Dr Gordon Baxter appointed Scottish Chair of BCS Interaction Group
Dr Gordon Baxter has recently been appointed as the chair of the Scottish regional sub-group of the BCS Interaction Group. The BCS Interaction Group celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and is the longest established and largest national group in Europe devoted to human-computer interaction. The Interaction group is served by regionally based sub-groups with representatives from a broad range of academic and industrial centres of HCI interest. These sub-groups meet informally every few weeks to progress work, and all participants are committed to promoting the education and practice of HCI and to supporting HCI people in industry and academia.
Ildiko Pete wins People’s Choice Prize
Congratulations to Ildiko Pete who won the People’s Choice Prize for her presentation at the 2014 London Hopper Colloquium. Ildiko entered the Research Spotlight competition prior to the event, and was chosen as a finalist. The event was held at the BCS headquarters on 22 May 2014.
The Colloquium is an annual event for women in Computer Science, which provides an opportunity for participants to present their work, network with other researchers and gain insights into careers in industry.
May 19th: An Introduction to NoSQL and MongoDB – SICSA CSE Workshop
An Introduction to NoSQL and MongoDB – SICSA CSE Workshop
Speaker: Joe Drumgoole Director, Partner Technical Services @MongoDB
Joe is a product development expert with over 20 years experience in the field. An expert in cloud computing and one of the first users of Amazon cloud in Europe. An outstanding team builder who has created successful product teams in both small and large companies.
Brief details:
Joe Drumgoole from MongoDB
NoSQL, NewSQL, BigData, Hadoop Oh My! Why is NoSQL all the rage all of a sudden? why should I care? When should I use it? How should is use it? In this workshop Joe will demystify NoSQL and put it in its proper context. He will show you how and when to use it. In complex Systems engineering our new systems must be engineered to meet the needs of industry and society, operating robustly. How can NoSQL help and when should you consider SQL? Finally he will allow you to throw your weight around in NoSQL conversations down the pub or when next at a SICSA event!
Practice talks for papers that Aaron and Daniel are presenting at AVI.
Title: AwToolkit: Attention-Aware User Interface Widgets
Authors: Juan-Enrique Garrido, Victor M. R. Penichet, Maria-Dolores Lozano, Aaron Quigley, Per Ola Kristensson.
Abstract: Increasing screen real-estate allows for the development of applications where a single user can manage a large amount of data and related tasks through a distributed user inter- face. However, such users can easily become overloaded and become unaware of display changes as they alternate their attention towards different displays. We propose Aw- Toolkit, a novel widget set for developers that supports users in maintaining awareness in multi-display systems. The Aw- Toolkit widgets automatically determine which display a user is looking at and provide users with notifications with different levels of subtlety to make the user aware of any unattended display changes. The toolkit uses four notification levels (unnoticeable, subtle, intrusive and disruptive), ranging from an almost imperceptible visual change to a clear and visually salient change. We describe AwToolkit’s six widgets, which have been designed for C# developers, and the design of a user study with an application oriented towards healthcare environments. The evaluation results re- veal a marked increase in user awareness in comparison to the same application implemented without AwToolkit.
TItle: An Evaluation of Dasher with a High-Performance Language Model as a Gaze Communication Method
Authors: Daniel Rough, Keith Vertanen, Per Ola Kristensson
Abstract: Dasher is a promising fast assistive gaze communication method. However, previous evaluations of Dasher have been inconclusive. Either the studies have been too short, involved too few participants, suffered from sampling bias, lacked a control condition, used an inappropriate language model, or a combination of the above. To rectify this, we report results from two new evaluations of Dasher carried out using a Tobii P10 assistive eye-tracker machine. We also present a method of modifying Dasher so that it can use a state-of-the-art long-span statistical language model. Our experimental results show that compared to a baseline eye-typing method, Dasher resulted in significantly faster entry rates (12.6 wpm versus 6.0 wpm in Experiment 1, and 14.2 wpm versus 7.0 wpm in Experiment 2). These faster entry rates were possible while maintaining error rates comparable to the baseline eye-typing method. Participants’ perceived physical demand, mental demand, effort and frustration were all significantly lower for Dasher. Finally, participants significantly rated Dasher as being more likeable, requiring less concentration and being more fun.
Event details
- When: 20th May 2014 12:00 - 13:00
- Where: Cole 1.33a
- Format: Seminar
Honorary degree for Professor Dana Scott
We’re delighted that the University will be awarding the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, to Professor Dana Scott at the graduation ceremony on Wednesday 25th June.
What does it mean to describe a computation? For Turing, it meant designing an ideal machine whose small set of simple operations could perform calculations: the operational view of computing that allows machines to perform tasks previously thought to require humans. Set against this is a view that is independent of mechanisation, where the calculations, rather than the machines that perform them, take centre stage. When we take this view, we are making use of ideas that owe their modern existence to the work of Dana Scott.
Working at Oxford in the 1970s, Scott developed the mathematical structures now known as Scott domains that provide a way of precisely describing how recursive functions make progress towards their final result. This led directly to an approach for describing the meanings of programs and programming languages — the Scott-Strachey approach to denotational semantics — and indirectly both to approaches to proving programs correct, and to the development of the lazy functional programming languages that today form a major strand of computer science research.
Dana Scott is a Turing Award recipient (jointly with Michael Rabin), a winner of the International Bolzano Prize, and a supervisor of over 50 PhD students. His contributions to the foundations of computer science have been immense, and we’re very excited to be having his company alongside our graduating class.
Hot off the press: Foundations for Designing User Centered Systems
A new book, Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems has just been published by Springer. Written by Frank Ritter (Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State), Gordon Baxter (Systems Engineering Group, Computer Science, University of St Andrews) and Elizabeth Churchill (Director of HCI at eBay Research Labs), Foundations for DUCS was developed for people studying and practising human factors/HCI and software engineering.
Foundations for DUCS encapsulates the extensive experience of its co-authors in designing, developing and conducting research into interactive systems in domains as diverse as aviation, consumer Internet, health care, eCommerce, industrial process control, and enterprise systems. The book covers the fundamental information that system designers need in order to understand their users’ capabilities and limitations, the tasks those users will perform, and the context in which they perform them. It also considers the practical implications of this information for system design. Applying the lessons from Foundations for DUCS will help readers to design interactive systems that are more usable, more useful, and more effective.
Springer launched Foundations for DUCS at the end of April 2014 in Toronto at CHI, the pre-eminent conference in Human-Computer Interaction.
Dr Baxter said:
“It was a real challenge to produce a practical resource that would be useful to students of human factors/HCI and software engineering, as well as appealing to both academics and practitioners. The testimonials we’ve received from leading lights in all areas of our target audience suggest that we’ve met that challenge, with Ian Sommerville (author of Software Engineering) recommending it ‘to all engineers’, highly respected Human Factors expert Peter Hancock saying that ‘Even if only a proportion of designers and users read this book we will be so much better off.’ and IBM Distinguished Fellow and Chief Architect, Richard Hopkins noting that the book ‘has given me access to a variety of new techniques and an extended vocabulary that I look forward to introducing my design teams to.’”
The book is currently available via SpringerLink: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4471-5134-0 and from book stores.
ACM CHI 2014 Best Paper and Honourable Mention and AVI 2014 Best Paper award
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. This year, two papers from SACHI received a best paper and an honourable mention award. Across the program, members of SACHI had 9 papers and other works at this years CHI 2014 conference.
Michael Mauder (a PhD student in Computer Science), Simone Conte (an undergraduate student in CS), Miguel Nacenta (an academic in CS) and Dhanraj Vishwanath (an academic in Psychology here in St Andrews) were awarded an honourable mention for their full paper on Depth Perception with Gaze-contingent Depth of Field.
Jakub Dostal (a PhD student in Computer Science) along with many colleagues from Microsoft Research in Cambridge were awarded a best paper for their full paper on RetroDepth: 3D Silhouette Sensing for High-Precision Input On and Above Physical Surfaces. This work stems from a SICSA industrial internship award Jakub held to work with MSR during the summer of 2013.
AVI 2014 is the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces and through more than two decades, the Conference has contributed to the progress of Human-Computer Interaction, offering a forum to present and disseminate new technological results, new paradigms and new visions for interaction and interfaces.
Per Ola Kristensson and Aaron Quigley (academics in Computer Science) along with colleagues from the University of Castilla-La Mancha Albacete, Spain have been awarded a best paper award for their full paper on AwToolkit: Attention-Aware User Interface Widgets. This work stems from a collaboration formed from the research visit of Juan to SACHI during the summer of 2013 and subsequent joint research.
Members of SACHI are presenting 3 papers and a poster at this years AVI 2014 conference.
Senior Honours BBQ 2014
Four years of hard work, and a sunny day in May sound like prerequisites for our SH BBQ. Some laughter, lots to eat, photographic evidence and the odd game of Chess provide a well deserved opportunity to unwind before the focus shifts to exams, thoughts of graduation, or the next step. We wish them well in their exams.
Some will remain with us for another year and continue their studies on our MSci (hons) Computer Science or MSc Portfolio. We congratulate them on their exceptional choice and look forward to seeing them again in September.
Senior Honours Class of 2014
Funded PhD Research Studentship in Constraint Programming
Dr Chris Jefferson at the School of Computer Science is offering funding for a student to undertake PhD research in Constraint Programming.
He is looking for a highly motivated research student with an interest in Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms. The studentship offers costs of fees for UK or EU students and an annual tax-free maintenance stipend of about £13,726 per year for 3.5 years. It might also be possible to fund non-EU students on an equivalent basis, so students of any nationality are encouraged to apply. Students should normally have or expect at least an upper-2nd class Honours degree or Masters degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.
Research topics of interest to Dr Jefferson include the automatic generation of propagation algorithms (http://caj.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/pubs/statelessprop.pdf), the automated creation of combinatorial puzzles (http://caj.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/pubs/combination.pdf), or advances in Computational Group Theory. Dr Jefferson is also interested in any student suggested projects in the area of Constraint Programming.
For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/prospective-pg).
Candidates should address general queries to pg-admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk, or specific queries on the research topics to caj21@st-andrews.ac.uk. The application process will require an interview (by phone or voice-conference if appropriate).
The closing date for applications is June 5th 2014 and we aim to make decisions on studentship allocation by June 20th 2014.