Seminars
Seminars
We hold a regular programme of meetings and seminars at 1pm on Fridays with a mixture of external and local speakers. If you are interested in attending one of our seminars, or visiting us to give a seminar, please contact Daniel Holliday or Deirdre Devers.
All meetings and seminars are held in the Focus Room (room A222) unless otherwise stated.
Spring 2012
18th May 2012 (A110): Tim Kindberg, founder and managing director of matter2media
13th April 2012: Anja Sisarica
Winter 2012
24th Februay 2012: Dr Konstantinos Zachos
Title: A Creativity App to Help People with Dementia
13th January 2012: Dr Bill Karakostas
Title: Concepts, Technologies and Systems for Smart Evacuation
2011
- 9th December 2011: Rebecca Stewart
Title: Spatial Audio in User Interfaces for Music Collection Navigation
- 14th October 2011: Faidon Loumakis from Fluent Interaction
Title: How do images smell? Effects of image information scent in search engine results pages
- 3rd October 2011: Steve Krug author of "Don't Make me Think"
Title: I'm just a guy with the hammer
- 30th September 2011: Dana McKay from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne
Title: Digital, physical, interactive, human: Tales from an academic library
- 23rd September 2011: Amélie Cordier, SILEX Team, LIRIS Lab
Title: Reasoning from Users' Experiences: from Case-Based Reasoning to Traces-Based Reasoning.
Seminar details
Title: Pervasive media: Creative applications of pervasive computing and the role of practice-based research
Abstract:
In this talk I will describe the work of the Pervasive Media Studio, in which technologists, artists, academics and producers collaborate to integrate computing, sensing and actuation into theatre, music, narrative and other art forms. This practice-based research is quite different, methodologically speaking, from research as conducted in industry and academia. It has led to conceptions of pervasive computing that are in some ways at odds with notions in conventional computer science, particularly that of context. It has also led to commercial activities that extend the functionality provided by the creative industries. I will include case studies from my own work and that of others.
Biography:
Tim Kindberg is a computer scientist turned creative technologist based in Bristol, UK. He has held academic positions including visiting professorships at Bath University & ITU Copenhagen. He worked in Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto USA, & Bristol, and was research director at the Pervasive Media Studio. He is principal at matter2media.com, where he develops mobile/pervasive computing platforms and installations for the creative industries. He has a PhD in computer science and a BA in mathematics.
Title: Empowering understanding in person-centred dementia care by creative problem solving and serious games
Abstract:
Reflecting on the first months of her PhD studies, Anja will introduce her research motivation, share insights from her literature review, present the ongoing collaborations and discuss the emerging doctoral research plan.
Anja is exploring opportunities in synergies between creative problem solving and serious games that apply reflective learning to inform general improvements of challenging working environments. Findings of this research, supported by a City University London scholarship and the EU-funded MIRROR Integrated Project, are to be tested in customized gaming solutions for assisting creative training in person-centred professional care of people with dementia.
Biography
Anja Sisarica is studying full-time towards a PhD in Software Systems Engineering at City University London and its Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice, being supervised by Prof Neil Maiden (School of Informatics), and Prof Julienne Meyer (School of Health Sciences). Her doctoral research is sponsored by MIRROR Studentship and Fund for Young Talents of Serbia. Anja holds a BSc (2010) and a MSc (2011) in Computer Science from University of Novi Sad. She was a visiting scholar at Sapienza University (BASILEUS EM-ECW), Bremen University (DAAD) and Johannes Kepler University (CEEPUS-II), and has been alumna of ExperiencingEurope internship programme (WUS Austria, Foundation Dr Zoran Djindjic) and Eurobank EFG scholarship programme.
Title: A Creativity App to Help People with Dementia
Abstract:
This talk will present results of research to design and evaluate a mobile creativity support app with which to care for people with dementia. The app was designed for care staff in residential homes to use to create new solutions to challenging behaviors through case-based and analogical reasoning with past cases of good care practice. To enable staff to create new solutions the app uses computational creativity services to generate new content that it presents in the work context to support cognitive creativity.
Biography:
Konstantinos Zachos received a PhD degree in Service-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Creativity from City University London in 2008. He is a researcher at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction at City University and has been involved in research in the areas of requirements engineering, service discovery mechanism and techniques, and creative problem-solving with a focus on supporting requirements discovery and invention with creativity tools. He is currently designing and developing creativity models, techniques and tools to reinforce learning and reflection in creative problem solving as part of the EU-funded Framework VII Integrated Project called MIRROR.
Title: Concepts, Technologies and Systems for Smart Evacuation
Abstract:
We present the concept of smart evacuation, i.e. the intelligent use of technologies to facilitate the efficient and safe evacuation of crowds from a disaster scene. We present the concept of 'situation awareness' and how this is supported by effective use of information and communication technologies. We overview technologies for smart evacuation such as active signage, image processing for crowd behaviour detection and mobile cloudlets.
Biography:
Bill joined the Centre in 2000 and is currently a senior lecturer. Prior to that, he was a research fellow and lecturer with the Department of Computation, UMIST in Manchester . Bill holds a degree in Computer Engineering and Informatics, from Patras University , Greece and both MSc and PhD in Software Engineering from University of Manchester . Bill has published over 100 research papers and two books on Systems Requirements Engineering and Model-Driven Service Engineering. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE Computer Society. His current research interests include systemic approaches to service engineering, languages and environments for service specification, generation and orchestration, and e-service mass customization.
Title: Spatial Audio in User Interfaces for Music Collection Navigation
Abstract:
Visualisations of music collections have employed maps as a way to navigate the virtual space that the collection inhabits. However, these types of interfaces can be problematic for users. This talk will look at past approaches to user interfaces for navigating music collections and how 3D or spatial audio has been used. It will examine how these approaches should be reconsidered and present recent work in the area, focusing on two applications: creating playlists and returning audio search results.
Biography:
Rebecca Stewart completed her PhD with the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London under the supervision of Prof Mark Sandler in 2010. In her PhD and postdoctoral research she looked at how music discovery and music collection navigation could be aided with user interfaces that utilise spatial audio. This past September, Rebecca started a company called Codasign and currently develops audio signal processing software and collaborates with artists that work with interactive media.
Title: How do images smell? Effects of image information scent in search engine results pages
Abstract:
According to Information Foraging Theory, all elements in web pages have a distinctive smell that helps the user decide which path to follow in order to find the information they're looking for. But what happens when scents contradict each other? What happens when strong scents combine? Do they create an even stronger scent or does it make no difference to the user? To find out, we added images to Google search results pages and observed people using them to find specific pieces of information.
This talk will describe two experiments aimed at understanding what effect on user behaviour the addition of images has on a "traditional" search results page. The information scent of images and text was measured and we made several combinations of scents to measure the performance of the page.
Our results demonstrate that users rely heavily on text to make their decisions and although users perceive images to be a useful addition to the page, they do not significantly improve the usability of a search results page.
Biography:
Faidon Loumakis graduated from City University MSc Human-Centred Systems course in January 2011. He interned with and now works as a user experience consultant for Fluent Interaction, delivering user research, insight, and design for major UK companies across ecommerce, mobile and information-heavy websites.
Faidon's dissertation was on Information Foraging theory. His paper "This Image Smells Good: Effects of Image Information Scent in Search Engine Results Pages" is being presented at the CIKM conference inGlasgow later this year. http://www.cikm2011.org
Title: Digital, physical, interactive, human: Tales from an academic library
Abstract:
Libraries, and academic libraries in particular are complex sites of human interaction with information. The information these libraries provide includes books, video, audio and articles, and it is provided through a variety of media and systems. In the end, though, if library users can't find and access information, be it physical or digital, the information isn't useful. In this talk I will discuss three studies of information seeking and use done in an academic library:
one about how researchers manage their publication identities, and search for work by specific people, the second about how library users get lost looking for material on the shelves, and the final one about how users search from the library homepage. With these three examples I hope to demonstrate some of the information and interaction problems facing libraries, and provide scope for library-based research.
Biography:
Dana McKay is a human computer interaction and digital libraries researcher-practitioner at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include information discovery, ebooks and ebook readers, search behaviour and information seeking behaviour more generally, information seeking in physical spaces, and digital libraries. Dana has a research and educational background in mobile interaction and web usability, and a research affiliation with the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne. As well as her work as a user experience architect for Swinburne Library, her professional background includes a secondment to Nokia Research Centre in Helsinki, usability consulting, and teaching.
Title: Reasoning from Users' Experiences: from Case-Based Reasoning to Traces-Based Reasoning.
Abstract:
Case-Based Reasoning is an artificial intelligence paradigm that consist in reusing previous experiences (cases) to solve new problems. The problem with Case-Based Reasoning is that "cases" are too restrictive to effectively represent "experiences". Traces are relatively new digital objects that enables us to capture "interactions" between users and systems. For numerous reasons, traces are rich objects. Trace-Based Reasoning is an evolution of the Case-Based Reasoning paradigm where cases are replaced by traces. Trace-Based Reasoning can be used for many purposes. One of them is user assistance. This will be the main topic of this talk. Indeed, in this presentation, I will give an introduction to Trace-Based Reasoning and I will show the benefits of Trace-Based Reasoning for user assistance. In the meantime, I will discuss open research questions related to Trace-Based Reasoning. Next, I will give several examples of Trace-Based applications developed in the Silex team (both academic and industrial applications).
Biography:
Amélie Cordier is an associate professor in the University of Lyon. She conducts her research in the LIRIS Laboratory. She received her PhD in 2008. She worked on an interactive and opportunistic approach to acquire knowledge for Case-Based Reasoning systems. Ever since, she works on experience sharing and experience reusing. She is involved in several academic projects (Ideal, Kolflow, Ozalid), and has a couple of partnerships withs industrials (SAP-Bo, IBM). She is interested in Case-Based Reasoning, Trace-Based Reasoning, Users' Experiences, Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering.
