SACHI Seminar: Matjaž Kljun – Large scale studies of habit changing interface design

SACHI Seminar – Large scale studies of habit changing interface design

Speaker: Matjaž Kljun

Abstract:

Various technologies can be used in persuading people to change their habits, behaviours or attitudes. Such technologies are defined as persuasive and they are used in a variety of fields such as marketing, public health and education.

We are daily exposed to persuasion through different visualizations and triggers on all our devices. For example, a social networking application tries to persuade us in opening the app with a push notification and once the app is opened other hooks are placed so we spend more time in it. However, such applications are usually installed by us and we are inclined in using them. But could we persuade highly busy professionals in completing a training course or just about everybody to read terms of service? We will discuss these issues through large-scale studies that have been in done in the wild.

Speaker biography:  Matjaž Kljun is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies at University of Primorska and is co-directing the HICUP lab (Humans Interacting with Computers at University of Primorska) and a research associate at the Faculty of Information studies, Slovenia. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Lancaster University, UK. His research interests span across various fields related to Human-Computer Interaction, Personal Information Management and the use of technologies in teaching and learning.

Event details

  • When: 12th April 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

SACHI Seminar: Klen Čopič Pucihar – The Missing Interface: Micro Gestures on Objects for Augmented Reality Interaction

SACHI Seminar – The Missing Interface: Micro Gestures on Objects for Augmented Reality Interaction

Speaker: Klen Čopič Pucihar

Abstract:

Augmented reality technology can introduce digital elements to arbitrary objects. However, these objects were never designed to incorporate the digital component, hence do not provide the necessary interface. To overcome this limitation, AR Interaction systems add sensors to objects, use additional handheld hardware or perform hand and body tracking. These methods are not optimal for direct interaction with physical objects  because they:

  • require modification of existing objects,
  • require the the user to hold the controller in their hand,
  • are based on synthesis of captured RGB or RGB-D data streams imposing the following limitations: (i) gestures need to be performed within the view of the camera; (ii) the gestures include reasonable large hand or finger movements (e.g. pinching the fingers, blooming gesture of opening the palm; (iii) the hand performing gesture is not occluded (e.g. cannot detect gestures if performed whilst grasping an object).

In this talk Klen will look at alternative methods which try to overcome such limitations and make inconspicuous, precise and flexible object oriented interaction possible for both augmented and mediated reality applications.

Speaker Biography

Klen Čopič Pucihar is assistant professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies at University of Primorska. Klen’s research vision is to look for new ways in which one could augmented, modify and mediate rich sources of visual, auditory and tactile stimuli that fabricate our everyday life experiences. The goal is to augment human abilities with new ways of using computational resources. This is important because the interface presents itself as the bottleneck between us humans and the benefit ever increasing computational resources could have on our everyday life. This makes the interfaces the core challenge for the future and the essence of Klen’s research which is currently mainly concentrated on augmented reality, mobile computing and human-computer interaction focusing on different perceptual issues that arise whilst interacting with various computer systems which lead to innovative user interface designs. Klen’s work was published as high ranked scientific publications and won him best poster award at ISMAR 2014.

Event details

  • When: 12th April 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

St Andrews – University of Primorska co-tutelle in Computer Science

The University of St Andrews and Primorska are soon to agree to award a joint degree with the title of Doctor of Philosophy (on condition that the joint PhD study programme in Computer Science will gain accreditation of the Slovenian Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education). This represents the culmination of many months of effort from Drs Matjaž Kljun, Klen Čopič Pucihar and Professor Aaron Quigley. Aaron and Matjaž first met at the UMAP conference in 2011 in Spain as mentor and mentee in the PhD doctoral program. Since then, Matjaž and Klen who undertook their PhDs in the University of Lancaster have returned to Slovenia to establish and exciting program of HCI research and development in the HICUP lab. In 2017 a program of international support (Slovenian/English) allowed them to invite Aaron to Slovenia for three weeks and this has resulted in a number of join grant submissions and the establishment of this co-tutelle program. We look forward to many years collaborating and we look forward to this new PhD student starting later this year.

VISSOFT 2018 Keynote by Professor Aaron Quigley

Aaron will be a keynote speaker at the IEEE VISSOFT 2018 conference later this year. “The sixth IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2018) builds upon the success of the previous four editions of VISSOFT, which in turn followed after six editions of the IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT) and five editions of the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SOFTVIS). Software visualization is a broad research area encompassing concepts, methods, tools, and techniques that assist in a range of software engineering and software development activities. Covered aspects include the development and evaluation of approaches for visually analyzing software and software systems, including their structure, execution behaviour, and evolution.”

Mensch-und-Computer 2019 Keynote by Professor Aaron Quigley

Professor Aaron Quigley will be a keynote speaker at the Mensch-und-Computer conference 2019 in Hamburg Germany in September of 2019. This series of symposia takes place each year in different German-speaking countries. This is one of the largest HCI conferences in Europe each year with over 700 delegates from industry and academia. Usability Professionals and Scientists come together in a multi-track program with long papers, short contributions, demos, tutorials and workshops. Submissions are possible in German and English.

Marwan Fayed (St Andrews): Quality of Experience Fairness for Adaptive Video Streams in the Network (School Seminar)

Abstract:

“Why is my kid getting HD on their phone, while I’m stuck with SD on my 50″ TV?” This type of complaint is among the most common directed to streaming services such as Netflix and BBC. Recent studies observe that adaptive video streams, when competing behind a bottleneck link, generate flows that lead to instability, under-utilization, and unfairness. Additional measurements suggest there may also be a negative impact on users’ perceived quality of experience as a consequence. The intuitive response may be, and has been, that application-generated issues should be resolved by the application. In this presentation I shall demonstrate that fairness, by any definition, can only be solved in the network. Moreover, that in an increasingly HTTP-S world, some form of client interaction is required. In support, a new network-layer ‘QoE-fairness’ metric will be be introduced that reflects user experience. Experiments using our open-source implementation in the home environment reinforce the network-layer as the right place to attack the general problem.

Refs-

[1] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/networking/networking2015/1570066341.pdf
[2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2940144

Speaker Bio:
Marwan Fayed joined the University of St Andrews in 2018. He received his MA from Boston University and his PhD from the University of Ottawa, in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and in between worked at Microsoft as a member of the Core Reliability Group. In 2009 he joined the University of Stirling, UK as Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) Lecturer, alongside an appointment to ‘Theme Leader’ for networking research in Scotland, 2014-2016. His current research interests lie in wireless algorithms, as well as general network, transport, and measurement in next generation edge networks. He is a co-founder of HUBS C.i.C., an ISP focussed on rural communities, recipient of an IEEE best paper award, and a Senior Member of both the IEEE and ACM.

Event details

  • When: 17th April 2018 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Compositional Coinduction with Sized Types – Dr. Andreas Abel

Abstract:

Formal languages and automata are taught to every computer science student.  However, the student will most likely not see the beautiful coalgebraic foundations, which use coindutive reasoning.

In this talk, I recapitulate how infinite tries can represent formal languages (sets of strings).  I explain Agda’s coinduction mechanism based on copatterns and sized types demonstrate that it allows an elegant representation of the usual language constructions like union, concatenation, and Kleene star, with the help of Brzozowski derivatives.

Event details

  • When: 16th February 2018 12:00 - 13:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33b
  • Format: Seminar

Interdisciplinary PhD studentship available with Management

Dr Tristan Henderson has a St Leonards interdisciplinary PhD studentship available, to be co-supervised by Professor Kirstie Ball of the School of Management. The area of study is to do with ethical values and data science. The student will be part of CRISP (Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance & Privacy), a collaborative research centre involving St Andrews, Edinburgh and Stirling. As an interdisciplinary project, we welcome and will consider applications from students with a wide variety of backgrounds, from computer science to management to technology law and anything in between. More details can be found on the CRISP website.