrempf, on RadarCat, Hui-Shyong Yeo on WatchMi and David Morrison, on Beyond Medics.
We thank all the staff and students who made our new Principal feel welcome here in Computer Science.
Aaron Quigley appointed as ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences
Congratulations to Professor Aaron Quigley who has been appointed to the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee, to serve as the Vice President for Conferences. The ACM Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI) is the premier international society for professionals, academics and students who are interested in human-technology & human-computer interaction. SIGCHI sponsors or co-sponsors 24 conferences in addition to providing in-cooperation support for over 40 other conferences. This family of HCI conferences are held across the year and around the world.
As Vice-President for conferences, Aaron will be responsible for strategic planning for SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, overseeing all aspects of SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, chairing various boards and committees and working with other SIGCHI vice-presidents and the SIGCHI executive committee on policies affecting SIGCHI sponsored, co-sponsored, and in-cooperation conferences.
PhD Viva Success: Michael Mauderer
Belated congratulations to Michael Mauderer, who successfully defended his thesis earlier this month. Micheal’s thesis, augmenting visual perception with gaze-contigent displays, was supervised by Dr Miguel Nacenta. Professor Aaron Quigley acted as internal examiner and Professor Hans Gellersen, from Lancaster University acted as external examiner.
Deepview Project: Innovative GAZER Software
Congratulations to Dr Miguel Nacenta and Michael Mauderer on the success of Deepview and its subsequent application Gazer, an open source tool that provides functionality for showcasing light field images using gaze-contingent focus. The software, developed by SACHI, works in conjunction with eye tracking devices to allow photographers using light field cameras to discern images by automatically concentrating on objects using just their eyes.
Results from the project have been widely disseminated in the media and featured on a BBC click episode (20.56)
For more information and downloads visit the Gazer project section or github repository.
The project was funded through the European Union’s Marie Curie Program (CIG – 303780).
Could your car be used to spy on you?
In the not-so-distant future, cars won’t require a human driver anymore. They will drive autonomously, and you will be their passenger. However, these vehicles will also need to know your location, and, in some cases (e.g. for taxis and car rentals), your identity. Consequently, your movements might be tracked.
How do you feel about your car collecting such private data?
Tell us what you think! Please complete the online survey here.
The survey is completely anonymous. The record of your survey responses will not contain any identifying information about you, such as your name or e-mail address.
If there are any additional questions or comments, please email Tobias Meyer or Prof Saleem Bhatti.
Thank you very much for your help and support!
SACHI presence at CHI 2016
The SACHI group were well represented at CHI 2016 held in San Jose, California. The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction, and an exciting venue to discover, discuss and learn about the future of how people interact with technology.
SACHI presented five full papers, one note and a workshop paper, ran a successful workshop on Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions and designed many of the vibrant SIGCHI banners on display throughout the conference.
Well done to all concerned. SACHI group activities, conference keynote and plenary sessions are pictured below. CHI 2017 will be held in Denver, Colorado next year with a September deadline for papers and notes.
Images courtesy of Aaron Quigley