Keith Cheverst: Investigating the Shared Curation of Locative Media relating to the Local History of a Rural Community

Abstract

In this talk I will present experiences and insights from our studies involving locative media, local history and community. Our work in the village of Wray has involved the longitudinal and ‘in the wild’ deployment of ‘digital noticeboard’ displays (conceived as technology probes) that support the sharing of photos/images. A significant portion of the submitted photo content relates to Wray’s local history and features of Wray’s landscape. Residents of the village have helped shape the system through involvement in co-design workshops. A key motivation of our current studies (as part of the SHARC project) is to explore issues around the co-curation of locative media experiences. A field trial (involving both residents and visitors) and a design workshop revealed both opportunities and challenges for the co-curation approach.

Bio

Dr Keith Cheverst is a Reader in HCI at Lancaster University where he obtained his PhD in 1999. Keith has also held the position of visiting scientist at Newcastle University’s Culture Lab, at Microsoft Research, Cambridge (working with the Socio-Digital systems group), and at the University of Melbourne (Department of Computing and Information Systems).

Keith’s primary research focus is in exploring the obdurate problems associated with the user-centered design of interactive systems in complex or semi-wild settings and the deployment and longitudinal study of these systems in order to gain insights into issues of user adoption and appropriation. He is particularly interested in the design interactive systems that feature locative media and associated mobile/pervasive technologies

Event details

When: 5th April 2016 14:00 - 15:00
Where: Cole 1.33a
Series: School Seminar Series
Format: Seminar

Distinguished Lecture Series: Reminder of next event – ‘CS for All’ by President Maria Klawe

Reminder that President Maria Klawe will be speaking at our Distinguished Lecture Series on March 31st 2016 in St Andrews.

During this event Maria will discuss the challenges in CS for all, including CS education in K-12, computing for all in undergraduate education, and CS research aimed at people with accessibility challenges and creating educational and research opportunities around the applications of computational technologies in almost every discipline and economic sector.

Programme of events:

09:00 – 09:30
- Introduction: By Professor Aaron Quigley
09:30 – 10:30
- Lecture 1: Computing for all in K-12 education
10:30 – 11:00
- Coffee Break: Refreshments served in foyer
11:00 – 12:00
- Lecture 2: Computing for all in undergraduate education
12:00 – 14:00
- Lunch Break: Free time
14:00 – 15:00
- Lecture 3: Computing for all in research
15:00 – 15:30
- Q & A: Open forum in the auditorium
15:30 – 16:00
- Informal time with Speaker: In the foyer

Event details

When: 31st March 2016 09:00 - 16:00
Where: Byre Theatre
Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
Format: Distinguished lecture

Katerina Saranti and Tatiana Matejovicova: Google STEP Internships

Congratulations to second year students Katerina Saranti and Tatiana Matejovicova, both have successfully secured Google STEP Internships with Google, in Zurich. A fantastic achievement given the highly sought after summer engineering projects and the competitive process involved.

Katerina had originally applied for a Google Anita Borg scholarship last year. She had intended Interning at a natural speech recognition company, before being contacted by a student development specialist from Google who encouraged her to apply for a STEP internship.

Katerina shared some of her thoughts on the interview process.

“After the Christmas holidays, a Student Development Specialist at Google emailed me asking me if I would be interested in applying for a STEP internship as my profile from the Anita Borg application seemed a good fit. It took me by surprise but I was thrilled of course and I spent the next few weeks preparing for the technical interviews.

I feel that all CS modules helped me for the interviews, but I found the most relevant module to be CS2001 as it focuses on data structures which are especially important for the interviews. Also crucial to my preparation was solving lots of coding problems by hand, without using an IDE, since during the interview I had to write out everything myself, without the help of auto-complete or the compiler’s complaints about my errors.

I had two technical interviews, I thought my first one went OK and I managed fairly easily to do the coding that I was asked but I was not quite sure about the second. The feedback took about two weeks to come out and after that, things went on rather quickly; a host matching interview was arranged for a project in Zurich and in a matter of hours I received confirmation that I was selected. The big bonus is that my friend and classmate Tatiana was also selected for the exact same project and I can’t think of a better outcome than us working side by side! Special thanks to the careers office who helped me with my CV which was necessary for the scholarship application.”

Thanks to Silvia and Katerina for sharing their experience in an inclusive and informative way, and in doing so encouraging other students to seek out internships.

We have supported a number of student led, or internship focused events in the last year including the Academic Skills Project and look forward to hearing more about the 2016 STEP internships at future events.

Computer Science hosts StacsHack and Google HashCode

The School hosted another hugely successful StacsHack last month. We congratulate the St Andrews Computing Society (Stacs) for running a fantastic event. Earlier in February they also coordinated and participated in Google HashCode, a team-based programming competition aimed at solving real-life engineering problems selected by Google.

Google Hash Code February 2016

Hackathons allow students with a range of talents and aptitudes to form groups and create innovative projects in 24hrs. It’s clear from the many photos that great fun was had at both events.

Gorgeous graphs, mood hub, SpeechFrenzy, Social face, Fresh: freshers app, Myo Athletics, pinboard and FarmScript are just some of the projects demos presented during StacsHack. Why not join them for StacsHack3 in 2017.

StacsHack2 February 2016

Thanks to Stacs for continuing to represent the School of Computer Science in such an upbeat and inclusive way.

Sponsors: GitHub, J.P.Morgan,Bloomberg, Codeplay and Startups hackcampus and Codio.

Hardware Lab Partners: Arduino, nest, intel, leap motion, muse, oculus, particle, pebble, and Myo.

StacsHack Photos by Ryo Yanagida, courtesy of Major League Hacking.

Google Hash Code Photos courtesy of Computer Science.

Undergraduate visiting day