FIT Lab News Archive

Projecting Ideas across the world

22 February 2010

We're celebrating the award of yet another grant! This time, our Professor Matt Jones is embarking on an 18 month project with Professor Mounia Lalmas (pictured), at University of Glasgow, and Professor David Frohlich of University of Surrey worth £500k.

Where as a previous news item was announcing the grant success investigating the future use of handheld projection technology, this grant will investigate social-media sharing communications in parts of the developing world. Working with Transcape NPO, and building on their previous digital storytelling projects, the team will investigate how these social-media communications will support education, healthcare, social decision-making, and more in these developing communities. Such research holds even more value in these cultures, where mobile phone networks are often more prevalent than landline telephones.

The project begins in May 2010, and we are looking forward to seeing the project take off!

This week, we are Going Forth

17 February 2010

Its not unusual for us to be heading off to various places around the country or world, but right now the majority are on the road. Our million-pound-grant-winning lecturer Parisa is off at the ExICTe workshop in Birmingham today. Matt Jones is at research meetings in London at the moment, and then off to visit colleagues in Glasgow later this week. Max is on the way to London to give a talk at UCL. And Harold... well who knows!? Further, several of our students are on the road.

Maybe next week we can bring all the excitement home, but it wont be long before, so far, a good 6 of us head off to Atlanta for CHI2010!

Projecting Ideas into the Future

31 January 2010

Congratulations to Professor Matt Jones, who this week was awarded a sandpit grant with our esteemed friends and colleagues at Bristol, Southampton, Brighton, and more! The grant, worth around £1.5M, was awarded for the study of how people may end up augmenting life with multiple mini hand-held projectors; a topic that is gaining increasing energy with the imminent release of the new generation of mobile projector phones.

In the proposal's terms, the project, called Patina, "will develop theory, techniques, prototypes and deployments that re-conceive research spaces as synthesised patterns defined by subtle interfaces that are enacted by our interactions."

The grant, in particular, is focusing on the use of these hand-held (or smaller) projector devices in research environments, to see how they may be used to augment our working spaces to make them more effective.

Its exciting times ahead in this project, and the team is looking forward to beginning the project in June 2010.

Our Imagine Cup Project: Frenigy.com

20 January 2010

Our previous news item highlighted the recent progress of our Swansea team in reaching the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2010 UK Final. Despite taking exams, the team is excitedly diving into the next phase of the competition, and have already begun detailed planning.

Their exciting concept, called Frenigy, aims to leverage the popularity of social networks, and influential technology to make people more aware of their energy consumption. What is good energy consumption? and how can you be proud of actively making changes that might help sort out the world's energy problems?

Over the next few months they'll be developing, testing, and trialling their new system and you can track their progress through their project website or through twitter.

Swansea Team reach Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2010 UK Final

11 January 2010

After submitting to the Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2010 Software Design competition in December, our Swansea team has made it through to the UK Final. Of all the submissions, only 6 were picked for the final round.

The theme this year is:

Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.

In more detail, the competition is encouraging teams to help reach the UN's Millennium Development Goals, such as ending poverty, creating education for all the world's children, getting rid of HIV, and reaching global energy sustainability. Its a great theme, and it fits in closely with the mission of the FIT Lab here of targeting Grand Challenges.

The creative and exciting team is made up of: Abigail Cauchi, Jonathan Hurlock, Steven Welti, and George Jones. Their team mentor is Max L. Wilson.

Lets change the world!

One of our new recruits reviews for Times Higher Education

08 December 2009

Being an academic, and grad student, involves more than focusing on your research agenda. Staying ahead of the game involves broadening your understanding of related work and contributing to the wider community. Having only started a few months ago, one of newly recruited PhD students, Rich Snow, has already begun doing so by reviewing Schneider and Gersting's latest edition of 'Invitation to Computer Science' for Times Higher Education (THE).

Providing a view from having recently graduated from an undergraduate computer science course, Rich discussed the book's suitability as a companion beyond the first year of study. The review (available here) was recently published on the THE website, and we look forward to hearing more from Rich in the future.

Prof Matt Jones gives Keynote at AmI2009

19 November 2009

As this news is being posted, the 2009 Ambient Intelligence conference is taking place in Salzburg, Austria. Focused on understanding a world where technology surrounds, senses, and reacts to us, our very own Professor Matt Jones was asked to give a keynote based on his years of experience with mobile pervasive technologies.

His talk, scheduled for Friday afternoon, has been entitled "From Bystander to Performer - Ambient Intelligence in a Digitally Extravagant Era". Building on the research being performed here in the FITLab in Swansea, Prof. Matt will talk about how such ambient intelligent technology lets us react and engage with the world, where we can augment, annotate, and contribute to life and entertainment.

Some of our own research in this field is into the growing trend of hand-held Pico Projectors, and their imminent introduction into our mobile phones. What will life be like when we can overlay Matt's keynote slides with our own perspectives of such research, using our mobile phones? What will be the social norms? and how what challenges will we face to adopt socially acceptable behaviour and deal with socially inappropriate behaviour. Sharing, communication, instruction, and even bullying could all be affected. The implications are exciting, unknown, and being researched here in the FITLab.

Inspiring Guests and Speakers

28 October 2009

We've had a recent run of inspiring visitors here at the FITLab. This week we had the Pro-VC of student experience, Rob Macredie, come to tell us about how they engage with students and education at Brunel. The talk was great, and the visit: shorter than we'd of course like. Always true.

Before that we were pleased to have Virpi Roto, a principal scientist at Nokia Research in Helsinki. In between engaging with our research and ideas, she spoke to us over 2 talks. First, she reviewed the interesting research performed and novel methods used (slides), over the last few years as part of their mobile search research agenda. As well as showing us some exciting ideas that are in progress.

Virpi also spoke to us about industry and academic relations (slides), and the different modes and scales in which they can work. Overall, she advocated the experience of internships and collaboration to our research students - advise that we thoroughly encourage too, through our existing ties with Nokia, Microsoft, and more.

Looking forward to future!

CHI+MED Kick-off meeting

16 October 2009

It's been a successful year for the FITLab, with everyone winning grants coming to around £10M! Now the work begins of course. Parisa's CHARM project, in collaboration with colleagues at Kingston and West England, has been making exciting progress, with more to tell soon. Matt's grants also led us, in part, to engaging with our future innovators at the British Science Festival. And now, the CHI+MED Project has begun!

Over the last 2 days, the kick-off meeting for the £6.7M CHI+MED Project has been taking place in London. The exciting collaboration, between UCL, Swansea, Queen Mary in London and more, was awarded the funding earlier this year, and now all the planning and hard work is on the way. The project is studying the important HCI issues with medical interactive systems for patient healthcare, making sure that you and me are safe in the hands of technology when we need it most! With many-a-plan being actioned during the kick-off meeting, it's sure to be an exciting next few months, and indeed the next few years!

Yet Another Best Paper Award - Well done Parisa!

01 October 2009

We're gonna need a bigger award shelf!

Parisa, working with alum-FITLabbers George Buchanan and Fernando Loizides, won Best Paper at ECDL2009 this time. Further, that's the 3rd year in the row for the FITLab.

The paper, called 'Hear it is: enhancing rapid document browsing with sound cues', focused on improving document browsing with SDAZ using audio feedback cues. The study results showed that audio cues led to significant improvement in visual search tasks.

We're off to peruse the office furniture catalog for that shelf...

twittering conferences twittering conferences...

27 September 2009

As the new teaching term begins, I was just scanning the tweets about ECDL2009 currently happening in Corfu, and right now, the majority are about the work that our Microsoft-Research-sponsored PhD Student, Jen Pearson, our beloved ex-fitlabber George Buchanan, and solid leader Harold Thimbleby, are presenting. George, and various members of our crew, are giving 4 presentations this week at ECDL2009!

And thats not it. Professor Matt Jones, celebrating his recent chair, and best paper award at MobileHCI2009, is off to speak at Ubicomp2009 in Disneyworld Florida! Along with Gary Marsden, Matt will be running a workshop called Globicomp, dedicated to studying the growing use of ubiquitous and mobile technology in the developing world.

There's plenty more too, Max Wilson is off to Washington DC in October, to present at 2 specialist workshops focusing on human computer interaction with search, and the use of semantic technologies to design user interfaces. More about that later.

Another best paper award for the FITLab shelf!

17 September 2009

We got news from Germany late last night at the MobileHCI2009 Award Ceremony, that Simon Robinson, Parisa Eslambolchilar and Matt Jones won best paper! Well done guys.

Simon gave the presentation yesterday, about the work they've been doing with colleagues at Glasgow University, including Stephen Brewster and Roderick Murray-Smith, on Negotiated Interaction with mobile technology. The prototype, called Sweep-Shake (PDF, Slides (PDF), Video (MOV)) lets you find out what types of information you can get about buildings or places as you walk around. By simply pointing the mobile device top-left, top-right, bottom-right, bottom-left, you can tell if you can get pictures, videos, etc. It lets you know what there is to know, so you can decide if you want to boot up your mobile web browser to learn more. Find out more here.

All over the British Science Scene

07 September 2009

Over the last week or so, many of the FITLab were at both the BCS HCI2009 conference in Cambridge, and the British Science Festival 2009.

The annual BCS HCI conference was hosted by Cambridge University and Microsoft Research Cambridge this year and Simon Robinson represented the FIT Lab by presenting a full paper on guided mobile interaction and giving a demo in the Open House Festival. Matt Jones was also invited to give a tutorial on Mobile Interaction Design, while Harold Thimbleby ran a workshop on Health and HCI. Together, with the other members of our team at the event, the FITLab demonstrated our world leading research to the British HCI community.

The annual British Science Festival provides a very different, but very important opportunity to engage with Britain's young people - the future leading scientists. In fact the British Science Festival is one of the largest annual science events in Europe. The FIT Lab, represented by Emma Thom (about to start an MRes in the FIT Lab), Simon Robinson, Kristian Brimble (one of our excelling undergrads), and Matt Jones, was there demonstrating the Storybank project, showing how Science and Technology can break down international and cultural boundaries and improve the lives of people in the developing world.

Later this month these two research agendas will be demonstrated at international events in Germany (MobileHCI2009) and Florida (Ubicomp2009), but more about that later. Safe travels everyone.

Improving Patient Care with the iPhone

01 September 2009

In line with our the interests of our new programme grant of £6.7M with UCL and Queen Mary University, starting soon, one of our masters students has been working hard on improving patient care with portable devices like the iPhone. One of the tasks performed regularly by nurses is to set drip-rates for medicine going into the body, and it's no simple calculation.

Mark Davies, working with Medical Device Trainer, Paul Lee, has been developing and testing paper prototypes with focus groups of nurses, trying to effectively support this task and in the context of real demanding medical environments. Improving patient safety with the latest technology is important and can save lives. Results are shaping up, and we now know more about the ways in which we can support medical care more effectively. We're looking forward to the publication of his masters thesis later this year.

ASME Best Paper Award

20 August 2009

Some of Max Wilson's recent work with Rolls-Royce engineers and the University of Southampton, has been awarded the 2009 Robert E. Fulton SEIKM Best Paper Award, at the Annual ASME DETC Conference in San Diego at the end of the month. ASME is the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and is similar to the ACM or IEEE. The award is given annually within the Computers and Information in Engineering (CIE) Stream.

The paper, titled "Navigation over a Large Ontology for Industrial Web Applications", describes a knowledge management system for engineers who maintain aircraft engines. In collaboration with colleagues such as Richard Crowder, Nigel Shadbolt, and Gary Wills, Max led the user-centered design process investigating the constraints and requirements for engineers working in the field. The contribution for the paper was a contextually accommodating interface for navigating and learning from a continuously developing semantic knowledge-base.

FITLab Awarded £6.77M Research Grant

27 July 2009

Last week, the FITLab, and colleagues from the UCL Interaction Center and Queen Mary University, were awarded an EPSRC Programme Grant of £6.77M over 6 years. Swansea will receive around £3m. The multidisciplinary project, called CHI+MED, will focus on improving interactive medical devices using Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques. The EPSRC describes such Programme Grants as "large, long-term grants available for world-leading groups".

Patient safety is a life saving research agenda. Recent work has shown that improving usability can reduce human error and save lives. Further, it is has been shown that human error while using medical devices in hospitals can kill more people than road accidents. CHI+MED will use a combination of HCI techniques to improve the usability of medical devices. The findings of empirical and observational techniques will be combined with analytical computational representations of medical devices.

The awarded grant marks the start of an exciting research agenda that will bring more contacts, research assistants, and PhD students to the FITLab, but more importantly, it will save lives.

Pressing On, Around the World

19 July 2009

Harold Thimbleby, the head of our group, is out on a month-long trip around the states presenting at conferences and visiting institutions. After presenting twice at EICS2009 last week, including the research into social network analysis carried out with Patrick Oladimeji, Harold was invited to talk about teaching and learning in HCI at HCI International 2009. While there, he'll no doubt be promoting his Book.

Its not all invitations to conferences, though, as Harold has been visiting international friends and colleagues around the world, such as: Scott Klemmer at CMU, the User Experience Group at Apple, Todd Johnson at UT's Health Science Center in Houston, and more.

I wonder where in the world he enjoyed his birthday...

Award Winning PhD Students

12 July 2009

One of our PhD students, Jen Pearson continues to demonstrate the award winning work carried out here in the FITLab. After recently attending the Microsoft Research's exciting and exclusive 2009 summer school, Jen won best poster and last week's Swansea University Poster Competition. All research students from across the university were invited to participate, and the top posters were presented and judged last week. Look out for more from both our current students, and the new recruits starting in October!

Reaching out to Future Scientists

05 July 2009

The FITLab reaches out to young students and future scientists by representing HCI, Computer Science and Swansea University in many events throughout the year. Last week, members of the FITLab demonstrated our research for over 1000 school students at the 2009 Neath Port Talbot Schools Careers Convention.

In preparation for the British Science Association 2009 Festival of Science, the FITLab and colleagues at the Digital World Research Centre at Surrey University have won an EPSRC grant to prepare a StoryBank exhibit. Emma Thoms has been appointed as an RA in the FITLab to prepare the exhibit for StoryBank, a project focused on breaking the digital divide across nationalities, ages, cultures and economies, with short video stories.

Royal Society Science Fair

28 June 2009

This week the FITLab is reaching out to the community. Lots of our team are organising, running, and participating in a Royal Society Science Fair. The day is designed to reach out to young students thinking about higher education in science and engineering, by showcasing the research from across Swansea University. Simon and Tom have been part of the organising committee working group leading up to the event, and are chairing sessions. Patrick and Chitra will be presenting and demonstrating Human Computer Interaction research from the FITLab.

Check out the Schedule

Harold Thimbleby: Keynote at NDM9

22 June 2009

Our very own Professor Harold Thimbleby will be giving a keynote talk at NDM9, the 9th bi-annual International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making. Being both supported by, and held at, the British Computer Society, in London, NDM9 is set to be an exciting focused meeting on complex, shared, and group decision making in areas such as medicine, policing, and emergency support. Southampton's Nigel Shadbolt (former BCS president), and other key academics in this area, will also be contributing keynote speeches.

Here, there, and everywhere

11 June 2009

The last few weeks have been, and the next few weeks will be, busy busy busy. We've been meeting with experts: from The National Centre for Product Design & Development Research; designers from the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre; medical specialists from Singleton Hospital, Morriston Hospital, and Royal Free Hospital; and friends and colleagues from UCL's Interaction Centre.

There doesn't seem to be an end in sight either. Next week, current members and alumni of the FITLab will be at JCDL09 in Austin, Texas. Max L. Wilson has meetings in College Park, DC. And Matt Jones will be visiting, as per usual, Nokia in Finland. And still more to do thereafter!

New FITLab RAs

01 June 2009

The FIT Lab recently appointed Tom Owen as one of two new Research Assistant posts created by the “Healthy Interactive Systems” EPSRC Platform Grant which is a joint venture between the FIT Lab and the Interaction Centre at University College of London. Welcome Tom!

Digital technologies aim to improve lifestyle through CHARM project

25 May 2009

Dr. Parisa Eslambolchilar has received some funding from DE Sandpit to start an exicting research on "shaping consumer behaviour by informing conceptions of 'normal' practice". This research will be in collaboration between Swansea, Kingston and Bristol Universities.

CHARM aims to develop, evaluate and understand the ways in which digital technology can be used to shape individual behaviour by informing and thereby challenging 'normal' practice. Much of what people do is based on their conceptions of shared conventions, but these conceptions are often misinformed. Research suggests that we can influence behaviour by telling people what other people do. The study draws upon research on social influence in sociology, behavioural economics, social psychology and social marketing. The three-year project will explore, develop and evaluate this approach in the context of sustainability, using digital technology as a non-invasive interface in three case studies: 1) electricity consumption, 2) active lifestyle and 3) Facebook.

For more information please see EPSRC website and BBC Science News

Our website now twitters

21 May 2009

The news and reading group information on this website now twitters. see http://www.twitter.com/FITLab_Swansea for more details

New HCI Reading Group

21 May 2009

The new HCI reading group will start next tuesday (26th) in the FITLab coffee area.

CHI2010 Madness

21 May 2009

Max L. Wilson and Matt Jones will be CHI2010 Madness Co-Chairs, along with Mira Dontcheva from Adobe. See you in Atlanta!

Work at CHI 2009

01 April 2009

Members of the FIT Lab will be at the ACM CHI conference in Boston. We'll be contributing with three co-authored papers, workshops and a tutorial.

FIT Lab members at the Ubicomp Spring School

01 April 2009

Richard Byrne and Matt Jones attended the UK Ubicomp Spring School. The school brought together early career and more established researchers to learn about and debate the future of ubicomp and mobile technologies.

UK-Japan HCI Workshop

25 November 2008

Matt Jones was one of the 4-person UK team involved in "Beyond the Desktop" workshop held at the British Embassy in Tokyo during 18th-19th Nov.

FIT Lab speaker at Swansea Uni Comp Sci student conference, Gregynog

03 November 2008

Andy Gimblett has been invited to deliver a talk at Swansea University's Computer Science Annual Colloquium at Gregynog Hall, Powys, on 25th November 2008. The talk will include (among other things) a look at his recent work in the FIT Lab, on the project "Formally based tools for user interface analysis and design".

FIT Lab members at MobileHCI 2008

07 September 2008

Matt Jones, Simon Robinson and Darius Garnham were at MobileHCI 2008 from 2nd to 5th September in Amsterdam. Matt was part of a panel discussing the evolution of the field of mobile interaction, entitled 'Ten years of Mobile HCI: Looking Back, Thinking Forward'. Simon presented Point-to-GeoBlog: Gestures and Sensors to Support User Generated Content Creation, a paper co-authored with Matt and Parisa Eslambolchilar. Darius participated in the Doctoral Consortium, see his submission entitled Implicit Participation from a Glance.

Royal Society-NRF Workshop in Cape Town

16 July 2008

Matt Jones organised a workshop funded by the RS and South Africa's NRF in Cape Town in the first week of July. Bringing together 5 UK academics (including Harold Thimbleby from the Lab) and 5 from South Africa, the workshop looked at potential technologies, algorithms and engineering-design practices for digitally ‘impoverished’ communities to take part in the user-generated content revolution. See website for more details.

IFIP WG 9.2 Meetings

16 June 2008

The Lab hosted the IFIP working group on Computers and Accountability between Thurs 12th and Sun 15th June. Two members of the Lab presented 'teach-ins' on work on healthcare and digital divide interaction design. Some of the visitors also took part in discussions with our current MSc and MRes students.

Leverhulme Fellowship

08 June 2008

Harold Thimbleby has been awarded a Royal Society-Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship for 2008/9. We are advertising a new lecturer post as a result.

Press On released

22 May 2008

Press On is the award-winning new book by Harold Thimbleby that explains the problems of interactive devices and how to design and engineer them so that they are more reliable, simpler and easier to use.

Being Human now available

21 May 2008

Dr Matt Jones participated in the Microsoft HCI2020 conference, a forum which brought together international leaders in computing, design, philosophy of science, sociology, anthropology and psychology to debate, contribute to, and help formulate the agenda for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in the next decade and beyond.
The resulting report, Being Human, is now available for download.