MSc in Human Computer Interaction starting in September 2013

We have added more details on our new MSc in Human Computer Interaction which is starting in September 2013. This is an intensive one-year programme designed to provide a solid theoretical and practical foundation in HCI. It is designed to enable students from a variety of backgrounds to become HCI practitioners, in roles including UX designer, visual analysts, interaction designers and interaction architects. This MSc will also help prepare you for a PhD programme in HCI. In semester 1 students take Human Computer Interaction Principles and Human Computer Interaction Practice, followed by User-Centred Interaction Design and Evaluation Methods in Human Computer Interaction in semester 2. Other modules can be selected from the general MSc portfolio.

You can find more details here on the MSc in Human Computer Interaction.

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Jacob Eisenstein: Interactive Topic Visualization for Exploratory Text Analysis

Abstract:
Large text document collections are increasingly important in a variety of domains; examples of such collections include news articles, streaming social media, scientific research papers, and digitized literary documents. Existing methods for searching and exploring these collections focus on surface-level matches to user queries, ignoring higher-level thematic structure. Probabilistic topic models are a machine learning technique for finding themes that recur across a corpus, but there has been little work on how they can support end users in exploratory analysis. In this talk I will survey the topic modeling literature and describe our ongoing work on using topic models to support digital humanities research. In the second half of the talk, I will describe TopicViz, an interactive environment that combines traditional search and citation-graph exploration with a dust-and-magnet layout that links documents to the latent themes discovered by the topic model.
This work is in collaboration with:
Polo Chau, Jaegul Choo, Niki Kittur, Chang-Hyun Lee, Lauren Klein, Jarek Rossignac, Haesun Park, Eric P. Xing, and Tina Zhou

Bio:
Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on social media analysis, discourse, and latent variable models. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award.

Event details

  • When: 23rd July 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Format: Seminar

PhD student awarded Google Scholarship

Many congratulations to Bilal Hussain, first year PhD student working with Dr Ian Miguel. Bilal has been awarded a Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. We thank Google for their additional support for Bilal’s study and research. The main funding for Bilal’s PhD comes from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and we of course thank them too.

Senior Honours Project Success

A Multi-display exhibit that enables visitors to explore The Old Course and photographs of Lawrence Levy, and to quiz their golf knowledge was developed by Julian Petford. The display was developed during his Senior Honours Project which was supervised by Miguel Nacenta. Great job Julian. We look forward to hearing more about the event in due course.

The exhibition officially opens on Saturday, although visitors to The University Library can view the exhibit from today. Read more about the showcase on Echoes From The Vault, a blog from Special Collections, the University 600th news or view some of the images on display via the BBC website.

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Students placed third in Hackin’ The City Hackathon

UCL Financial Industry Series
Hackin’ The City Hackathon
April 6 – 7 2013

Organised by the UCL Financial Industry Series (UCL FIndS) in partnership with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network, SWIFT and Level39 Technology Accelerator at Canary Wharf, the Hackin’ The City Hackathon brought together 55 students from a dozen of top universities in the UK to pit their skills in a round-the-clock hackathon to design and develop an application over 24 hours.

Six students from the university’s Computer Science department (Waqas Arshid, Gordon Coupar, Robert Dixon, Valentin Tunev, Alex Waller and Ben Lovell) were invited to attend the event in London. Five entered as ‘Team StACS’ and Ben as an individual participant with the intent of forming a team.

The aim of their project was to enable the creation and validation of safe buildings that have optimal escape routes in the event of disasters. Through the use of pathfinding algorithms, building floor plans can be analysed and statistics presented. Subsequently through these adjustments, improvements can be made in order to aid safety in the event of an emergency.

On Sunday morning, 12 teams presented their value proposition, technology solution and ran a live demo of their projects. Judges after long deliberation came up with six finalists. By 1530 on Sunday after 25 minutes of intense debate, senior judges The St Andrews team was awarded 3rd place and team members each received Amazon vouchers.

Group photo

 

Computer Science Research 2013 & Beyond

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Q: What do the words in the tag cloud have in common?

A: They all relate to research happening in the School of Computer Science. Some are conference contributions coming to a conference near you soon, and some will appear as forthcoming journal articles.

The University research portal features publications and awards, and can be customised to explore research happening in the School of Computer Science.

Thinking of studying in the School or contemplating collaboration with a research group? Use the words above to search and peruse the research publications for some inspiration.

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.

Computing Reviews’ Notable Books and Articles 2012

ACM Computing Reviews has selected a recent survey paper written by Per Ola Kristensson and colleagues as one of the Notable Computing Books and Articles of 2012.

The list consists of nominations from Computing Reviews reviewers, Computing Reviews category editors, the editors in chief of journals covered by Computing Reviews, and others in the computing community.

The selected survey paper is entitled “Foundational Issues in Touch-Surface Stroke Gesture Design — An Integrative Review” and it was published by the journal Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction in 2012.