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IDC
Seminars
IDC News
Usability
News
Interaction,
Specialist
Group of the British
Computer Society
HCI Bibliography
Projects :
Masters
by Research in the Area of Visual Analytics
UK Visual Analytics Consortium
CRitical Incident management training System
Activities :
Visual Analytics / Resilience Roadshow (VARR), Cardiff, Wales, September 13th, 2010
 Visual Anlytics Workshop (VAW), Imperial College London, September 14th - 15th, 2010
 Visual Analytics Summer School, Middlesex University, London, September 16th - 24th, 2010
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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.
Dr
Hanna Stelmaszewska |
Last
Tuesday (17.03.2009) one of our members (Hanna Stelmaszewska)
successfully defended her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction,
which focused on co-located sharing behaviour using camera phones.
Hanna’s examiners were Prof David Frohlich (Digital World
Research Centre at the University of Surrey) and Dr Elke Duncker
(Middlesex University). At a celebratory gathering in the Focus
area afterwards Hanna took the opportunity to thank all of the
people who assisted and encouraged her during her six year journey,
especially two of the greatest supervisors Dr Bob Fields and
Prof Ann Blandford. |
Gill
Whitney meets Wayne David MP |
Digital
Inclusion: Gill Whitney meets Wayne David MP, Deputy
Minister for Inclusion, at the Inclusive Digital Economy Network
Conference on 6th March 2009. He said that "The ‘prize’
of digital inclusion is not the technology itself, but the capability
of that technology to connect individuals to new opportunities
and to deliver better services for our citizens".
However, not everyone in the UK is digital connected. "Around
17 million adults in the UK today have no experience of the
Internet.They lack skills, access or confidence. Many are disabled,
socially disadvantaged as well as digitally excluded".
Gill Whitney is Head of the Design for All Research Group and
programme |
Professor
Ann Blandford
|
February
2009. Professor Ann Blandford, UCL Interaction Centre
presented some recent work on applying EMU (Evaluating Multimodal
Usability) to evaluate a satellite navigation system. This work
on EMU was begun by Ann's PhD student Jo Hyde when they were
both at MDX and the IDC was based in Bounds Green.EMU is a systematic
evaluation methodology for reasoning about the usability of
an interactive system in terms of the modalities of interaction. |
Dr
Alan Blackwell |
December
2008. Dr Alan Blackwell, Reader at Cambridge University Computer
Laboratory, spoke at the IDC on, " “Looking
under the Desktop: Where was HCI before 1984?". Dr Blackwell
gave a fascinating talk that took us back into the history of
human-computer interaction. The whistle-stop tour showed us
significant developments of Licklidder, Ian Sutherland, Doug
Englebart, Alan Kay, and many others who were instrumental in
the field of HCI. He also showed us the time when a PhD in HCI
often reported inventions that are commonplace I/O devices today,
e.g. the mouse and drawing editor, the SmallTalk programming
language, icons, and key concepts that tried to explain the
human and computer symbiosis. |
Professor
Penelope Sanderson |
November
2008. IDC awarded Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished
Visiting Fellowship to host world-leading cognitive engineering
scientist Professor Penelope Sanderson. Professor Sanderson
is Director, ARC Key Centre for Human Factors, University of
Queensland, Australia. During her coming month-long stay in
May 2009, Professors Wong and Sanderson will initiate the project
“Collaborative ESDA”, in which they will extend
the methods and techniques for Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis
which presently focuses on video and verbal protocols of individuals,
to study complex team coordination in complex dynamic work environments.
Together with the Swedish Defence Research Agency FOI, they
will cooperate to develop a key capability for rapidly analysing
large multi-stream, multi-formatted, multi-location data sets. |
|
November
2008. JISC Funds investigation of Creative Conversations at
Middlesex. JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee)
has funded team lead by Bob Fields and Andy Bardill to explore
novel uses of interactive technology to enhance the 'creative
conversations' that take place in a design setting. The project
is a collaboration between the IDC, the Product Design Research
Centre, and staff from the Centre for HCI Design at City University.
The team includes Bob Fields, Andy Bardill, Martin Loomes
and Balbir Barn from Middlesex, and Sara Jones and Panayiotis
Zaphiris from City University's HCID. Click for JISC: |
Rt
Hon Lord Sheppard Chancellor Middlesex University, Bob fields
& Leonie Gillman from Apple |
November
2008. Bob Fields has been named as Apple ARTS Laureate
for a project to research how technology can support peoples'
ability to work collaboratively. Apple has supported the project,
providing a range of Apple server, desktop and laptop hardware
that will allow the project to explore the opportunities offered
by a range of novel solutions. Here's a link to the ARTS
programme:
|
Tim
Berners-Lee & Suzette Keith |
October
2008. Suzette Keith, IDC Researcher and member of the Design
for All Research Group was invited to take part in a two day
working meeting of the Education Outreach Working Group (EOWG)
on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in France.
At the Technical Plenary Meeting 22 October 2008, Tim Berners
Lee gave a keynote speech setting out the importance of producing
clean code if future applications such as semantic web are to
work properly. He drew attention to the problems of convincing
developers that it is worth the extra effort and added by way
of analogy that it is the responsibility of the developers to
follow that old nursery level commandment to 'clean up your
own mess'. Picture: Suzette Keith catches up with Tim Berners
Lee in the lunch break. |
Best
Practice in Design for All Workshop |
June
2008. Best Practice in Design for All. In this workshop
delegates explored how to bridge the knowledge gap between the
student and successful Deign for All practitioners. The event,
held at Middlesex University was organised by Gill Whitney and
Suzette Keith as part of the activities for the Design for All
eAccessibility Network (EDeAN). Nearly 50 delegates attended
including members of various European projects, UK teachers,
trainers and researchers. The speakers revealed how they have
managed to engage their students with issued of designing interactive
technologies. The workshop also included two group discussion
sessions lead by Judy Wilson, Teaching and Learning Co-ordinator,
Middlesex University. Please
click for more information. |
National
Visualization and Analytics Center |
July
2008. Gabriela Mancero has been granted an scholarship from
the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland,
WA (USA). The grant covers a two-week summer camp
workshop on Visual Analytics.
In
summary, visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning
facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. If you want
more information about the PNNL or on Visual Analytics, please
click for more information. |
Suzette
Keith |
May
2008. ANEC research shows that use of web accessibility standards
is too low
In 2007, ANEC, the European Association for the Co-ordination
of Consumer Representation in Standardisation, more commonly
known as "The European consumer voice in standardisation",
commissioned a research study “Web Accessibility in context:
An investigation into standardisation issues”, carried
out by Suzette Keith, Middlesex University, UK. The purpose
of this study was to examine the gap between design practice
and the guidance offered through standardisation. Against the
background of very low rate of accessible commercial websites,
especially the ones owned by small companies such as hotels
and restaurants, the study recommends that further action is
taken to work with the relevant standardisation bodies, the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in particular, to harmonise
guidance at the most basic level of creating small non-interactive
websites both in relation to the authoring tools used by the
developers and the user agents used by the consumer (including
assistive technology tools and the browsers). It is also recommended
that action to evaluate and certify web authoring tools and
user agents is needed to ensure that small companies have the
opportunity to purchase tools that help to deliver accessible
content and to reduce current uncertainties. ANEC has already
approached W3C in order to start discussions on how to implement
the study recommendations. (Source:
ANEC newsletter: NEWSLETTER, Number 95 – April 2008)
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Dr
Fan Han |
May
2008. Researcher joins the 3D-in-2D project team. Dr Fan Han
joins the EUROCONTROL-funded project team from Heriot-Watt University's
Research Institute of Flexible Materials. Dr Fan brings
to the project special expertise in computer graphics, specialising
in drape simulation, parametric reconstruction of a human model,
3D digital cloning techniques of face and body, and human animation
with skinning smoothing. She has also conducted virtual wear
trials using a customer's own reconstructed body model at the
convenience of their own home. Dr Han has a BSc in Automatic
Controls and a MSc in Computer Science from Central South University,
China, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of
Bradford, UK. Welcome, Fan!" |
Gabriela
Mancero |
May
2008. IDC student wins prize at the 2008 London Hopper Colloquium
Women in Computing Research. Ms Gabriela Mancero won
one of the three prizes for the best content poster. The prizes
were sponsored by Google. The poster reported results from two
lab experiments conducted on perceptual depth cues to enhance
change detection. This is part of research funded by the European
Office of Aerospace Research and Development and the US Air
Force Research Lab. |
Professor
Nigel W. John |
Feb
2008 : Research Director from the School of Computing Science,
Bangor University Professor Nigel W. John gave a lecture on
“Medical Virtual Environments ” - In this
lecture he describes in general, biological systems are three-dimensional
structures living in three-dimensional space so it is natural
to use 3D visualisation as a tool in the biological or medical
educational process. One example is surgical training, which
today is largely a matter of close supervision on the apprenticeship
model. There is a growing requirement in training to practise
techniques and operations in a way that does not put patients
at any risk and one way this can be done is using virtual reality
modelling of the procedure. |
Professor
Bill Gaver |
Feb
2008 : The Head of the Interaction Research Studio at Goldsmits
University Professor Bill Gaver gave a lecture on “Designing
technology for everyday life”- In this lecture
he explained the design computational products that should utilitarian
assumptions to tell more interesting stories about who we are
and what we care about. The Plane Tracker, for instance, tracks
passing flight traffic and imagines views of their journeys.
The Local Barometer displays text and images from local sources
as if blown through the home. The Home Health Monitor picks
up indicative information about household activities and reflects
this back in the form of automatically generated horoscopes.
|
Professor
Ifan Shepherd |
Jan
2008 – Professor Ifan Shepherd from Transfer Research
and Applications Research Group at the Marketing Department,
Middlesex University Business School gave a lecture on “What
can we learn from videogames?” - In his presentation,
he explored the design of interfaces for effective user interaction
in 3D virtual environments, with special reference to geographical
data visualization. Much of the software designed for mainstream
virtual geographical environments (VGEs) has only recently offered
facilities for full 3D visualization, and many widely used programs
still provide only rudimentary tools for user interaction with
data expressed as 3D scenes. |
Dr
Sofie Pilemalm |
January
2008: Senior Scientist from the Swedish Defence Research Agency
FOI visits the IDC. Dr Sofie Pilemalm gave a lecture on "Collaborative
Operations MANagement And Crisis Handling Evolution (COMANCHE)
- Developing A Concept And An Information Infrastructure For
Inter-Organisational Collaboration In Crisis Management ".
In this lecture she described the application of service oriented
architecture as the basis for the design of crisis management
network concept and how emergency organisations in Europe can
achieve optimal collaboration across at local, regional, national
and international level, by sharing information, services and
resources. With a special focus on user-centred design, Dr.
Pilemalm has managed and co-managed several development and
research projects, including projects in the area of non-governmental
organisations, the Swedish defence and inter-organisational
crisis management. |
Dr
Antoni Moore |
January 2008: Dr Antoni Moore, University of Otago,
New
Zealand, spends sabbatical at the IDC, and delivered
a lecture to the IDC on Geographic aspects of novel technologies:
tangible augmented reality and the consequences of ubiquitous
maps". In his talk he described his project on the use
of augmented reality to create a map navigation system based
on a cube interface. Dr Moore is currently Senior Lecturer in
Geographic Information Science at the Department of Information
Science, atf Otago, having previously worked as a coastal /
marine GIS Analyst in the UK. His research interests centre
around cartographic visualisation and generalisation but also
includes the development and use of intelligent information
systems in the context of spatial decision support, and spatio-
temporal modelling. |
Professor
William Wong, Dr Paola Amaldi, Simone Rozzi, Stephen Gaukrodger
|
December
2007: "3D-in-2D Displays for ATC"
project team clears Year 1 Review by EUROCONTROL Innovation
Research Advisory Board. Eight innovation research
projects funded by the EUROCONTROL CARE INO research programme
were reviewed and unfortunately, three were terminated. Our
'3D-in-2D Displays' project managed to survive the review
(phew!), subject to significant re-orientation of effort to
investigate innovative designs for future operational scenarios
that go beyond SESAR, the Single European Sky ATM Research
programme for the immediate future. Well done to the team
from the IDC, Space Applications Services in Belgium, and
NEXT Ingegneria dei Sistemi in Italy. |
 |
November
2007: Dr Dong-Han Ham at the OECD
Halden Reactor Project. As part of the joint research
project with the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute,
Dr Dong-Han Ham participated in the Safety Culture Workshop
held at IFE, the Institute for Energy Technology, OECD Halden
Reactor Project, in Norway. He also visited the HAMMLAB,
HAlden Man-Machine LABoratory (see picture), an example
of a modern control room that is also used as a test-bed
for designing nuclear power plant control interfaces. Plans
have been made for experiments to be carried out at HAMMLAB
in 2008. |
Dr
Paola Amaldi |
October
2007: Dr Paola Amaldi receives Global
Research Award from Royal Academy of Engineering.
The Award will enable her to carry out the project "An
investigation into system safety defences: The case of Air
Traffic Management in European Airspace", as an EUROCONTROL
Visiting Scientist while she is at the EUROCONTROL Experimental
Centre at Bretigny, Paris. The project develops on the assumption
that a better understanding of variables and interactions
that affect “normal” performance, along with “normal”
variability lies at the heart of providing a “systemic
view” of safe as well as unsafe occurrences. Two software
products will be employed to collect “live” data
about ATC interventions under routine conditions. A number
of indicators are sought like how interventions were enacted
and when and how factors like traffic geometry, workload and
time correlate with the characteristics of the interventions.
Congratulations and well done, Paola! |
Picture
shows Peter Martin, Project Officier at EUROCONTROL, while
interacting with the AR in your hand demonstrator with Stephen
Gaukrodger |
September
2007: 3D-in-2D Display Project, Year
1 Completed! The final project management meeting
on the 3D-in-2D Display Project took place at the IDC the
29 September. The meeting focused on the Innovative Concept
developed during year 1 and the innovation process behind
their development. The seven Innovative Concepts range froom
AR based system, e.g. 3D AR in your hand, which enables a
controller to hold a 3D traffic picture in his/her hand, to
the Stereoscopic Display, which leaves controller with the
sensation of being immersed in the 3D space. The project is
sponsored by EUROCONTROL's third innovation research programme,
CARE INO 3. IDC people involved in the project are Prof. William
Wong, Mr. Simone Rozzi, Dr. Paola Amaldi, Dr. Bob Fields,
Mr. Steve Gaugkrodger and Prof. Martin Loomes. |
Photo
shows Stephen Gaukrodger implementing a novel 3D selection
mechanism based on the AR toolkit technology |
August
2007: Graduate Student Stephen Gaukrodger
joins the 3D-in-2D
Display Project team.
Stephen
has a M.Sc. in vision/cognitive psychology and a Graduate
Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Canterbury
in New Zealand. His main interest is Augmented Reality applications.
He is working at Middlesex University on a Eurocontrol founded
project, developing innovative concepts to combine 3D information
to 2D displays. Other members of the same project are Prof.
William Wong, Mr. Simone Rozzi, Dr. Paola Amaldi, Dr. Bob
Fields, and Prof. Martin Loomes (). |
From
Left - Collette Bannister, Bannister, Lt. Col. Bob
Kang, Chief, Human Sciences Div., EOARD, Gaby Mancero, Researcher
on Change Blindness, and Col. Stephen Pluntze, Comd. EOARD,
during a EOARD visit to the IDC |
June
2007: IDC hosts Summer Intern from the US Air Force Academy.
Officer Candidate C1C Collette Bannister (extreme
left in picture) spends 6 weeks at the IDC working on a number
of projects. These projects include the development of a Topic
Map prototype for representing informational relationships
that span large disparate datasets, a review of European Commission
funded research into crisis management, and participation
in a human factors study to determine the effect of real visual
depth on minimising change blindness. This last project is
funded by the USAFs' EOARD and the AFRL. |
 |
May
2007: Filippo Tomasello, European Aviation Safety Agency
(EASA), and Anthony Smoker, National Air Traffic Services
(NATS), visits the IDC. In our first panel discussion
between an air safety policy and a air traffic control organisation,
organised by Dr Paola Amaldi, Tomasello and Smoker, debated
about the complexity of drafting aviation safety legislation
in the EU and the practicalities of implementing and complying
with them. |
Dr.
Stephen Ellis |
April
2007: Dr. Stephen Ellis, from the Advanced Displays and
Spatial Perception Laboratory at the NASA Ames Research Center
NASA, visits the IDC. Steve’s talk focused
on the predictive tools and procedures including the identification
of specific visual features that controllers develop to carry
out their tasks. Stephen has published on the topic of presentation
and user interaction with spatial information in 170 journal
publications and formal reports and has been in the forefront
of the introduction of perspective and 3D displays into aerospace
user interfaces. He has served on the editorial boards of
Presence and Human Factors, and has edited a book, Pictorial
Communication in Virtual and Real Environments, 2nd Ed., concerning
the geometric and dynamics aspects of human interface to systems
using spatial data. He was awarded a University Medal from
Kyushu Sangyo University in Japan in 1992. He recently was
awarded the best paper prize at IEEE Virtual Reality 2006
for a joint publication with Bernard Adelstein and Sean Young
titled "Demand characteristics of a questionnaire used
to assess motion sickness in a virtual environment: or Does
the simulator sickness questionnaire make you sick?" |
Gabriela
Mancero and Darryl Singh |
March
2007: PureDepth, makers of the Multi-Layered Displays,
visits the IDC. Darryl Singh, Director, Software
Development at PureDepth, New Zealand, visited the IDC, following
demonstrations of the MLD at CEBIT in Germany. Darryl brings
news that PureDepth has now an agreement with a large international
manufacturer of LCD monitors to produce the MLD on a commercial
scale. This is encouraging news as it provides the IDC with
a strong impetus to further its research into information
layering design techniques for reducing change blindness (EOARD)
and the sharing of weather information in ATC (EUROCONTROL).
|
From
left - Gabriela Mancero, Professor William Wong,
Simone Rozzi, Paola Amaldi, Andrea Boiardi, and Rahel Meretse |
March
2007: First officer and Human Factors expert Andrea Boiardi,
from Alitalia, the Italian Flight Company, gave a lecture
at IDC on Human Factors in the cockpit environment.
The talk "An HCI perspective on Integrating an Alarm
System in a Collaborative and Distributed Environment. The
case of T-CAS" looked at the case of a recent near accident
in Japan. Learnings from it reveal that the way response of
distributed operator to alarm system might very according
to the conditions under which they are operating. So, all
those operators who might be affected by the tool - not just
the front line operator - should be involved in the design
process, to avoid designing technologies that will require
remedial procedures and training to compensate the drawbacks
of the design. Andrea is also a former military pilot from
the Italian Air Force. |
Neesha
Kodagoda |
March
2007: Postgraduate student Neesha Kodagoda is doing her
MSc thesis at IDC with Professor William Wong in the area
of mobile computing for low literacy users. She is
looking in particularly at the use of mobile phones for accessing
government and town council citizen support information. The
work would involve looking at information seeking strategies
among low literacy users, video protocol analysis, and information
architecture design for small mobile devices. |
Picture
shows Yohan Fernando in front of two air traffic views provided
by the simulator |
Febbruary
2007: Yohan Fernando, an undergraduate student with a
BSc in Information and Communication Technology joins the
IDC. Yohan will develop a simulator for Air Traffic
Control, which is intended (i)to generate simulated traffic
and (ii)to be pluggable to different integrated 2D/3D visual
displays. Besides the simulator will be made out of 4 components,
a Flight Planner, a Simulator Engine, an Air Traffic Controller
Display Unit and a Pseudo Pilot. This configuration will allow
subjects to control traffic as in real control environment.
In the end the simulator will allow to carry out human in
the loop simulations under different traffic complexity and
display conditions. The focus in the short term is on researching
how different types of integrated two-dimensional and three
dimensional air traffic representations impact controllers'
visual-spatial tasks. |
Dr
Dong-Han Ham |
February
2007: Dr Dong-Han Ham wins research
grant from KAERI, the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute.
The KRW 150,000,000, three year project will see Dong-Han
investigating and developing a model-based method for evaluating
cognitive task complexity and human-machine interface design
in Nuclear Power Plants. Congratulations and well done,
Dong-Han!
Visit
KAERI |
From
Left - Simone Rozzi, Maria Gabriela Mancero, Alessandro
Boccalatte, Peter Martin, Deen Martin Loomes, and Professor
William Wong |
January
2007: "3D-in-2D Radar Planar View
Display" Project kicks off. Attended by Peter
Martin, Project Officer, EUROCONTROL, and Alessandro Boccalatte,
from partner Space Applications Services N.V. Belgium. The
Middlesex University team comprised Simone Rozzi, Paola Amaldi,
Bob Fields, Martin Loomes, and William Wong. |
Judy
Wilson |
January
2007: Academic Judy Wilson has been
awarded a travel grant from the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund
(est.1950), to present a paper on her research on elderly
driver behaviour at TRANSED 2007, the 11th International
Conference on Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled
Persons, in Montreal, Canada, June 2007. |
Peter
Woodward |
January
2007: Peter Woodward, Researcher in
Human Factors and HCI, leaves for the Centre for
Human-Computer Interaction Design at City University, in London.
Pete's been heavily involved with the FP6 AD4 Project on Virtual
Airspce Management System, programming our Picture-in-a-Picture
visualisatios for ATC as well as running experiments and field
studies of air traffic controllers. All the best to Peter
as he starts his new job at City. |
IDC
Group 2006 Christmas Party |
December
2006: IDC Christmas Party at the Hollywood
Bowl was a whopping good time! Top scoring bowler
was Peter Woodward at a whopping 169 points, and followed
by Ed Currie at 111 points! The IDC wishes all our friends
a happy and blessed Christmas! Click
here to see the photos! |
From
Left - Dr Bob Fields, Dr Paola Amaldi, Simone Rozzi,
Professor Martin Loomes, and Professor William Wong
|
December
2006: IDC awarded grant from EUROCONTROL
Experimental Centre (EEC) to carry out Innovation Research
into "3D-in-2D radar planar view displays".
The team comprises partners from European industry:Space Applications
Services NV, Belgium, NEXT Ingegneria dei Sistemi S.p.A. Italy,
and is led by the IDC at Middlesex University. The IDC team
comprises Dr Paola Amaldi, Dr Bob Fields, Mr Simone Rozzi,
Professor Martin Loomes, and is led by Professor William Wong.
The grant is worth €300,000 over three years. Photo shows
the IDC AD4 Project Team, Dr Paola Amaldi, Dr Bob Fields,
Simone Rozzi, Peter Woodward and Professor William Wong, at
the EEC's Innovative Research Workshop, 5-7 December 2006,
at the EEC in Bretigny, where the team presented several papers
on the AD4 work as well as the proposed innovation research
to the EEC's Innovation Research Advisory Board. |
Dr
Paola Amaldi |
December
2006: IDC researcher, Dr Paola Amaldi
awarded a 6-month EUROCONTROL funded fellowship as a residential
Visiting Scientist at the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre
at Bretigny, just outside Paris. Dr Amaldi will be investigating
the collaborative aspects of TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance
System) with EUROCONTROL scientists, Dean Garfield, Alistair
Jackson and Marc Bourgois, Innovation Studies Department.
Dr Amaldi will commence her attachment in May 2007. Congratulations,
Paola! |
 |
November
2006: IDC PhD student Jainaba Jagne
wins "Outstanding Short Paper Award" at the IADIS
International Conference "WWW/Internet 2006",
held in Murcia, Spain, 5-8 Oct 2006. Her paper is titled,
"Cross-cultural system design strategy: Avoiding problems
in usability evaluation" and is co-authored by her supervisors,
Elke Dunker-Gassen, Serengul Smith-Atakan, and Paul Curzon.
Congratulations, Jainaba! |
Simone
Rozzi |
November
2006: IDC researcher Simone Rozzi was
invited to give a lecture at Milan Statal University, in Italy.
Simone gave a lecture on aspects of collaboration, operators
information needs, and HMI evaluation in complex safety critical
environments . The presented work was based on results from
field studies, design and testing activities he has been involved
in at the Interaction Design Center during the AD4 project.
Other IDC members involved in the same project are Peter
Woodward, William Wong, Paola Amaldi and Bob Fields. |
Dr
Sandrine Balbo |
November
2006: IDC hosts visit by Dr Sandrine
Balbo, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne.
Dr Balbo's interests gravitate around task modelling. She
tries to find ways to use this technique to support usability
engineering in general, and more specifically information
architecture, user requirement specification or usability
evaluation. Dr Balbo presented a talk, “Towards a framework
to analyse Information Architecture work practices”. |
 |
October
2006: IDC awarded grant from the United
States Air Force EOARD (European Office of Aerospace
Research and Development) and the AFRL (Air Force Research
Laboratory) to carry out research into the "Utility of
the Multi-Layered Display for Minimising Change Blindness".
The US$50,000 one-year grant will allow the project team,
comprising Dr Paola Amaldi, Gaby Mancero, and led by Professor
William Wong, to investigate and develop interaction and visualisation
for use in a new and novel Multi-Layered Display technology. |
Dr
Dong-Han Ham |
October
2006: IDC researcher, Dr Dong-Han Ham,
invited to collaborate with South Korean institutions on two
research projects. The first project is about the
"analysis of human performance and development of next-generation
human reliability analysis methods in nuclear power plants",
is led by KAERI, the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute.
Dr Ham will be applying ecological approaches to identifying
and classifying task complexity factors of emergency operating
procedures, the quantification of task complextity using resilience
engnineering methods, and the design of experiments to validate
these measures. The second project investigates the "development
of human performance enhancement system in railway industry",
and is being conducted by three Korean universities KAIST,
the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Hanyang
University, and Ajou University. Using a cognitive systems
engineering approach, this project addresses the analysis
of human error behaviours, intelligent support for analying
human error data, and the architectural design of a training
simulator in railway operators in the Korean railway industry. |
 |
October
2006: IDC teams up with Product Design
and Engineering to deliver new Masters programme in Interaction
Design. The programme is part funded by the EPSRC
and is co-led by Dr Bob Fields, IDC, and Dr Andy Bardill,
PDE. The programme brings together fresh interactions between
HCI and product design and will be based at the Product Design
and Engineering Department'sTrent Park Campus. More information
...click
here. |
| 
Dr Ben Knott |
September 2006:
US Air Force Research Lab visits IDC. IDC hosts
visit by Dr Ben Knott, General Dynamics Advanced Information
Systems Division, and Air Force Research Laboratory, USAF.
Dr Knott is lead scientist at General Dynamics AIS and conducts
Human Factors research into collaborative technologies at
the AFRL at Wright-Paterson AFB. He presented a talk, "Collaborative
Technologies in Air Battle Management", where he is
investigating the efficacy of messaging systems on team
performance in an air battle C2 synthetic task environment. |
Poorva Lavate & Aditi Singh |
June 2006: The
IDC hosts two interns from India: Poorva Lavate from the
Industrial Design Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology,
Bombay, and Aditi Singh from the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute
of Information and Communication Technology, in Gandhi Nagar.
Both Poorva and Aditi are senior undergraduates of a 4 or
5 year programme, and while here at the IDC, they are collaborating
with the Citizens Advice Bureau and are researching visualisation
and interaction techniques for use by people with poor literacy
and low information search skills. Such users of electronic
advice systems often find that the Google-type presentation
of links-to-links of information confusing and often get
lost in the links that points them to many different government
silos. Poorva and Aditi are conducting interviews to develop
a problem-based, cross-silo information architecture, from
which they will subsequently develop a focus-and-context
visualisation and interaction prototype on the Multi-Layered
Display that will use layering and segregation display techniques.
(Photo: Shows Poorva, left, and Aditi, right, with an earlier
focus-and-context prototype on the Multi-Layered Display). |
Gabriela Mancero |
June 2006: School
of Computing Science student Maria Gabriela Mancero, was
selected to be part of an internship exchange with the HIT
Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New
Zealand. Gaby is a MSc student at the IDC and has
been investigating accuracy and timeliness of 3D perception
tasks in 2D displays. Such tasks include the estimating
of separations between target objects. Her investigations
will inform other research at the IDC including the development
of 3D/4D displays for air traffic control. When in New Zealand,
Gaby will be working with Assoc. Professor Mark Billinghurst,
Director HIT Lab NZ, on assessing information layering and
segregation techniques for minimising change blindness in
dynamic monitoring tasks, using a new display technology
called the Multi-Layered Display. On her return, she will
continue with this line of research as she starts her PhD
study as part of the collaborative research project between
the IDC and HIT Lab. Her internship is sponsored by NZ industry,
TrueDepth Ltd, through the HIT Lab. (Photo: Gaby wearing
a tiny lip-stick camera with improvised head-mounting system.
The camera was used to track what a study participant was
attending to during a concurrent verbal protocol analysis
study). |
Ronish Joyekurun |
April 2006: Ronish
Joyekurun, a recent graduate from Middlesex University,
was awarded a competitive EUROCONTROL scholarship to study
for his PhD in Computing Science, in the use of
visual depth for encoding information in Air Traffic Control
displays. Ronish will be based at the EUROCONTROL Experimental
Centre, EEC, Bretigny (just outside Paris), and will visit
the Interaction Design Centre. He is jointly supervised
by Alistair Jackson and Marc Bourgois, Innovation Research
Area, EEC, and Dr Paola Amaldi and Professor William Wong,
IDC. |
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April 2006:
EUROCONTROL Innovation Researchers visit IDC. Mr
Marc Bourgouis is the Deputy Manager for Innovation Research
at the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre, directing the EEC's
research into emergeing technologies for ATM. He visited
the IDC to kick off the EEC PhD scholarship programme with
the Middlesex University. He gave a seminar on the use of
"Augmented and virtual reality for Tower Control at Airports",
exploring the issues and rationale for virtual towers. |
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Staff and students of the IDC with EUROCONTROL
visitors.
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