CHAI Seminar Schedule
2006
Here is the schedule for the Computer Human Adapted Interaction Research Group seminars.
They range from formal presentations of mature work by members of the group or visitors to less
formal reports of work-in-progress. The regular meeting time is 11:00am Wednesday in the School of IT Building Seminar Room 123.
Subscribe to the CHAI Seminar Calendar
Weekly Seminars
Special Seminars
:: Responsive Information Architect: Context-Sensitive Information Seeking
Speaker:
Zhen Wen
Description:
Imagine the next generation of multimedia information portals, where users are able to obtain information through an intelligent multimodal interaction that is tailored to the tasks you are performing, and adapted to your context and interaction devices. To realize this vision, we are building an infrastructure, called Responsive Information Architect (RIA), which engages users in a dynamically generated multimodal, conversation to aid users in exploring large and complex information spaces.
Unlike existing information access paradigm that forces users to explore information following pre-defined paths (e.g., GUI menus), RIA allows users to express their information requests flexibly using multiple modalities, such as GUI, natural language, and gesture. Using a rich context, such as conversation history and data semantics, RIA is capable of understanding user inputs, including complex data queries ( e.g., "tell me about cities in the north along hudson river with at least 5000 people"), abbreviated requests (e.g., "what about golf courses"), and imprecise and ambiguous ones. To create tailored responses to such diverse user queries introduced during a conversation, we automate the generation of RIA responses. In particular, we use optimization-based approaches to select/organize desired content, and assign the proper media to convey different types of content. To present the intended content in a specific medium, we develop case-based learning algorithms to dynamically synthesis speech and visual presentations. As a result, RIA provides users with a customized multimedia presentation of retrieved information, including both speech and graphics.
Speaker Bio:
Zhen Wen is research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. His research interests include visualization, computer graphics, machine learning, pattern recognition and multimedia systems. Zhen received PhD degree in computer science from Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His thesis work was on improving human computer interaction using human face avatars. At IBM, Zhen's current research focuses on adaptive context-sensitive user interfaces for information analysis. Specifically, he has worked on information selection adapted to task contexts and user interactions; automated graphics generation for dynamic data; and visual context management for helping users to integrate information in continuous visual dialog. Zhen's work has been filed as three patents and has been published in leading conferences and journals such as InfoVis and Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI). Zhen's work received a best paper award at IUI 2005, an IBM Research Division Award and an IBM invention award in 2005. Zhen serves on technical committees for major conferences such as ACM Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia.
:: Community Bar: Designing for Informal Awareness and Casual Interaction
Speaker:
Gregor McEwan
Description:
Community Bar (CB) is groupware that supports informal awareness and casual interaction. CB's conceptual design was primarily derived from three sources: prior empirical research findings concerning informal awareness and casual interaction, a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, and the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. Design nuances are strongly influenced by observations and feedback supplied by a user community who had been using both the CB and its Notification Collage predecessor for a total of five years. In this presentation, I will describe CB and how the theoretical sources were used to arrive at the final design. I will also describe how CB addresses an issue of inflexible functionality that is common in most Groupware, through the use of a groupware plugin architecture. Finally, I will report on a field study of a group's on-going CB use and use the results to reflect upon the matches and mismatches that occurred between the theoretical and actual usage behaviors anticipated by the design principles vs. those observed in deployment.
Speaker Bio:
Gregor McEwan is currently a Research Engineer at National ICT Australia. He is part of the Braccetto Project, which investigates technology to support intense collaboration between co-located and distributed teams. He has just recently completed a Masters degree at the University of Calgary, Canada, working with Professor Saul Greenberg. Previously, he worked at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC) in Australia as a Research Scientist. His expertise is in Computer Supported Cooperative Work with a special emphasis on creating groupware environments for small communities.
His recent graduate work applies social theories of interaction to groupware design. His time at DSTC included work on the Orbit groupware environment and research into social communities formed around sharing of web resources. He was also involved in research on Participatory Design and eXtreme Programming development methodologies.
:: Tabletop interfaces to file systems of personal information
Speaker:
Anthony Collins
Description:
Hierarchical organisation of files and personal information has long been accepted for conventional personal computer systems. However, the constrained interactions allowed by tabletop interfaces make it difficult and unnatural to navigate a conventional hierarchical file system on a tabletop display. Existing tabletop research has focused on creating separate user interfaces for navigating and manipulating small collections of information, such as digital photographs or a virtual desktop of files, rather than creating unified interfaces that incorporate an entire computer file system. Furthermore, existing tabletop interfaces have only presented information from a single collection, rather than merging related information from multiple sources (such as the file systems of all group members sitting around the tabletop display). There is an opportunity and need to explore radically different ways to interact with files and personal information on tabletop displays.
A promising approach is to explore ways to organise and manage files and personal information according to their content, rather than the hierarchical file structure imposed upon them, and present this information in a non-uniform manner designed to support a user's task. In this honours project, I have developed and evaluated a tabletop interface where only items most relevant to a user selected focus item are displayed, with their relevance to the focus indicated by their size. This technique, combined with full content-based searching of a file system, enables users to efficiently navigate a very large number of file system documents on a tabletop interface. The system is also designed to merge related information from multiple sources (such as multiple computers). In this talk I will describe the design of the implemented system, discuss the results obtained from qualitative user experiments, and outline areas for future work.
Speaker Bio:
Anthony Collins is an honours student with the Smart Internet Technology Research Group after completing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Adv) degree at the University of Sydney.
:: Image Based Tagging and Interactive Mapping on Tabletops
Speaker:
Glen Whitaker
Description:
Honours Practice Presentation. Tabletop interfaces present more collaborative environments for performing tasks. The levels of personalisation in current systems vary from identifying who owns a particular object, to associating individual words to objects. MyMaps is a prototype that explores the concept of associating metadata though the interaction of images in tabletop interfaces. Comparing methods of text interaction with the TeamTag system from Stanford University.
MyMaps explores the introduction of identifying regions on special interactive maps. MyMaps enhances tabletop tagging with the association images to particular point locations and regions of the map. All these elements are put together in an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of tabletops as a collaborative planning tool by MyMaps providing a framework for achieving this.
Speaker Bio:
Glen Whitaker - an Honours student that is part of the Smart Internet Research group. Currently undertaking honours as the 4th year in a Bachelor of Information Technology and has a strong interest and enjoyment in anything relating to programming.
:: Adobe Flex
Speaker:
Robin Hilliard
Description:
Web 2.0 and the largest Flex application in the world - Adobe Flex is emerging as a leader in Rich Internet Application technology. This talk will use Fairfax's AFRAccess online investors toolkit as an example of what's possible with the Flash Platform and its role on the new web.
Speaker Bio:
Robin Hilliard will be giving the talk - Robin is a well known Australian expert on Flash Platform technologies such as Flex, ColdFusion, Flash and Flash Media Server. As Director of Rocketboots, Robin's mission is to add world class capability to development teams working with the Flash Platform. A more detailed bio can be found at LinkedIn by searching for 'Robin Hilliard'
Michael Crawford - Software Engineer for the consulting firm; The Frame Group Pty Limited. Michael has broad IT experience including roles in Rich Internet Application technology, Voice over IP and robotics, as well as network management and project coordination.
:: Personal Information Management for Electronic Mail Client
Speaker:
Eric Wu
Description:
As electronic mail has become an increasing important medium for workplace communications, it has grown to be a significant part of personal information management. An alarming problem associated with electronic mail is the huge volume of mail traffic in the workplace. People need to manage their mails effectively but it cannot be done without the right information about their mail activities.
This thesis investigates the way to support email management by providing tools which perform analysis on user mail activity information. By modeling the user mail history, mail statistics can be determined to help the user become more aware of the nature of their mail box. This can improve user management processes, for example adjusting their mail behavior according to which day of the week they receive the most mail, and changing the method they archive mail the origin and the destination of their mail items. The communication between user and other individuals can be examined to answer questions such as "what's the average time it takes for this person to reply my email?", and "how long does it usually take me to reply an email from him?".
Through evaluation of the analysis tools for mail activities, this thesis reflects the user's expectations of support in order to become more aware of the mail behavior, and the communication relationships between the people with whom they interact.
:: Some Challenges for Next Generation Service Internetworks
Speaker:
Michael Fry
Description:
Following a period of sabbatical in early 2006 in Europe I would like to present my research agenda. This is broadly framed by the challenges posed by new and emerging paradigms of internetworking. Forces include the imminent explosion in wireless networking - MANETs, mesh backbones, WSNs, VANs etc - and how we can develop new approaches to connectivity in such environments, that is tolerant and adaptive to network impedance points. One line I am investigating in collaboration with overseas colleagues is to revisit cross-layered architectures in this context. Another challenge for network researchers is posed by the trashing of the Internet commons and some responses to this such as 'walled gardens'. I am working with a newly-formed international group focusing on Resilient Networking (ResiliNets) which is addressing this and other issues through, for example, the management of trust boundaries. I continue to have an interest in developing frameworks and mechanisms for active service composition and creation, including within the context of Next Generation Networks. I am also looking to further develop and generalise previous work on topology awareness in the form of network underlay services to support applications such as autonomic content distribution. I will finish my talk by outlining the program, currently under consideration for funding, for a new Smart Services CRC.
Speaker Bio:
Professor Michael Fry has an extensive research track record in areas including communication protocols, high performance communication systems, multimedia networking, Quality of Service, active networks and active services. He has participated in a number of major international research collaborations, attracting research funding from both government and industry.
:: Research at the Web Engineering Group (WEG). J12 3W
Speaker:
Rafael Calvo
Description:
The presentation will be a short introduction to the people and projects currently at WEG. I will comment on some of the projects in data mining (sports, farming (on mobile phones) and e-Learning) and Software Engineering in Education.
The students involved in the projects will be available for questions. We aim with this presentation to get people in our floor to know each other. Since we have similar research interests, we want students across the groups to collaborate more.
:: Unobtrusive, Scrutable Music Recommendation
Speaker:
Mark Hingston
Description:
My thesis is attempting to explore the possiblity of making unobtrusive, easily understandable (ie. scrutable) new music recommendations to ipod users. Currently I am looking at comparing a number of different methods of making recommendations and evaluating their usefulness in terms of both recommendation effectiveness and scrutability. I am also investigating the ways in which implicit data on user's musical tastes can be effectively converted into ratings of individual pieces of music. Hopefully, this thesis will produce a web-based system that can allow users to plug in an ipod and quickly receive useful recommendations for new music that they might enjoy.
Speaker Bio:
After 5 years here at Sydney Uni, Mark Hingston finally is completing the BIT (Honours) this semester. He has a general interest in all things musical and is an avid supporter of the Parramatta Eels. He is the guy with dreadlocks that you may have seen wandering around our new School of IT building.
:: MyMaps - Tagging and Interactive Mapping on Tabletops
Speaker:
Glen Whitaker
Description:
Tabletop interfaces present more collaborative environments for performing tasks. The levels of personalisation in current systems vary from identifying who owns a particular object, to associating individual words to objects. MyMaps introduces the concept of associating meta data though the interaction of images in tabletop interfaces.
Instead of associating words to entire images, meta data is assigned to images which are then able to be tagged to particular points and regions on other objects. One of the current systems in TeamTag by Meredith Ringel Morris would require attaching individual meta data manually to each of the objects, and would not allow direct association of one image to a particular region in another. MyMaps extends on this research by allowing direct association to individual regions providing the ability for users to create things such as document arrangements, virtual museums, building tours, and the list goes on.
Speaker Bio:
Glen Whitaker is an Honours student that is part of the Smart Internet Research group. Currently undertaking honours as the 4th year in a Bachelor of Information Technology and has a strong interest and enjoyment in anything relating to programming.
:: A collaborative filtering approach to personalised learning
Speaker:
Dean Cummins
Description:
Personalised courses are currently reliant on metadata and are often contained within a relatively static framework. This talk will present an alternative which aims to takes advantage of collaborative filtering techniques to deliver personalised courses to learners without the reliance of time consuming and error prone metadata to be created.
:: Flexible Social Scheduling using Mobile Devices
Speaker:
Glen Tregoning
Description:
As mobile phone adoption has grown it has changed the way many people socially interact. Mobile phones allow people to plan social events on short notice, or plan a meeting without finalising their time and place until the last minute. This flexibility however is significantly reduced as the number of people involved increases.
This presentation outlines a project aiming to overcome the current limitations for dynamic social interaction between larger groups of people. These limitations are outlined, with solutions proposed and combined to form the proposed system architecture.
Speaker Bio:
Glen Tregoning is currently in his 5th year of a combined B. Engineering (Software) and B. Science (Psychology) at the University of Sydney. He is currently working as a Casual Research assistant on the Keep in Touch project, as well as completing his Engineering thesis in the School of IT.
:: Scrutable adaptation: because we can and must
Speaker:
Judy Kay
Description:
Beginning with the motivations for scrutability, the talk introduces PLUS, a vision of Pervasive Lifelong User-models that are Scrutable. The foundation for PLUS is the Accretion/Resolution representation which is at the base of an architecture for active user models that can drive adaptive hypermedia, with support for scrutability. Essentially, it aims to be the simplest representation that enables user control over use and interpretation of their user model, while also supporting reasoning under the uncertainty that goes with user modelling.
The core of the talk illustrates PLUS in terms of its existing, implemented elements of this vision. These are mainly derived from my work: the Personis-lite version of Accretion/Resolution, and the Personis-plus active user models; tools like VCM to elicit conceptual understanding and knowledge; SIV as an example of an interface that will be essential to support scrutability of large user models; a framework for defining user model ontologies and distributing them, managing movement of partial user models in ubiquitous computing; scrutability-preserving service discovery for pervasive computing; and taking scrutability beyond the user model in scrutably adaptive hypertext.
To illustrate how this notion of scrutability impacts an adaptive hypertext application, I will present some examples: the Just-in-time Training system (JITT), the Unix tutor with scrutably adaptive hypermedia and MyPlace, a pervasive personalised service that informs the user about relevant people, things and services.
The concluding section is a research agenda for some of the essential elements of this PLUS vision, with the role, challenges and trade-offs in scrutability for adaptive hypermedia.
:: Tabletop Sharing of Digital Photographs for the Elderly
Speaker:
Trent Apted
Description:
We have recently begun to see hardware support for the tabletop user interface, offering a number of new ways for humans to interact with computers. Tabletops offer great potential for face-to-face social interaction; advances in touch technology and computer graphics provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects, which we can display on the tabletop surface. Such an interface has the potential to benefit a wide range of the population and it is important that we design for usability and learnability with diverse groups of people.
This paper describes the design of SharePic - a multiuser, multi-touch, gestural, collaborative digital photograph sharing application for a tabletop - and our evaluation with both young adult and elderly user groups. We describe the guidelines we have developed for the design of tabletop interfaces for a range of adult users, including elders, and the user interface we have built based on them. Novel aspects of the interface include a design strongly influenced by the metaphor of physical photographs placed on the table with interaction techniques designed to be easy to learn and easy to remember. In our evaluation, we gave users the final task of creating a digital postcard from a collage of photographs and performed a realistic think-aloud with pairs of novice participants learning together, from a tutorial script.
URL of the paper
The citation context is
Apted, T, J Kay and A Quigley, Tabletop Sharing of Digital Photographs for the Elderly. In Proceedings of CHI2006, the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems , April 24 - 27, 2006, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (to appear).
Speaker Bio:
In March 2005, Trent Apted started his PhD at the University of Sydney after working with NICTA for one year as a research engineer on Project Nightingale; a joint research project with the University of Sydney and the Smart Internet CRC. In his PhD work, Trent is exploring the potential of the "tabletop interface" as a platform for formal and informal face-to-face collaboration, multimedia display and exchange, information visualisation and entertainment.
After studies in 2003, Trent was awarded the University Medal and first class Honours in the Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Advanced) at the University of Sydney. For his honours thesis he investigated learning techniques for interactive tangible user interfaces, or "Smart Toys", and graduated with the highest fourth-year weighted average mark in the Faculty of Science. While undertaking his degree he did tutoring and gained experience in a range of computer science disciplines including machine learning, knowledge representation, database design, computer security, networking and user interfaces as a result of coursework and research projects while participating in the Science Talented Student Programme.
During the last two years of his undergraduate degree, he published papers in four international conferences and submitted a paper to the International Journal on Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (special issue on Concepts and Ontologies in WBES), which appeared in 2004. He has since published work in a number of workshops, and will be presenting a full paper at CHI2006 in Montreal, Canada.
:: VirMutt - Virtual Museums on tabletops
Speaker:
Glen Whitaker
Description:
I will be introducing the project of developing a personalised virtual museum on a tabletop as part of my honours project.
Speaker Bio:
Glen Whitaker is a Honours student that is part of the Smart Internet Research group. Currently undertaking honours as the 4th year in a Bachelor of Information Technology and has a strong interest in anything relating to programming.
:: A tag-based 3-D file and personal information manager with ad-hoc peer sharing capabilities
Speaker:
Anthony Collins
Description:
As computer disks have grown dramatically in size over the years, little has been done to simplify the retrieval of items in a disperse file system hierarchy that are related to a particular task. Many visualisations exist that depict file systems in a more accessible way, however, a knowledge of where items are located in the file system is still required for efficient use. It can also be argued that a hierarchy is not the most simple and efficient way to store personal information in a computer file system because of limited multiple classification facilities. The recent proliferation of personalised tagging systems on the Internet has highlighted a potential solution that can address the categorisation problem and provide a much simpler and efficient file system abstraction for users to navigate and manage their file-spaces.
I am currently investigating the use of tagging to manage files and personal information in computer systems, and the visualisation of this information using 3-D drawing techniques in a task-based interface. I will present my work to date, and also discuss the proposed direction it will take during the year.
Speaker Bio:
Anthony Collins is an honours student with the Smart Internet Technology Research Group after completing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Adv) degree at the University of Sydney.
:: MSc Annual Review Talk: Learner modeling for reflective learning in student self-assessment
Speaker:
Bruce Li
Description:
In this talk, Lichao will give an overview of his MSc for the first annual review. The goal of his project is to to explore ways to improve support for learner reflection/ /in student self-assessment, by building and externalizing a learner model and evaluate the impact of this on students' learning behaviour. Lichao will present some related-work in this area, current progress of the project and plan for the next few months.
:: PhD Review Talk: Capturing the Digital Photograph Story at a Tabletop
Speaker:
Trent Apted
Description:
In this talk Trent will be giving a brief overview of his PhD for his 1st-year review. He is investigating the tabletop as an interface for the sharing of digital photographs and the automatic capture of storytelling "photo-talk". The aim is to create an online photo album, augmented with sound and "trails" -- hyperlinked paths through the photo collection that tell a story, without the photographer being present. Trent will give a brief summary of the related work in the area and give an overview of his research plan for the next two years.
Speaker Bio:
In March 2005, Trent Apted started his PhD at the University of Sydney after working with NICTA for one year as a research engineer on Project Nightingale; a joint research project with the University of Sydney and the Smart Internet CRC. In his PhD work, Trent is exploring the potential of the "tabletop interface" as a platform for formal and informal face-to-face collaboration, multimedia display and exchange, information visualisation and entertainment. After studies in 2003, Trent was awarded the University Medal and first class Honours in the Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Advanced) at the University of Sydney. For his honours thesis he investigated learning techniques for interactive tangible user interfaces, or "Smart Toys", and graduated with the highest fourth-year weighted average mark in the Faculty of Science. While undertaking his degree he did tutoring and gained experience in a range of computer science disciplines including machine learning, knowledge representation, database design, computer security, networking and user interfaces as a result of coursework and research projects while participating in the Science Talented Student Programme. During the last two years of his undergraduate degree, he published papers in four international conferences and submitted a paper to the International Journal on Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (special issue on Concepts and Ontologies in WBES), which appeared in 2004. He has since published work in a number of workshops, and will be presenting a full paper at CHI2006 in Montr?al, Canada.
:: Ruby - an introduction to a lovely language
Speaker:
David Symonds
Description:
I will be introducing Ruby, an object-oriented interpreted language, and trying to get you to fall in love with it.
Speaker Bio:
David Symonds is a PhD student in the Advanced Networking Research Group at the University of Sydney. He does not like long walks along the beach, nor Barry Manilow, nor putting in unnecessary effort into his programming endeavours. Dave has been heavily using Ruby for 3 years, and loves it like he would a child, if he had any.
:: Speech Recognition in KiT
Speaker:
Bojan Djordjevic
Description:
The goal of the project was to investigate the feasibility and usefulness of adding a speech interface to KiT. The project involved using an existing speech recognition library and interfacing it with KiT, as well as creating lower level sould libraries to make this possible.
Speaker Bio:
Bojan Djordjevic is currently in year 4 of combined BE(Software) and BSc(Physics). Over the summer holidays he worked on speech recognition for the Smart Internet Technology group as a Summer Scholar.
:: Photo Sharing for All Ages - Adding Photo Sharing to KiT
Speaker:
Glen Tregoning
Description:
The recent adoption of digital cameras, the Internet, and photo sharing applications have allowed for people to share photos across the globe quicker than ever. Although there has been significant development in this field, these technologies are still a long way from reproducing the simplicity and intimacy of traditional in-person photo sharing. Current technologies are in most cases too complicated for technologically inexperienced people from younger and older generations.
This talk describes an extension to the Keep in Touch appliance that aims to allow users of all ages to exchange voice annotated photographs. It also discusses some of the issues faced during development, and highlights areas for future development.
Speaker Bio:
Glen Tregoning is currently in his 5th year of a combined B. Engineering (Software) and B. Science (Psychology) at the University of Sydney. Over his vacation period Glen has undertaken a Summer Scholarship with the Smart Internet Technology Research Group, and the School of I.T. at Sydney University.
:: Extending Keep in Touch (KiT) to support synchronous voice communication
Speaker:
Anthony Collins
Description:
Keep in Touch (KiT), an intergenerational communications system that allows people to easily send short voice messages to each other, has been extended to support real-time voice communication. Users may initiate phone calls with each other using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which provides an alternative method of communication that gives immediate feedback, making it better suited for transmitting messages that are equivocal, urgent, or require discussion. The KiT interface has also been enhanced to display the presence of users, and allow users to explicitly decide if they wish to accept voice calls. The talk will outline how these new features have been implemented in KiT, and the technical obstacles that were faced during development.
Speaker Bio:
Anthony Collins is beginning his Honours year after completing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Adv) degree. He has been working on the Keep in Touch project as part of a summer vacation scholarship with the Smart Internet Technology Research Group.
:: A Platform for Wide-Area Overlay Network Deployment and Management
Speaker:
Michael Fry
Description:
As the Internet evolves, the distributed computing model is providing greater opportunities to network providers and to end-users to utilise and provide new services. Active service approaches enable dynamic deployment and management of new services in the form of overlays. However, structured management to optimally connect distributed nodes is required. Manual administration is prohibitive because of the potential scale and changing nature of such service networks. Suitable mechanisms are required to effectively link and manage distributed nodes and to provide optimal support for active service deployment.
We present a set of self-organising mechanisms for the discovery of nodes that may support service overlays, and for the deployment of application-level service overlays themselves. We present mechanisms within the framework of the funnelWeb infrastructure. Experimental deployment on PlanetLab has demonstrated scalability, robustness and resilience.
These mechanisms are described and illustrated with two examples of application specific implementations: an overlay based on the E.164 international telecommunication-numbering plan, then an overlay based on the Global Network Positioning system. This overlay supports a wide variety of services that rely on proximity to nearby nodes in the Internet. These examples also show leverage of a discovery system to provide distributed and resilient deployment and linking of overlay nodes on the Internet. Some results from deployment of our system on PlanetLab are discussed. We introduce the idea of a generic service overlay construction mechanism which defines generic processes of bootstrapping, registration, handoff and recovery in a set of core classes, with derived metric classes implementing specific peer selection, management and storage.
:: Personalised Museum Tours Base One: Building User Models Using Concept Mapping on a Tabletop
Speaker:
William Niu
Description:
The MyMuseum project aims to provide personalised museum tours. An essential starting point for this is to construct a model of the user and to do this efficiently, making modest demands on the user while achieving adequate fidelity in the model. This paper describes an approach to eliciting user models with a tabletop interface for concept mapping.
Speaker Bio:
William Niu is a PhD student in the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney. His research interests include ubiquitous computing, user modelling, ontologies, information retrieval, and computer music. His thesis is "Group and Individual Customisation of Information in Supporting Intergenerational Communication". It focuses on exploiting ontological reasoning to provide a superior group model, built from individual user models (UMs), for a group adapted museum tour. His research is supported by the Smart Internet Technology CRC.
:: A Personalised Public Information Display
Speaker:
David Carmichael
Description:
This talk briefly describes MyPlace, which drives a personalised display for information about the building where it is located.
We describe the current single-user form as well as proposals for extensions to support groups of users.
We will discuss the MyPlace system, the non-interactive public display, and our plans for creating a hybrid of the two.
:: The Intelligent-Electronic Mail Sorter
Speaker:
Eric McCreath
Description:
The first part of this presentation aims to bring together research that relates to the email project we (Judy Kay, Liz Crawford and myself) have been involved in over the last 5 years. Sorting email messages into folders is an important task for a vast number of computer users. The iems(Intelligent-Electronic Mail Sorter) project is focused on improving the way users interact with email managers. In this presentation I will discuss how combining learnt and hand crafted rules can improve the overall performance of the system. Also I will present a composite rule learner that classifies mail by combining an instance based approach with an approach that constructs a general explicit description. We show that this approach improves classification erformance. Furthermore, this combined approach produces understandable and concise classification rules that users can scrutinize allowing them to maintain a sense of control.
The second part of this presentation will overview the new email management system that is being developed and released. I will present research directions that will be considered. In particular we wish to consider how other work-flow activities may be combined into an email manager. An example of this is combining a "todo list" into an email manager. This would enable associations between messages and todo items and hence provide a uniform interface for handling this information. Another aspect I wish to explore on this new email manager is learning when messages are important then presenting these important messages to the user.
Speaker Bio:
Eric McCreath completed his Ph.D. degree in 1999 from the University of New South Wales. This was on research involving Inductive Logic Programming(ILP) which is a sub-field of Machine Learning. As part of his PhD thesis Dr McCreath derived a Bayesian heuristic for finding the most probable hypothesis in a very general framework that allows noisy data and fixed example size. He joined the Basser Department of Computer Science(now the School of Information Technologies) at Sydney University in 1999 and then in 2001 he joined the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University. Dr McCreath currently holds a lecturing position at the ANU. Recently Dr McCreath has collaborated with Judy Kay from the University of Sydney investigating the application of machine learning techniques in categorizing email within a user's inbox. More recently Dr McCreath has been supervising Robert Bridle during his PhD and together they have investigated novel approach for applying machine learning to improve mobile phone interfaces.
Slides
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