HCI

Thursday Seminar from Japan – Prof. Yoshifumi Kitamura – Interactive Content Design and 3D Interactions

Date: 2014-11-13
Time: 14:00 to 15:00
Location: Maths Lecture Theatre A, North Haugh, University of St Andrews.

Title: Interactive Content Design and 3D Interactions

Abstract: Good media content has the power to enrich our lives. We focus on non-traditional content other than movies, music and games, conducting comprehensive research on a variety of interactive content which creates new value through interactions with humans. In this talk I will introduce a series of my group’s recent research projects involving technologies for interactive content design and 3D interactions.
Web: http://www.icd.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/index-e.html

Bio: Yoshifumi Kitamura is a Professor at Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University. He received the B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD. degrees in Engineering from Osaka University in 1985, 1987 and 1996, respectively. Prior to Tohoku University, he was an Associate Professor at Graduate School of Engineering and  Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University (1997-2010), and before that he was a researcher at ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories (1992-1996) and Canon Inc. (1987-1992).

Event details

  • When: 13th November 2014 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Maths Theatre A
  • Format: Seminar, Symposium, Talk

Simone Conte: Lockheed Martin Software Engineer of 2014

Yesterday evening, in front of a crowd of about 750 people (as part of ScotSoft, the largest yearly Software and IT meeting in Scotland), one of our School graduates received the Lockheed Martin Software Engineering Award, for an outstanding project demonstrating excellent software engineering skills.

Simone Conte receiving award from Scotland IS chair of the Board - Robert Campbell

Simone Conte receiving award from Scotland IS chair of the Board – Robert Campbell

Simone was awarded this prestigious award for his Senior Honours project, which involved the design, construction and implementation of a haptic device for people with visual disabilities. The project was chosen among the final undergraduate projects of all Scottish Computer Science departments, and has been awarded for the last 25 years by Scotland IS. The selection panel includes senior software engineers and CEOs of top companies in Scotland and beyond, including Amazon, SmarterGrid, Microsoft, RBS, Chevron, Scottish Life, Skyscanner and, of course, Lockheed Martin.

An early version of the HaptiQ

An early version of the HaptiQ

The prize consists of a trophy and a check. Other awardees from the night include Blair Archibald from the University of Glasgow, Andrews White from Strathclyde and Heather Ellis from Dundee.

Honorary Professor John Stasko

Dean Dearle, Professor Quigley with Professor StaskoProfessor John Stasko and the Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has been appointed as an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science. This appointment comes following a SICSA distinguished visiting fellowship John was awarded. This fellowship allowed John to participate in the SACHI/Big Data Lab summer school in Big Data Information Visulisation in St Andrews. This industry linked summer school has successful paved the way for a new generation of students to explore Data Science and Information Visualisation.
Professor Stasko at the Big Data Info Vis Summer School 2013
John is a newly elected fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to information visualization, visual analytics and human-computer interaction. Professor Quigley who has known John for the past 14 years and said, “I’m delighted John will join us a honorary Professor here in St Andrews. His world leading research and experience in Information Visualisation will be of great benefit to our staff, students and colleagues across the University. I first met John when I was a PhD student and organiser of a Software Visualisation conference we held in Sydney. Then, as now, his enthusiasm, breath of knowledge and desire to engage and work with others marks him out as a true intellectual thought leader. We hope to see John here regularly in the years ahead and we will be working with him on new projects.”

ITS & UIST 2013: “Influential and Ground Breaking”

These are words used by the Co-Chair of UIST 2013, Dr Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK), to describe one of the prestigious conferences taking place in St Andrews this week.

“UIST is the leading conference on new user interface trends and technologies. Some of the most influential and ground breaking work on graphical user interfaces, multi-touch, augmented reality, 3D user interaction and sensing was published at this conference.

It is now in its 26th year, and the first time it has been hosted in the UK. We are very excited to be hosting a packed program at the University of St Andrews. The program includes great papers, demos, posters, a wet and wonderful student innovation competition, and a great keynote on flying robots.”

Ivan Poupyrev, principal research scientist at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, described hosting UIST in St Andrews as “an acknowledgment of some great research in human-computer interaction that is carried out by research groups in Scotland, including the University of St Andrews.”

Two major events taking place this week are the 8th ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS), and the 26th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), hosted by the Human Computer Interaction Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.

Read more about the events in the University News and local media.

Dr Per Ola Kristensson tipped to change the world

Dr Per Ola Kristensson is one of 35 top young innovators named today by the prestigious MIT Technology Review.

For over a decade, the global media company has recognised a list of exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to “transform the world.”

Dr Kristensson (34) joins a stellar list of technological talent. Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook; Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple; and David Karp, the creator of Tumblr.

The award recognises Per Ola’s  work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. He builds intelligent interactive systems that enable people to be more creative, expressive and satisfied in their daily lives. focusingon text entry interfaces and other interaction techniques.

One example  is the gesture keyboard, which  enables users to quickly and accurately write text on mobile devices by sliding a  finger across  a touchscreen keyboard.  To write “the” the user touches the T key, slides to the H key, then the E key, and then lifts the finger. The result is a shorthand gesture for the word “the” which can be identified as a user’s intended word using a recognition algorithm. Today, gesture keyboards are found in products such as ShapeWriter, Swype and T9 Trace, and pre-installed on Android phones. Per Ola’s own ShapeWriter, Inc. iPhone app, ranked the 8th best app by Time Magazine in 2008, had a million downloads in the first few months.

Two factors explain the success of the gesture keyboard: speed, and ease of adoption. Gesture keyboards are faster than regular touchscreen keyboards because expert users can quickly gesture  a word by direct recall from motor memory. The gesture keyboard is easy to adopt because it enables users to smoothly and unconsciously transition from slow visual tracing to this fast recall directly from motor memory. Novice users spell out words by sliding their finger  from letter to the letter using visually guided movements. With repetition, the gesture gradually builds up in the user’s motor memory until it can be quickly recalled.

A gesture keyboard works by matching the gesture made on the keyboard to a set of possible words, and then decides which word is intended by looking at both the gesture and the contents of the sentence being entered. Doing this can require checking as many as 60000 possible words: doing this quickly on a mobile phone required developing new techniques for searching, indexing, and caching.

An example of a gesture recognition algorithm is available here as an interactive Java demo: http://pokristensson.com/increc.html

There are many ways to improve gesture keyboard technology. One way to improve recognition accuracy is to use more sophisticated gesture recognition algorithms to compute the likelihood that a user’s gesture matches the shape of a word. Many researchers work on this problem. Another way  is to use better language models. These models can be dramatically improved by identifying large bodies of  text  similar to what users want to write. This is often achieved by mining the web. Another way to improve language models is to use better estimation algorithms. For example, smoothing is the process of assigning some of the probability mass of the language model to word sequences the language model estimation algorithm has not seen. Smoothing tends to improve the language model’s ability to accurately predict words.

An interesting point about gesture keyboards  is how they may disrupt other areas of computer input. Recently we have developed a system that enables a user to enter text via speech recognition, a gesture keyboard, or a combination of both. Users can fix speech recognition errors by simply gesturing the intended word. The system will automatically realize there is a speech recognition error, locate it, and replace the erroneous word with the result provided by the gesture keyboard. This is possible by fusing the probabilistic information provided by the speech and the keyboard.

Per Ola also works in the areas of multi-display systems, eye-tracking systems, and crowdsourcing and human computation. He takes on undergraduate and postgraduate project students and PhD students. If you are interested in working with him, you are encouraged to read http://pokristensson.com/phdposition.html

References:

Kristensson, P.O. and Zhai, S. 2004. SHARK2: a large vocabulary shorthand writing system for pen-based computers. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2004). ACM Press: 43-52.

(http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1029632.1029640)

Kristensson, P.O. and Vertanen, K. 2011. Asynchronous multimodal text entry using speech and gesture keyboards. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011). ISCA: 581-584.

(http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2011/i11_0581.html)

Full Press Release

Carnegie-Cameron Taught Postgraduate Bursaries 2013

Congratulations to Alice Herbison who has been selected to receive a Carnegie-Cameron Taught Postgraduate Bursary. Alice has studied a number of undergraduate modules in the school and will begin her postgraduate studies in September on our new MSc in Human Computer Interaction. We look forward to seeing her in the department again soon.

The Carnegie Trust For The Universities Of Scotland, supports the bursaries, which were established by Andrew Carnegie in 1901.

Gesture-based Natural User Interfaces

Research into personalised gestures for user interfaces carried out by Miguel Nacenta, Per Ola Kristensson and two of our recent MSc students, Yemliha Kamber and Yizhou Qiang featured in the University News last week. You can read more about their research in the MIT Technology Review, and Fast Company’s Co.DESIGN. Their results question whether pre-programmed gestures need the personal touch to make them more effective.

Honourable mentions for two ACM research papers

Per Ola Kristensson has two recent papers published in top ACM conferences that have received honourable mentions: