Staff and students at the IDC carry
out research into various aspects of Human-Computer Interaction.
We investigate how people manipulate and interact with computers
and information, how individuals and teams use computers to control
systems and processes, and how software should be designed and built
to support the nature of such work.
News
March 2012. Alastair Dant, Interactive lead at the Guardian gave a talk on ‘Humble Pie - finding big stories in small details’. Alastair talked about major news events prompt millions of responses online. Every message passing through the internet has a voice. Aggregate analysis and visualization helps us see the roar of the crowd.
March 2012. Commonwealth fellows visit to the IDC. Dr Sanjay Kataria head, Learning Resource Centre, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India, Philip Muiyuro is Library Assistant at the Kenya Ministry of Tourism and Manju Shivalli is Librarian at Chowgule College of Arts and Science in Margao, Goa, India visited the IDC.
February 2012. Professor Ebba Thora Hvannber from the School of Engineering and Natural sciences, University of Iceland gave a talk on ‘Communication during crisis management training in a virtual environment’. Ebba talked about crisis is an emergency event that can lead to multiple serious or fatal injuries and can cause structural failure or damage.
February 2012. DIVA (Data Intensive Visual Analytics) is a research project jointed funded by the EPSRC (UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and DSTL (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory). The consortium consists of three universities: Middlesex University, City University, and Loughborough University. DIVA aims to apply Visual Analytics methodology to 'Human Terrain Analysis' that provides ground troops with social insights into local population by integrative analysis of social media (e.g., Twitter) together with a range of other intelligence information (e.g., demographics). The results of Human Terrain Analysis will allow the ground troops to choose the appropriate engagement strategy with local communities and avoid any unnecessary confrontation and loss of life. The project is planned to start in June 2012 and finish in 12 month time.
February 2012. Dr Aygen Kurt and Dr Penny Duquenoy both of EIS, Middlesex Univerity, gave a talk on ‘Ethics, technology and governance’. Aygen and Penny talked about the EGAIS (ethical governance of emerging technologies) project is funded by the European Commission’s (EC) Science in Society Programme to investigate how ethical considerations relevant to technology projects could be embedded into the technology development culture of European research, specifically through governance processes.
February 2012. Dr Mark Shovman from University of Abertay, gave a talk on ‘Reverse Hierarchy and the Comprehension of Abstract Data Visualisations’. Mark talked about established visualization techniques, such as scatter-plots or line charts, have evolved during the last 200 years, to conform to the restrictions of human perception and to present an efficient interface between the data and human comprehension.
February 2012. Dr Kai K. Kimppa, from University of Turku gave a talk on ‘The problems with security and privacy in e-government – case: biometric passports in finland’. Kai talked about we go through potential problems with RFID/Biometric passports in their intended use and problems with biometric databases due to the collection of biometric data and the usage of the data for other, (publicly) non-intended uses.
January 2012. Chintan Handa, who recently completed his bachelor degree in IT with Networking at Middlesex University gave a talk on ‘An AR Tangible Binary Game’. Chintan talked about The binary numbering (also called the base 2) system is one the most elementary thing for any computing system. It is very essential to know how it works, as the computer understands only ones and zeroes.
January 2012. Phong Nguyen, a PhD student at Middlesex University, gave a talk on ‘Computer Graphics and Visualisation Work in Phong's MSc Studies’. Phong talked about some selected work in Computer Graphics and Visualisation that he has done during his master’s degree to describe his background and demonstrate his programming skills.
January 2012. Dr Tony Russell-Rose, from UX Labs gave a talk ‘A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search’. Tony talked about Classic IR (information retrieval) is predicated on the notion of users searching for information in order to satisfy a particular “information need”.
December 2011. Mirjam Haus, from Middlesex University gave a talk ‘Training the ability to handle unexpected events in emergencies - Physiological reactions and interruption of on-going activity caused by surprising and startling stimuli differing in complexity and intensity’. Mirjam talked about a study that is conducted within the framework of the CRISIS project which aims to develop a realistic computer based training simulation for first responders and crisis managers.
December 2011. Nuzhah Gooda Sahib, a PhD student from Queen Mary University of London gave a talk on ‘The Information Seeking Behaviour of Visually Impaired Searchers for Complex Search Tasks’. Nuzhah talked about Understanding search behaviour is important and leads to more effective search interfaces that support searchers throughout the search process.
November 2011. Professor William Wong, from the School of Engineering and Information Sciences, Middlesex University gave a talk on ‘Keyholes, Blackholes, Brown Worms and 17 other Representation Design Problems’. William talked about some initial thoughts about the problems that we are trying to design for in Visual Analytics.
September 2011. The Third International UKVAC Workshop on Visual Analytics VAW2011 (University College London - September 7th and 8th). The workshop featured invited presentations from key speakers in the field, about the work of some major research centres and projects. A series of paper sessions described recent developments in the areas of: Visual Analytics and Networks; Visual Analytics and Applications; Sensemaking and Visual Analytics Systems. For more information click ...
September 2011. Mirjam Haus is a research intern within the CRISIS project. She visits Middlesex University coming from Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany, where she studies psychology and just finished her master thesis on the topic “Stress and Cognitive Decrements in Extreme Environments”. At the university in Munich, Mirjam works within the e-Triage project, a government-funded research project for the development of a new electronic system for the registration (triage) of affected people in mass casualty incidents (MCIs). Her research interests are the influences of stress at the wellbeing and the cognitive functions of high risk professional groups like emergency personnel.
June 2011. We like celebrating happy occasions but this month we gathered to say goodbye to one of our colleagues Tamara Al-Sheikh. Although it is sad to see her leaving, Tamara's new job opportunity is taking her to Google in Zurich. We wish her all the best and prosperous future in her new carrier.
June 2011. Laurence Okonmah joins the IDC. He is a PhD Research Student with the School of Engineering and Information Sciences (EIS) where his research focuses on“Technology-Mediated Collaborative Intelligence Analysis”. Laurence holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, and completed an MSc degree in Information Technology from Northumbria University, Newcastle. After completing his Masters, he joined Cisco Systems Inc., as the Cisco TelePresence Systems Lead Engineer. Laurence is also currently working on the BAE Systems TSAM Project in a joint collaborative work with other IDC team members: Prof William Wong, Dr Simon Attfield, Dr Bob Fields and Dr Hanna Stelmaszewska.
June 2011. William Wong, Jane Barnett and Simon Attfield attended The 10th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) held in Orlando Florida. The group presented two posters. ' Startle points: A preliminary framework for exploring decision-making during uncertainty" (Wong, Barnett, Westley, Adderley and Smith) reporting a CRISIS project study, and 'When Enough is Enough: Time-Restricted Sensemaking in Underground Railway Control' (Attfield, Pagnacco, and Benedyk) reporting a study of controllers on the London Underground.
May 2011. IDC members William Wong, Neesha Kodagoda, Chris Rooney, Kai Xu and Simon Attfield attened the CHI 2011 in Vancouver, Canada. The group demonstrated INVISQUE (INteractive VIsual Search and Query Environment) 'Intuitive information exploration through interactive visualization' (Wong, Chen, Kodagoda and Rooney).
May 2011. IDC members William Wong, Neesha Kodagoda, Chris Rooney, Kai Xu and Simon Attfield were hosted by Vicki Lemieux and Luanne Freund at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver for an enjoyable one day research workshop with UBC researchers entitled "Information Interaction in Multiple Contexts". This event has laid the ground for discussions on research collaborations in Visual Analytic's and e-Government.
May 2011. IDC was represented at the 2-day Visual Analytics Community Consortium meeting (University of Maryland) by William Wong, Kai Xu, Neesha Kodagoda and Simon Attfield. The group demonstrated Invisque and ran a panel and working group session on the use of Visual Analytic technologies in context. The panellists were Jason Baron (NARA), Guy Cuthbert (Atheon Analytics), Brian Fisher (SFU), David Kasik (Boeing) and Joe Looby (FTI Consulting).
February 2011. Jennifer George from the SAE, visited our Usability Lab with a group of students from a Web Design course. Our team: Hanna, Simon, Neesha, Tamara and Chris hosted the session that focused on usability evaluation methods and how the usability lab can be used in in the context of different projects (e.g. low literacy users, collaborative work and multimodal interaction). The feedback received from the students and Jennifer was very positive.
February 2011. Diarmad McNally Managing Director of the Interaction Design Studiogave a talk on ‘What it's like to work as an IA/UX consultant?’ Diarmad talked about the skills and requirements for working in industry, which helped us in designing our HCI modules to facilitate those requirements
February 2011.Three Commonwealth Fellows visiting our university: Dr Sunil Goria of G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar, India; Mr Muhammad Farooq of Riphah International University, Islamabad, Pakistan, is Director of theInformation Services Department and Mrs Titilayo Ilesanmi, University of Agriculture Abeokuta (UNAAB), Ogun State, Nigeria meet with some of the members of the IDC group to share they research, interests and discuss possibilities of future work together.
January 2011. Thalies visit to IDC. Vincent Colt and Stas Krupenia of the Human Factors Lab of Thales visited Middlesex to gain an insight into IDC activities and to give the IDC an insight into the work of the Human Factors Lab and Thales in-general.
January 2011. BAE Systems visit to IDC. Mark Williams and Steve Harmer of BAE Systems visited the IDC to gain and insight into the work of the IDC and present the work BAE Systems is conducting in UK Filton facility.
January 2011. Steve Souza the entrepreneur behind LiquiLight Software LLC gave a talk on LiquiMap. LiquiMap is a novel visualisation software that visualises data in a form reminiscent of thermal map. This alter perspective has the potential to assist in the discovery of patterns within the data and give users new prospective on their data, as well discover novel details about their data. As such, LiquiMap gives rise to LiquiLight Software's tagline: Discover Your Data.
December 2010. Dr. Rahat Iqbal gave a talk on Peripheral Feedback on Participation Level to Support Meetings and Lectures. He is from the Department of Computing and the Digital Environment, Coventry University, UK. He described two services. In one service, participants in a small-group meeting receive real-time feedback about observable properties of the meeting that are directly related to the social dynamics, such as individual amount of speaking time or eye gaze patterns. In the other service, teachers in a lecture room receive real-time feedback about the activities and attention level of participants in the lecture. He described the user-centered design process, the conceptual designs and results of evaluations.
November 2010. Guy Cuthbert & Chris Fisher gave a talk on Atheon Analytics. They focused on how Atheon Analytics helps data consumers to explore, interrogate and understand rich, complex information - using visual analytics tools and techniques - so that they make better decisions, take informed action and run better businesses.
November 2010. Prof. Harold Thimbleby gave a talk on From machine guns to traffic lights: A computer science perspective on how to make user interfaces more dependable despite inevitable human error. He is the Director of the Future Interaction Technology Lab (FIT Lab) at Swansea University, Wales. He wrote Press On (MIT Press, 2007), which was the winner for the American Association of Publishers best book in computer science 2007 award. He was Professor of Computer Science at Middlesex University to 2001 and is now (rare!) Visiting Professor. He is also a visiting professor at UCL, emeritus Gresham Professor of Geometry, and was a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder and a Royal Society-Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. Harold has been invited to lecture in 21different countries (not counting Scotland and England!). His passion is sorting out human-com ularly for interactive medical devices. See www.harold.thimbleby.net
November 2010. Dr. Tinni Choudhury have a talk on Loculus: An Ontology-based Framework for Information Management for the Motion Picture Industry. "How do you film a punch?" This question can be posed by actors, make-up artists, directors and cameramen. Though they can all ask the same question, they are not all seeking the same answer. Within a given domain, based on the roles they play, agents of the domain have different perspectives and they want the answers to their question from their perspective. In this example, an actor wants to know how to act when filming a scene involving a punch. A make-up artist is interested in how to do the make-up of the actor to show bruises that may result from the punch. Likewise, a director wants to know how to direct such a scene and a cameraman is seeking guidance on how best to film such a scene. This role-based difference in perspective is the underpinning of the Loculus framework for information management for the Motion Picture Industry.
November 2010. Dr. Tinni Choudhury is a researcher with the Making Sense project. She’ll be researching and developing the system architecture for the project. Tinni completed her PhD from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, on the topic of ontology based knowledge management. Before that she worked as a software engineer for Mincom Pty Ltd and a research engineer for Distributed Systems Technology Co-operative Research Centre (DSTC) at the headquarters of both organisation, which were located in Brisbane, Australia. She completed dual bachelors in engineering and commerce from University of Queensland, Brisbane Australia.
September 2010. Over fifty students and presenters arrived at Middlesex University's Hendon campus in north London to take part in the UKVAC Visual Analytics Summer School (VASS). UKVAC is a consortium of UK universities with a shared interest in establishing a scientific community dedicated to promoting and contributing to visual analytics research and education in the UK and is coordinated from IDC by a team headed by Professor William Wong. The Summer School was a lively nine-day residential course which, in conjunction with two other UKVAC events marked the inaugural year of UKVAC. Click for more information ....
July 2010. Sheetal K Agarwal a researcher from IBM India Research Lab gave a talk on The Spoken Web. The Spoken Web is a voice-driven ecosystem parallel to that of the WWW. It is a network of interconnected VoiceSites that are voice driven applications created by users and hosted in the network. It has the potential to enable the underprivileged population to become a part of the next generation converged networked world. The talk focued on the concept of creating such an ecosystem, some pilot applications that have been created using this technology and open challenges that need to be solved to not only realize the Spoken Web but also to enable the two Webs to cross leverage each other.
Mr Simone Rozzi
July 2010. July 2010. Mr
Simone Rozzi gave a talk titled “IT Innovation and its
Organizational Conditions in Safety Critical Domains. The
case of the Minimum Safe Altitude Warning System”. Simone
is a PhD Candidate at the Interaction Design Center, Middlesex
University, and his research is funded by EUROCONTROL Experimental
Center. Simone discussed how IT/IS successes and failures critical
from a safety view point can reflect the organizational conditions
within which development occurs. These include for instance
governance processes, IT outsourcing, as well a regulatory weaknesses.
Simone’s expertise includes the areas of field study investigation,
user center design, safety case development, and validation
of automated systems. His current research interests pertain
to the areas of organizational safety, IT failure, Resilience
Engineering, and safety insurance practices along system development
process. Prior to his PhD he has been involved in the development
of innovative 3D visualizations systems for Air Traffic Control
at Middlesex University - AD4 and 2D in 3D Project -, development
of novel user interfaces for the domestic environment at Whirlpool,
and the analysis of collaborative practices within ambulance
dispatch centers at Milan Statal University.
Jason R. Baron
July 2010. Jason R. Baron
is Director of Litigation for the U.S. National Archives and
Records Administration gave a talk on What do I do with a
Billion Emails? The Future of E-discovery Text Analytics.
We had a seminar and discussion with Jason Baron. Jason presented
on the difficulties of handling large document collections
in e-discovery arising from 'information inflation'. Jason
is particularly animated on this subject, not least given
his role within The National Archives and Records Adminstartion
who take custody of White House documents at the end of each
administration. Jason is Co-Chair of The Sedona Conference
Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production,
served as Editor-in-Chief of The Sedona Conference Best Practices
Commentary on the Use of Search and Information Retrieval
Methods in E-Discovery (2007), and Co-Editor-in-Chief of The
Sedona Conference Commentary on Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery
Process (2009). He is a co-founder of the TREC legal track,
co-organizer of the DESI (Discovery of ESI) workshop series,
and currently guest editor for a special issue of the Artificial
Intelligence and Law Journal. Jason has published extensively
on electronic records preservation, and frequently speaks
at conferences internationally.
Ishneet Grover and Prof.
William Wong
July 2010. The demonstration
of the system approach developed by Ishneet Grover to Prof William
Wong.
Ishneet is a research intern working on ‘INVISQUE', the
Interactive Visualisation Search and Query Environment. She
created a system that enables the user to create and visualize
the progress and the process of research. Different research
areas are visualized as different patches. The system follows
a top down approach to create themes and to append and progress
in existing themes. It also enables the user to track its progress.The
internship end in mid July.
Prof. Balbir Barn, Ms Neesha
Kodagoda & Prof. William Wong outside IBM Research India,
Delhi.
June 2010. A visit to IBM
research India. Prof. Balbir Barn, Ms Neesha Kodagoda &
Prof. William Wong visits IBM Research, India. This
is one of IBM’s most recently established research labs
and with over 100 researchers located in South Delhi in the
Vasant Kunj area. The visit focused on information sharing
regarding research areas in EIS and IBM, along with more detailed
discussions on the specific potential collaboration regarding
Ms Kodagoda’s (a doctoral student supervised by Professor
William Wong) work and the IBM Spoken Web project headed by
Nitendra Rajput. A longer-term strategic collaboration was
also outlined. The team met with the Spoken Web research team,
Mr Anupam Saronwala, Program Director; and Dr Manish Gupta,
Director IBM Research India, and Dr Raghuram Krishnapuram,
Associate Director via video conference from Bangalore.
Article on Visual Analytics
- Times of India Monday 7 June 2010 : Scientists at Middlesex
University, UK, are working on the rapidly emerging area of
‘Visual Analytics’, a multi-disciplinary activity
that brings together the sciences of analytical reasoning, visual
representations, interaction techniques and data manipulation.
The key applications of this new field arise in those domains
characterized by large, complex data gathered from a variety
of sources, including people and sensors of various kinds, where
people have to make critical judgments, often in the face of
incomplete or conflicting information. In particular, these
enterprises often cross national boundaries, and hence global
co-operation plays a significant part, and cultural differences
may be an important factor. click
for more...
FP7
CRISIS launched!
June
2010. The €3.5 mil FP7 funded project CRISIS with 12
European partners was launched on 3 June 2010. The
team is led by Professor William Wong, School of Engineering
and Information Sciences, at Middlesex University, and comprises
partners attending the kick-off meeting, 3D Connections (DK),
Linkoping University (SE), VSL (SE), University of Iceland,
Isavia (Iceland), ObjectSecurity (UK), Space Applications
Services (BE), National Aerospace Laboratory NLR (NL), AE
Solutions (UK), British Transport Police (UK), and ANA (PT).
CRISIS, which stands for "CRitical Incident management
training System using an Interactive Simulation environment",
seeks to research and develop a simulation training system
for airport and train critical incident managers and first
responders. Adapting computer games technology, the training
simulator will enable individuals to train on their own by
"playing" against the computer, teams of individuals,
and teams of teams, at the field level (FDX) right up to the
command post level (CPX). The training will emphasise situation
assessment, rather than procedural choice selection, requiring
a sound understanding of the decision making and team coordination
processes. The project is organised along 3 themes: a research
theme, the development and integration theme, and the end-user
participation theme. Initially to be based around critical
incident scenarios to be extracted from incident managers
at partner institutions - Lisbon Airport, and Casscais Aerodrome,
Portugal; the British Transport Police; and Keflavik Airport
in Iceland - it is envisaged that post-project releases could
be adapted to other transportation hubs, commercial and industrial
complexes. The 3-year project ends in 2013. <click here
to CRISIS website>.
Ishneet
Grover
June 2010. Ishneet Grover is a research intern working on ‘INVISQUE',the Interactive Visualisation Search and Query Environment,
where she is working with the rest of the research team. She
will investigate interaction and visualisation techniques for
creating 'themes' and for carrying out Boolean search operations
using visual objects to support the 'evidence collation' process. After
graduating in Computer Science she worked with Computer Associates
for a year, and is presently pursuing her Masters in Interaction
Design at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Her
research interests are mainly in artificial intelligence and
designing interactive environments. She loves playing basketball.
John
Anderson
April
2010. John Anderson from University
of Dundee, an expert at 3D graphics
and audio software development, presented his talk on 3D visualisation
software for maritime archeology.He
introduced the "WreckSight", the commercial maritime
visualisation software developed by the 3D Visualisation Research
Group at the University of Dundee, attempts to set a new benchmark
in this area of data visualisation of sonar information from
the scans of ship wrecks by producing images with a level of
detail and clarity that far exceed other such systems in use
in the field to date.
Dr.
Daniel Jenkins
March
2010. Dr. Daniel Jenkins of Sociotecnic Solutions ( www.sociotechnic.com
) presented his research on cognitive work analysis (CWA)
framework. He introduced core conceptual backgrounds
of the CWA framework and introduced his research projects
that applied the CWA to command and control systems. In this
presentation, he also suggested a practical process of applying
the CWA framework more systematically.
Dr
Chris Rooney
March
2010.Dr Chris Rooney
is currently working on the CRISIS project, where he focuses
on interaction and believability in virtual worlds. He completed
both his BSc and PhD at the University of Leeds. The title
of his PhD was interaction with high resolution, wall-size
displays, which focused on the HCI issues that occur when
moving from desktop interaction to large display walls, and
how to maximise the real estate available when visualising
data.
Dr
Janey Barnett
March
2010.
Dr Janey Barnett is currently working on the CRISIS
project. Her research interests are gamers' feelings of positive
emotional well-being in relation to violent and non-violent
video game play; development and implementation of leadership
and team-building skills in massively multiplayer online (MMOs)
games; gamers' emotional attachments to video game characters;
using MMOs for teaching and learning skills such as mathematics,
and second languages.
Dr
Sophie Cockcroft
Feb
2010. Dr Sophie Cockcroft visits the IDC, on sabbatical
from the University of Queensland Business School's Business
Information Systems department. Her primary research interests
relate to data modelling, data quality and decision support
systems, specifically in the application areas of geographic
and medical information systems. She presented a talk "Clinical
Decision Support Systems: An Information Systems Approach",
based on a review of the literature from over the last 10 years,
informed by a variety of IS theories; and she will be working
with members of the IDC on how techniques such as those in visual
analytics can help in her research.
Raymond
Chen
December
2009. Raymond Chen is researcher at Middlesex University.
His interests are on web design/development, web analytics,
visual analytics and interaction and databases. He speaks
Mandarin and English.
Dr
Yongjun Zheng
December
2009. Dr Yongjun Zheng is a researcher working on the
JISC project called MUSKET (Middlesex University Skills and
Education Planning Tool), which will deliver models (documented
in standards such as UML and BPMN) that will span employer engagement
and course information in a unified and integrated manner. Zheng
completed both his BSc and PhD at Nottingham Trent University,
he has worked in two EU projects, which focused on Web-enabled
intelligent environment for collaborative design and manufacture;
his research is interested in Semantic Web Technology, Information
Modelling and data mining.
Dr
Yu Qian
November
2009. Dr Yu Qian
is a researcher working on the JSIC project called MIRAGE (Medical
Image Repository with a CBIR ArchivinG Environment). MIRAGE
aims to develop a content-based medical image retrieval system
benefiting the students and researches in providing a rich supply
of medical images for data mining, to complement current e-learning
system.
She has since worked on the EPSRC project at the Media Technology
Research Centre (MTRC) of the University of Bath and the Centre
for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) of the University
of Surrey. Her research topic is sketch-based video retrieval
system. She gained her PhD from the School of Engineering and
Information Science at the Middlesex University.
Her research interests focus on computer vision, image and video
processing, pattern recognition.
November
2009. UBiRD team successfully completed their JISC funded
project. The User Behaviour in Resource Discovery
project led by Professor William Wong with members Researcher
Dr Hanna Stelmaszewska (EIS), Ms Nazlin Bhimani (Library Resources),
Mr Sukhbinder Barn (Business School), Professor Balbir Barn
(EIS) investigating information seeking behaviour of users
working in the Business and Economics disciplines has come
to its end. See www.www.ubird.mdx.ac.uk
November
2009. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Due to the increased level
of research activity, we are looking for creative and dynamic
individuals to join the School of Engineering and Information
Sciences to help grow research and teaching in human computer
interaction. For FP7 project CRISIS: Researcher (HCI) (Ref
EIS30), and Researcher (Software Engineer) (Ref EIS29), closing
date 17 Nov 2009. For Information spaces for creative conversation:
Researcher ISCC (Ref. EIS25T), closing date 26 Nov 2009. For
strategic development in the area: (1) Reader / Principal
Lecturer in Interaction Design (Ref. EIS32T), and Lecturer
/ Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design (Ref. EIS33T), closing
date 7 Dec 2009. See www.mdx.ac.uk/jobs
September
2009. VAW 2009 is the first Visual Analytics Workshop focusing
on the application of Visual Analytics in the Security and
Defence area. Organised by the IDC, the US NVAC and
local industry partner AE Solutions, VAW 2009 brought together
researchers that included the NVAC in the US, the European
VisMaster Network, Australia's NICTA Making Sense of Data
programme, with the support of the US Department of Homeland
Security, and the UK's Home Office and MoD.
September 2009. UK VAC, or the UK Visual Analytics
Consortium - is a group of 5 UK universities that have come
together to create a Consortium that will drive and grow Visual
Analytics in the UK. The universities are Imperial
College, University College London, Bangor University, Swansea
University, and led by Middlesex University. The US Department
of Homeland Security has agreed to financially support the
initial coordination activities to get the UK VAC up and running,
while the UK Home Office and MoD will ensure government support.
Professor
Penelope Sanderson
September
2009. Professor Penelope Sanderson from the University of
Queensland, visits the IDC as part of her Royal Academy of
Engineering Distinguish Visiting Fellowship to Middlesex University.
Prof Sanderson gave a number of talks, including a one-day
Master Class on research approaches to laboratory to field
studies, attended by postgraduate students from Middlesex
University and UCL. Drawing on her expertise in the joint
project between Prof William Wong and Prof Sanderson, Collaborative
Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis, Prof Sanderson also
engaged in many working meetings with various staff projects
(e.g. UBiRD and the 3D-in-2D Displays project). This was also
the start of a new cooperation on carrying out experimental
evaluation of 3D/2D project Multi-Collision Display with her
and her colleagues at the University of Queensland.
August
2009.EPSRC Making Sense. Another grant! Following
a gruelling week at an EPSRC Sandpit, a team of 11 researchers
from across 9 UK universities successfully applied for a £2
mil grant to collaborate on research into identification of
suspicious activity based on multiple sources of multimodal
data that may be partial, unreliable and contradictory. In
addressing this challenge we expect to create an interactive
visualization-based decision support assistant which collects
data, fuses it, analyses it and visualizes the results in
a way which can be shared by analysts within an agency/shift
and across multiple agencies/shifts. This project will start
in Feb 2010.
July
2009 - FP7 CRISIS: SUCCESS! We have been
successful in leading the €3.5mil proposal to research
and develop a CRitical Incident management training System
using an Interactive Simulation environment, or CRISIS.
This is a pan-European, 13-partner project led by Middlesex
University, to research and develop in Europe a distributed,
large scale, collaborative and interactive simulation environment
for the training of crisis managers and their staff at airports.
The consortium will develop a serious games based training
simulation environment called an 'Airport in the Box', that
will enable individuals to play and train against the system,
teams of individuals, and teams of teams to play and train
to handle critical incidents or major crises. The project
is now under final negotiation with the European Commission,
and expected to start early 2010.
The
JISC INVISQUE team at work
June
2009 - JISC INVISQUE proposal success! Standing
for INteractive VIsual Search and QUery Environment, it is a
JISC Rapid Innovation project to develop prototype future interfaces
that will provide learners, students and researchers with an
interactive visualization user interface which supports HE library
resource and information seekers with a design that moves away
from the commonly used Google- style listings paradigm. Based
on the concepts of Visual Analytics, the new interface will
support sense-making, query formulation, and information search
by showing in visual representations associations and relationships
between the journal articles and/or books, for information search
and retrieval tasks in and among large, loosely- coupled data
sets, such as the library catalogue and disparate digital libraries
and journal repositories. The joint project team is led by Professor
William Wong, with members Dr Nawaz Khan, Dr Dong-Han Ham and
Ms Neesha Kodagoda (EIS), Dr Emma Byrne (UCL), Ms Nazlin Bhimani
(LIbrary).
The
NDM9 organisers
June
2009 - NDM9 23-26 June 2009. Together with
Southampton University and the British Computer Society, the
IDC co-organised the 9th International Conference on Naturalistic
Decision Making in London. The conference attracted
a diverse group from the Naturalistic Decision Making community
and from those in computing science and visual analytics, in
order to generate new ways of thinking about how computing-based
tools can or should be designed to support decision making in
dynamic and complex environments. Speakers included Chris Baber,
John Maule, Harold Thimbleby, Nigel Shadbolt, Gary Klein, Robert
Hoffman, Jan Maarten Schraagen, Kathleen Mosier and Ute Fischer.
The
JISC UBiRD team at work
May
2009 - JISC UBiRD proposal successful!
The User Behaviour in Resource Discovery proposal was selected
from a field of 19 finalists. The purpose of the study is to
identify, understand and compare behaviours invoked by users
when accessing resource discovery systems available in HE institutions
such as electronic databases, e-journals portals (such as Emerald,
EBSCOs EJS) and free online resources available on the Internet.
This work will complement on-going JISC- funded research program
in User Behaviour Observational Study such as the CIBER e-Books
Observatory Deep Log Analysis. Professor William Wong will lead
an inter-disciplinary team from the University's Library (Ms
Nazlin Bhimani), the Business School (Mr Sukhbinder Barn), and
EIS (Professor Balbir Barn and Dr Hanna Stelmaszewka).
