Ian Sommerville, along with colleagues from Surrey, York and Cranfield has been working on an analysis of the UK’s Digital Government proposals. Their report, published on 25th January, highlights major problems and omissions in the Government’s Digital Strategy from a software and systems engineering perspective. Download the report from http://ukgaap.org.
Research
SICSA DEMOfest 2012
The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance in association with ScotlandIS hosted their 5th annual DEMOfest, a technology showcase of Scottish Universities Informatics and Computer Science on the 6th November.
The school had three posters at the DEMOfest. Derek and Gordon were promoting their work on the SFC funded Horizon Project “Services to the Cloud”, Masih’s poster was “On The Propagation of Network State Knowledge In Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks”, which forms part of his PhD, and Chris was talking about the work he’s been doing with Alex Voss on “Analysing Social Media”.
In addition, for the first time, workshops were included as part of the DemoFest. Gordon organised the first of these on the topic of Cloud Computing. The lunchtime workshop was aimed at software developers who are considering moving their product to the cloud, and comprised three invited speakers and an open panel Q&A/discussion session.
It was attended by 37 people from industry and academia, and is the first in a series of dissemination workshops being organised as part of the Services to the Cloud project.
Best Student Paper Award for iSCAN
Congratulations to Per Ola and colleagues Ha Trinh, Annalu Waller, Keith Vertanen and Vicki L. Hanson. Their paper “iSCAN: a phoneme-based predictive communication aid for nonspeaking individuals” received the ACM SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award at the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2012) earlier this year.
Virtual Worlds Research: NuiLib & Armadilo
Exciting update on two pieces of software from the Open Virtual Worlds research group.
The first is NuiLib
(available at NuiLib.org), a utility library for facilitating
development with NUI (Natural User Input) devices (such as the Microsoft
Kinect).
It puts an abstraction layer over the top of the NUI device to
hide the gory details of the original API and allows the developer to
focus on what they are trying to use the device for. It aims to ease
cross platform support, support for different devices, development and
experimentation with new NUI input parsing algorithms, integration of
new algirithms and code clarity.
The second is Armadillo.
This is a Virtual World client modified to support Kinect input. Users
can perform gestures to move their avatar through the world without having to interact with the computer itself. Helpful in museum or school installation
projects.
A video of Armadillo in action is available on the Open Virtual Worlds’ facebook timeline.
Kinect integration in Armadillo was achieved solely using NuiLib.
NuiLib has been featured on Microsoft’s Channel9 Coding for Fun blog
and by the DevelopKinect
community.
Talks are underway to include Armadillo in an
educational pilot program across 38 schools in Ireland and as part of a
Virtual World performance art project.
Both projects were developed by John McCaffery. You can find him in Room 0.09 (Jack Cole Building).
If you are starting on a Kinect project and want
to look at NuiLib or would like to superman your way through the Open
Virtual Worlds group’s reconstruction
of St Andrews Cathedral send him an email or pop in for a chat.
Business success for former PhD Student Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
Congratulations to Hassan and Ali Khajeh-Hosseini on their ShopForCloud business, which has just been sold to RightScale.
Ali worked as a software engineering intern at RightScale while studying for his PhD in computer science. Read more in Scotsman business article and on the ShopForCloud Blog.
Data Journalism Award
Alex Voss and researchers from Manchester, Leicester and the Guardian Newspaper were awarded first place in the Data Visualisation and Storytelling category at the Global Editors Networks World News summit in Paris yesterday. Riot Rumours featured in the Reading the Riots study published by the Guardian newspaper last December. More information in the University News and our previous blog post. Congratulations to all concerned.
New visualisation technique by STACS lecturer featured in the New Scientist
Brazilian “Science without Borders” studentships
The Brazilian Government has decided to support a programme of scholarships to promote the consolidation and expansion of science, technology and innovation in Brazil through ‘Science without Borders’. Science and technology scholarships will be made available to support tuition fees, travel and living costs.
Background information and programme details can be located at Brazil Science Without Borders and includes a list of project areas relating to Computer Science.
AWARE featured researcher of the week
Graeme Stevenson, who’s finishing his PhD funded by the Sapere EU project, is this week’s featured researcher from the EU’s Awareness initiative. Awareness brings together the project consortia for a number of EU projects in self-awareness, autonomic computing and pervasive systems.
Honourable mentions for two ACM research papers
Per Ola Kristensson has two recent papers published in top ACM conferences that have received honourable mentions:
- Kristensson, P.O. and Vertanen, K. 2012. The potential of dwell-free eye-typing for fast assistive gaze communication. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Eye-Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012). ACM Press: 241-244.
- Coyle, D., Moore, J., Kristensson, P.O., Fletcher, P. and Blackwell, A. 2012. I did that! Measuring users’ experience of agency in their own actions. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012). ACM Press: forthcoming.