CHAI Seminar Schedule
2007
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
:: Reflections on Reflect
Speaker:
Greg Darke, with assistance from Chris Ackad, Steve Bian, Judy Kay, Matthew Wardrop
Description:
Reflect has now been in active use in large classes for several years. Carrick funding is making it possible to spread the joy: Monash, UTS and QUT have been working on adopting it and there is real interest in broader use of it in the School. This talk is an overview of the current state of Reflect as well as an introduction to the range of activities that are being done to make it more usable and more readily deployed more widely. There are many pragmatics that will be discussed and we are keen to have input from the many who have made active use of it and can contribute suggestions for refinements. In addition, we need to consider issues of reuse of learning tasks and enhancements to the quality of the learner feedback.
Speaker Bio:
Greg Darke has been supporting Reflect this year. Over the summer, he will work with summer vacation scholars, Chris Ackad, Steve Bian and Matthew Wardrop on refinements and evaluations of Reflect.
:: Trac plugin: Matching patterns for data mining
Speaker:
Vincent Daviet
Description:
Vincent will talk about the work he has done during the first months of his internship. He has worked on Data Mining, creating a plugin for Trac (software project management for teamwork). The aim of this plugin is to analyze the data generated by Trac when some teams use it. And then, to give a feedback to the users about their teamwork. Teachers can add and save the patterns that they recognize as similar to an efficient team, or to a less efficient one.
Speaker Bio:
Vincent is a student at the UTBM (University of Technology Belfort-Montb?liard, France), after completing a 2-year technical degree in Networking and Telecommunication (IUT-GTR, Annecy, France). He is doing a 6-month internship at the School of IT, University of Sydney. It is the equivalent of the first semester of his 4th year to complete an Engineering degree in Computer Science.
:: Narcissus: Learning how to work in a group using an interactive visualisation
Speaker:
Kimberley Upton
Description:
Collaborative software development projects are common practice in industry, and as such there have been a variety of tools and methodologies created to support such group work. The context explored by the Narcissus project is the novice case. Students enrolled in a computer science degree must complete a capstone unit of study, where they are required to develop software in a group over one or two semesters. Students must use tools for collaboration, project management processes, and interact effectively as a group. Groups must be able to contribute when collocated during labs and scheduled meetings, as well as when geographically distributed in their own time. This unit of study is typically a steep learning curve, as many students have not previously participated in a group project before.
The use of online tools in this context overcomes the technological barrier involved with such collaborative work. However, there are still concerns that groups may not have a good understanding of their own operations, particularly in the novice case. The Narcissus project exploits trace data from the collaborative online tools to support the groups. The approach is to use an interactive visualisation to mirror the activities of the group members, which gives them the opportunity to see the dynamics and progress of their group.
This talk describes the interactive visualisation prototype and presents results from experimental evaluations and user studies that informed the design of the visualisation. Applications of the Narcissus project beyond the student software development context will be discussed.
:: Mining group interaction data in software development teams
Speaker:
Kalina Yacef
Description:
We study the application of data mining to data collected from third year software development group projects using Trac, an online collaboration tool. We applied two very distinctive techniques, clustering and sequential pattern mining. The results emphasised the importance of leadership and group interaction in successfully achieving a collaborative outcome. In addition, certain patterns were found which may be indicative of good individual practices during software development projects specifically. We also discuss a wide range of issues, including how the results should be interpreted and used for predictions, limitations of the work, and possible improvements.
:: TABLETOP 2007 Trip Report
Speaker:
Anthony Collins
Description:
Anthony will give a Trip Report of TABLETOP 2007, the 2nd IEEE international workshop on horizontal interactive human-computer systems, held in Newport, Rhode Island, USA (along with UIST 2007).
:: SSP Trip Report
Speaker:
Kalina Yacef
Description:
Kalina will present her SSP trip report, including her visit at INRIA in France and relevant work applying data mining and visualisation on data from a semantic Wiki engine followed by a conference report on Personalisation in AIED systems.
:: UIST 2007 Trip Report
Speaker:
Trent Apted
Description:
This talk will be a trip report on UIST 2007, held in Newport, Rhode Island, USA.
:: UbiComp 2007 Trip Report
Speaker:
Bob Kummerfeld
:: Mobile internet: taxonomy of current mobile internet technologies and user acceptance of internet access through a mobile phone
Speaker:
Robert Cheng-Kang Wu
Description:
As a result of the perceived size of the mobile internet market, mobile technologies have been developed to improve the usage of the mobile internet, especially to mobile web. This research report creates a taxonomy of current mobile internet technologies and examines user acceptance of using the internet through a mobile phone with Technology Acceptance Model. The TAM is evaluated with several potential factors that were mentioned in previous literatures to investigate if these potential factors has affected on user's acceptance of using internet through mobile phone. The thesis concludes that cost of internet access through mobile phone and having other internet access have negative effects on users acceptance.
:: Acceptance of ITS, A realistic multiple indicator approach
Speaker:
Ivan Teo
Description:
This thesis presents an acceptance model for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) based on the Technology Acceptance Model. Three potential ITS applications are examined and their acceptance by drivers are presented. To augment the model, a set of minimum performance requirements are presented by synthesizing previous work in drive through internet. The thesis concludes with an examination of business issues related to introducing ITS.
Speaker Bio:
Ivan Teo is a Masters of Information Technology Coursework student currently involved in a 18CP Research project supervised by Prof. Michael Fry.
:: Personalizing Next-Generation News Services using Aggregated Multimodal Contents
Speaker:
Dian Tjondronegoro
Description:
Users increasingly consume news articles on the Web and mobile devices which are enriched by audio, image, and video contents. As broadband Internet is becoming affordable for home users, more-and-more multimedia contents can be delivered to attract users' attention to consume news service. The current approach to generate such contents is still manual, with no technology to automate the multi-modal contents indexing and summarization. To sustain the rapid growth of news contents and overcome limitations of manual work, this project aims to propose the framework, tools and techniques to automatically generate a news service which aggregates multimedia contents for increasing users' enjoyment. For example, users can browse on the text-with-image topics in order to watch some news video highlights; or alternatively, they can start by watching streaming news video on the Web while the interface provides opportunities to read some overlaid text contents describing further information. Using this approach, the news service becomes more personalized as users have the control over the type of media contents they want to consume, depending on their context of use.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Dian Tjondronegoro is a Senior Lecturer in the area of Interactive Media at Faculty of IT, QUT. His research interests are: Multimedia Information Retrieval, Multimodal Content Delivery, and Mobile Applications & Services. He has so far published 25 international refereed articles in high-quality refereed journals and international conferences, including ACM Transactions in Multimedia Computing and Applications (TOMCCAP), IEEE multimedia, Information Processing and Management, and WWW journal. Please visit http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~tjondron/research.php for more details on his research area and papers.
:: Tabletop File System Access: Associative and Hierarchical Approaches
Speaker:
Anthony Collins
Description:
This seminar will consist of two short talks. First, I will give a practice talk for the upcoming IEEE TABLETOP '07 workshop, held in Newport, Rhode Island in October. The abstract for the practice talk is:
Tabletop interfaces provide a new medium for collocated collaboration. Indeed, the collaborative possibilities afforded by tabletop interfaces make them appealing for sharing digital files and personal information between group members. While users may not perceive a tabletop interface as a conventional personal computer, a form of file system is important: a file system, and its interface, constitute a core facility of an operating system. Hierarchical organisation and navigation of file systems has become the standard in conventional personal computers, although the properties and constraints of tabletop interfaces call for rethinking standard approaches to file system interaction. The social nature of the tabletop interface also encourages people to share their files with each other, meaning that files on the tabletop often need to come from multiple file systems, and these file systems may need to be interacted with concurrently by multiple people.
We present our exploration of tabletop file system access, in the form of two different collaborative tabletop file system interfaces: OnTop, a novel associative access approach to file system interaction where users navigate multiple file systems by selecting focus files, and the Browser, a hierarchical interface where users interact with folders of files on the tabletop. We have conducted a qualitative study of the two approaches that highlights the strengths of each approach, and raises important issues in supporting collocated collaboration at the tabletop.
Second, I will discuss the proposed direction of my thesis work, which focuses on personalised tabletop file system access in pervasive computing environments.
Speaker Bio:
Anthony Collins is a Master of Science (by Research) student with the Computer Human Adapted Interaction (CHAI) Research Group after completing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Adv) degree with first class honours, also at the University of Sydney.
:: Trip report on CSCL 2007
Speaker:
Peter Reimann
:: Narcissus: an Interactive Visualisation for Mirroring Activities
Speaker:
Kimberly Upton
Description:
Working effectively in groups is hard, particularly for projects that span some months. Groups can be derailed by a range of problems including poor leadership, poor communication, failure to monitor progress, and social loafing. Learning to work effectively in a group is a difficult but necessary measure to ensure group success.Groups using electronic support tools provide huge amounts of trace data, which has the potential to provide the group with insights into the effectiveness of their own operation. The Narcissus project exploits this data to support the groups. The approach is to use an interactive visualisation to mirror the activities of the group members, which gives them the opportunity to see the dynamics and progress of their group.This talk describes user studies that informed the design of the visualisation. Some prototypes of the visualisation will be presented as well as plans for the remainder of the project.
Speaker Bio:
Kimberley Upton is an Honours student, currently completing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Advanced) at the University of Sydney. She is doing her project with the Computer Human Adaptive Interaction Research Group, supervised by Judy Kay.
:: HCI 2007: Painting with Wii-motion
Speaker:
Martin Schwank
Description:
Digitally created art is only restricted by our imagination, every effect; colour or texture can be recreated and manipulated with a computer. The obstacle is the interface between human and computer. The mouse, which has become a universal standard, can only provide relative motion in 2 dimensions. The pen tablet is widely used for its accuracy and additional pressure sensitivity, but is also restricted to 2 dimensional input. The Wii-remote provides 3d motion sensing (including rotation around the axes) as well as pointing capabilities. My project intends to use this deep range of input and make a simple paint program with modular input->output behaviours. Using motion and/or pointing, users would be able to paint unlike they have ever painted before. I am consulting with professional designers and artists on possible painting behaviours.
At this stage I will be presenting the progress so far, design concepts that dictate how the users will paint, details of the Wii remote's capabilities, and ask for a brainstorming session to evoke further ideas.
Speaker Bio:
In 2007, Martin moved to Australia to do a Master of Information Technology at the University of Sydney and was hired by IBM to begin work in 2008 as an IT Consultant. Martin had completed a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at the University of Warwick, UK in 2006. His 3rd year final project was to create software for the Palm OS, using the touch interface capabilities and an unknown OS environment. Previously Martin attended the Vienna International School in Austria to complete the International Baccalaureate in 2003, focusing on Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics. He also completed a workshop at DigiPen Institute of Technology, Redmond, WA.
Currently he is focusing on project management and human computer interaction, with 2 projects using the popular Nintendo Wii and its motion & pointing capabilities. Martin is the IT/AV Officer at Wesley College and provides IT expertise to a law firm in Austria.
:: Comparing Cartographic and Linguistic Representation for Pedestrian Indoor Navigation
Speaker:
Carolin Plate
Description:
In the presentation of the annual figures of the CEO, on traffic signs, in advertisements - we constantly come across pictures in our daily lives. Especially in visuo-spatial tasks like wayfinding graphical representations are thought to be the more suitable means of representation. Using a text-based interface as an alternative, we conducted a user study (N = 18) of an indoor pedestrian navigation system to evaluate that claim. In a 2x2x2 design, gender and the visualizer-verbalizer dimension were included as "between-subjects" factors and the presentation form (cartographic or linguistic) a "within-subjects" factor . Contrary to expectations participants were significantly faster and more efficient with the linguistic interface and made slightly less errors. The study supported a general preference for the cartographic interface and confirmed that gender and the visualizer-verbalizer dimension influence this tendency. This work has important implications for UI designers since it shows that pictures satisfy affect but there might be more effective ways to support the user.
Speaker Bio:
Carolin Plate received her Bachelors of Science in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabr?ck in 2005. In the course of her studies she spent a semester abroad at Linkoepings Universitet, Sweden, and wrote her thesis at the German Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Jameson in the field of Usability Engineering. Subsequently, she started the Master's program in Cognitive Science at University of Osnabrueck, choosing Computer Science as the complementing minor. Ms. Plate is currently writing her Master's thesis in cooperation with the Computer Human Adapted Interaction Group of the University of Sydney under the supervision of Prof. Judy Kay in the field of Interaction Design.
:: Ontological Reasoning in Indoor Pervasive Environments
Speaker:
William Niu
Description:
There have been a few researchers proposing the use of ontologies in a pervasive environment, the clear gap in this area, however, is the lack of implemented and evaluated prototypes that actually use ontological reasoning in a context-aware system. In this talk, I will introduce a context-centred ontology, called Adaptive Scrutable Ontology, and how it can be constructed and used to conduct reasoning for a context-aware system. In particular, this ontology will be exploited in three main aspects of an indoor pervasive environment: conflict resolution, personalisation and privacy control. Finally I will present some promising results from a conducted experiment which showed the potential of this ontology in conflict resolution.
Speaker Bio:
William Niu is doing a PhD in the University of Sydney under Associate Professor Judy Kay's supervision. His research interests include ontological reasoning, ontology learning, context awareness, personalised information delivery and ubiquitous computing.
:: PhoTable: Enhancing the Social Interaction around Digital Photographs
Speaker:
Trent Apted
Description:
Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing piles of recently developed photos, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. My work aims to develop a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, leveraging the digital technology allows us to capture the stories told, and associate them as metadata to the appropriate photographs. My thesis is that by leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can immerse users in their social interaction, evoke stories, and allow the computer interaction to occur merely as a side-effect as it uses these stories to annotate an automatically created digital photo album; archived and useful for future sharing either locally (as a traditional photo album), or remotely.
At this point in my work, I will present the interface tools and architecture I have developed to assist users sharing digital photographs at a tabletop in a social manner.
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. He plans to submit his thesis in March, 2008, with a focus on enhancing the social interaction around digital photographs.
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.
:: Scrutability and Control of Personalisation in Portal Systems
Speaker:
Jeremy Pu
Description:
With the increasing use of web portals, such systems collect user's demographics such as their goals, areas of expertise, interests and background, and tailor different response to the user based on those information. However, the personalisation is often conducted by the system itself and the user has little or even no control over the adaptation process, that is, the personalisation in these systems is inscrutable to the user.
My research is to explore a method to offer users the possibility of seeing what has been personalised and why. The novelty of this work is that it makes it possible that not only the presentation layer can be customised, but also the adaptation process in a portal system can be customised as well.
The prototype of user interface SAPS is being developed to experiment how to provide scrutable personalisation in the context of a portal system. PersonisAM, the distributed user modelling server, has been used for maintaining more flexible and easy-to-share user models among different applications.
Speaker Bio:
Jeremy Pu is currently doing the master by research program at School of IT, The University of Sydney. My supervisor is Associate Professor Judy Kay. I completed my bachelor degree in 2000 and had worked in IT industry as a software engineer for more than 5 years.
:: WikiNavMap: A visualisation to support team-awareness in Trac
Speaker:
Adam Ullman
Description:
As well as being very successful for large scale collaborative sites such as Wikipedia, wikis are becoming a very popular medium for small team collaboration. In such a setting, particularly in the early stages of wiki use, the wiki can be very dynamic. It is important for team members to coordinate their activities which involves being aware of one another's actions on the wiki. In order to be aware of their team members actions, users need to constantly update their mental model of the structure of the site which is something that is not very well supported by a traditional wiki.
WikiNavMap is a visualisation which gives a dynamic overview of a wiki structure. Using a colour gradients and the ability for users to customise what is visualised, WikiNavMap allows users to quickly see what has changed in a wiki and who has made those changes. WikiNavMap is a plugin for the advanced wiki and issue tracking system, Trac, and is written in Python using Graphviz for the visualisation elements. AJAX techniques, similar to those used in Google Maps, were used to make it easier to navigate the, potentially very large, visualisations, as well as providing an interface to customise what is displayed.
Speaker Bio:
Adam Ullman is a Masters by Research student at the School of Information Technologies. Adam's Masters thesis supervisor is Judy Kay and co-supervisor is Peter Reimann from the CoCo Research Centre in the Faculty of Education & Social Work. Adam graduated from a Software Engineering undergraduate degree in 2004 at The University of Sydney and has been working in the CoCo Research centre as a Web Application Developer since. This role has seen him directly involved with research including collaboration on an ARC project with Judy Kay and Kalina Yacef at the School of Information Technologies. This project peaked Adam's interest in Wikis and Visualisation and has lead him to pursue his Masters in this area.
Slides
:: Remote Collaboration and Visual Analytics
Speaker:
Masahiro Takatsuka
Description:
This talk consists of two topics: 1) Remote Collaboration and 2) Visual Analytics.
Due to rapid advances in computing, network and hci technologies, many types of tasks (business, learning, creative design and planning) can now be executed collaboratively over the networks. In this talk, "Braccetto" project, which is the first ICT round table's HxI initiative project, is introduced and discuss what sorts of research challenges we (ViSLAB) are investigating in order to achieve "Distributed Intense Collaboration".
Visual Analytics is a emerging discipline, and it aims to utilize Visualization and User Interfaces in order to improve an Analytical Reasoning process. We've been working on a new Self-Organizing Map (one of Artificial Neural Networks) suited for Visual Analytics. A Self-Organizing Map is a type of Artificial Neural Networks and has been primarily used for 1) Associative Memory and 2) Data Visualization. Although the original form of the SOM does provide a useful visualization mechanism to a certain extent, it falls short of requirements in Visual Analytics. In this talk, SOM's shortcomings will be explained and some possible solutions and future challenges will be presented.
Speaker Bio:
Masahiro Takatsuka is Senior Lecturer at the School of Information Technologies, the University of Sydney, where he heads the ViSLAB (Visualization Research Group). His current research interests include the use of manifold surfaces for multidimensional scaling and Information Visualization, Advanced Collaboration Technologies, in particular, the use of Service Oriented Remote Collaboration, and Network Centric Computer Graphics. Takatsuka obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering form Monash University, M.Eng. in BioElectronics from Tokyo Institute of Technology.
:: Supporting CSCL by Mirroring Activities of Small Long Term Teams
Speaker:
Kimberley Upton
Description:
This presentation will be outlining my Honours project. My project is about supporting small groups that are collaborative over a period of time and use online tools capable of encapsulating large quantities of data about the activity of the group. The problem this research explores is learning to make small groups effective, particularly for the duration of long term projects that span some months. The approach to overcoming this problem is to mirror the activities of the students by exploiting the large amount of available data on their activities and visualising some useful aspects of the group functions. I will discuss the motivation of my research, the potential contributions I hope to make, and my research plan, including evaluation methods.
Speaker Bio:
Kimberley Upton is an Honours student, currently completing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Advanced) at the University of Sydney. She is doing her project with the Computer Human Adaptive Interaction Research Group, supervised by Judy Kay.
:: Adding a knowledge layer to standards compliant MCQs for modelling learner's knowledge of programming
Speaker:
Rajibussalim
Description:
Assessment is one important component of e-learning which covers a diverse range of computer support for improved learning. It is summative assessment that enables teachers or examiners to know if their students have reached the appropriate level of knowledge. Summative assessment typically takes the form of an exam which is translated into a grade; typically a single number. By contrast, formative assessment, especially when it takes form of self-assessment enables a student to check how well they are learning. This can, and should, take the form of more detailed feedback on just which aspects the student knows well as well as those where they have weaknesses. Then, from such feedback, the student can plan future actions to overcome weaknesses and build upon strengths.
This thesis explores a new approach to enhancing assessment in e-learning by adding a knowledge layer to a standard approach to testing. The particular approach we explore is the Multiple Choice Question (MCQ). This makes an excellent starting point because it is so widely used, as reflected in the existence of a well accepted standard, the Question Test of Interoperability (QTI) standard.
Speaker Bio:
Rajibussalim is a one-semester MIT (by coursework) bridging program student at School of IT, The University of Sydney. Currently, he is doing a 18 credit-points MIT project under Associate Professor Judy Kay supervision as a requirement to progress to MIT by research program.
:: A visualisation tool to explore and analyse the student social network in an e-learning environment
Speaker:
Stephen O'Rourke
Description:
For my undergraduate thesis project, I have developed a visualisation tool to explore and analyse the student social network in an e-learning environment. The visualisation tool was developed using and the Prefuse visualisation toolkit and is closely integrated with e-learning tools from the Sakai Project. The tool aims to provide an innovative solution for improving the quality of e-learning by supporting educators ineffectively understanding the student social network in an e-learning environment. The tool integrates techniques from social networking andgraph theory and utilises the concept of link distance to implement a number of filtering and clustering functions. These functions facilitate the effective analysis of social networks and help to reveal the embedded patterns in the underlying data.
Speaker Bio:
Stephen is a 4th year undergraduate student at the University of Sydney. he is currently studying for a B.E. in Electrical Engineering working with Rafael Calvo, on a social network visualisation tool as part of his undergraduate thesis project. In the future, he is interested in researching and developing engineering solutions for web-based applications.
:: CHI 2007 Trip Report: Part 1
Speaker:
Anthony Collins
Description:
In this talk, I will give an overview of some of the papers and exhibits presented at CHI 2007 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing systems), a conference that attracts some of the best papers in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field. The conference this year was held in San Jose, California, from April 30 to May 3.
Speaker Bio:
Anthony Collins is a Master of Science (by Research) student with the Computer Human Adapted Interaction (CHAI) Research Group after completing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Adv) degree with first class honours, also at the University of Sydney.
:: Knowledge discovery experiment in the Rowing performance database
Speaker:
Di Dong
Description:
Nowadays huge amount of data have been recorded during various training and competition activities, in order to support coaches to make right strategies and decisions to direct athletes for future competitions. However so far, the major use of these records is limited to basic statistics analysis and only from the viewpoints of sports science, such as biomechanics. As a result, some important patterns of these datasets themselves and relationships among data may still remain hidden. So we implemented a knowledge discovery experiment on one of these datasets (rowing training database in NSW Institute of Sport). The target of this activity is to find: Linear module that connects boat speed and various measurements attributes Attributes that contribute critically to the increase of average boat speed The quantitative relationships between the attributes found and the speed In order to achieve these goals, we constructed a discovery process that combined three widely used knowledge discovery algorithms: Principal Components Analysis, Standard Multiple Linear Regression and Quantitative Association Rules Extraction. Fortunately, some really interesting results have been captured and its biomechanics interpretation has also been provided.
:: Exploring Tabletop File System Interaction
Speaker:
Anthony Collins
Description:
Tabletop interfaces provide a new medium for collocated collaboration. Consequently, tabletops need to support access to file systems, just as a core facility of conventional computer systems is to provide an interface to a file system. However, the constraints of tabletop interfaces call for rethinking standard approaches to file system interaction. In this presentation, I will discuss the design of OnTop, a novel associative-search approach to file system interaction: users navigate multiple file systems by selecting focus files, retrieving similar ones. We report a small-scale qualitative evaluation of OnTop against a more conventional file browser approach: OnTop was consistently preferred and found to be more efficient, especially for larger file collections.
This talk will be a practice talk for CHI 2007 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing), to be held in San Jose, CA, USA from April 30 to May 4.
Speaker Bio:
Anthony Collins is a Master of Science (by Research) student with the Computer Human Adapted Interaction (CHAI) Research Group after completing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology (Adv) degree with first class honours, also at the University of Sydney.
:: A comparative UI study for MyPlace
Speaker:
Carolin Plate
Description:
In this talk I want to present my planned research at USYD during the next months and set it in the context of the research of the group. Building upon the implementation of MyPlace - a location-tracking system for people and devices by Mark Assad, David Carmichael, and William Niu - I will design and implement a text-based and a map-based interface for it. Research findings on spatial cognition and individual differences in wayfinding behavior provide the basis for my research question: "Mobile Navigation in Ubiquitous Environments - Is a Cartographic Representation the Natural Way to Communicate With the User?". Evidence will be provided by a user study that compares examples of both map and text interfaces with respect to user performance and satisfaction and further explores the need for and acceptance of personalization in ubiquitous computing.
Speaker Bio:
Carolin Plate received her Bachelors of Science in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabr ck in 2005. In the course of her studies she spent a semester abroad at Linkoepings Universitet, Sweden, and wrote her thesis at the German Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Jameson in the field of Usability Engineering. Subsequently, she started the Master's program in Cognitive Science at University of Osnabrueck, choosing Computer Science as the complementing minor. Ms. Plate is currently writing her Master's thesis in cooperation with the Computer Human Adapted Interaction Group of the University of Sydney under the supervision of Prof. Judy Kay in the field of Interaction Design.
Slides
:: Beehive: Application Framework for Collaborative Learning
Speaker:
Aiman
Description:
Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within the E-Learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. In this project, we present the design of a new pedagogical framework for collaborative learning. The framework guides teachers in implementing online activities based on well-known pedagogical techniques, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and simplifies the development of collaboration tools needed to carry out those techniques. By following this framework, developers will place the control of designing and implementing the pedagogical tools in the teacher's rather than in the software designer's.
:: Evaluation of Visualisations in Small Development Teams
Speaker:
Kimberley Upton
Description:
Third year computer science students are required to complete a software development group project. Tools such as Trac and a set of visualisations have been provided to assist their project management and improve their chance of success. This talk will discuss an evaluation of these tools, involving related research and interviews conducted with students who undertook the course. The information presented has a particular focus on the set of visualisations.
Speaker Bio:
Kimberley Upton has recently completed her degree in Computer Science and Technology (Advanced) at the University of Sydney, and is about to commence her Honours year. She is currently undertaking a Summer Vacation Scholarship with the Sydney University School of I.T. with the Computer Human Adapted Interaction research group.
:: Instant Messaging in Trac
Speaker:
James Bunton
Description:
Instant messaging is a popular way to communicate with people, for general socialising, to passing somebody a URL or a snippet of code. Students have used instant messaging as a collaboration tool in group projects for a while now, however the monitoring utilities in place for the Software Major Project course have no way of tracking this usage.
Jabber, or XMPP is an open standard instant messaging protocol, with hundreds of clients, dozens of server implementations, and millions of users worldwide. Google Talk uses the XMPP standard.
TracChat is a software system written in Python comprised of four parts: A reusable, extensible high level Jabber library (currently supports only minimal features necessary for this project) A web frontend written using Twisted Python and Nevow which connects to a Jabber groupchat and allows the user to communicate with other users in that groupchat. A Trac plugin which integrates the web frontend with Trac, displaying a a new tab, "Chat", that users can click to be dropped straight into a groupchat with all their other project members. Their Trac credentials are reused as the username and password for the Jabber server. A third-party application called Bandersnatch which connects to a Jabber server and logs all traffic passing through it to a MySQL database. This will be displayed in the Trac interface for users to refer to, as well as being available after the project is complete for data mining. The presentation will consist of a demo of the complete system, as well as a brief description of how it was implemented.
Speaker Bio:
James Bunton is a third year Bachelor of Information Technology student, majoring in Principles of Computer Science, and Software Development. He is currently working on integrating Jabber chat with Trac for the software development projects in third year.
:: Cross-platform Installation for Reflect System
Speaker:
Greg Darke
Description:
Learning to program is a difficult task, which the reflect system attempts to alleviate. This talk will present my progress in transferring the system into a product that can be installed onto numerous machines with ease, and the future direction of reflect.
Speaker Bio:
Greg Darke is a third-year Bachelor of Information Technology student currently undertaking a vacation scholarship with the School of IT, working on the reflect system.
:: Literature Review on Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Speaker:
Laura Ingram
:: Emerging Sequences in Trac Usage
Speaker:
Sam Thorogood
Description:
Trac is a project management system used by third year students consisting of a wiki, ticketing system and Subversion interface. Based on data obtained from past usage, we aim to determine indicators of 'good' groups versus 'bad' groups- via the notion of emerging sequences- that can eventually be applied to strategies dealing with future students who will utilize Trac. The emerging sequence algorithm has been implemented from existing work in a 2006 paper.
Speaker Bio:
Sam Thorogood is a semester away from completing his Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology. He's currently involved in a vacation scholarship with the School of IT, working with Kalina Yacef and Judy Kay.
:: Summer scholarship project on KiT
Speaker:
Emma Fitzgerald
Description:
The KiT web interface aims to make the Keep in Touch system accessible from an ordinary computer, rather than only from specialised KiT appliances, and from anywhere in the world. It uses a Java applet for audio capture and playback and an AJAX interface for faster response times and a more user-friendly interface, but there is also a version that only uses HTML and CGI scripts and does not require either Javascript or Java, to ensure that the web interface can be accessed from a wide range of browsers and configurations.
Speaker Bio:
Emma Fitzgerald is a third-year Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical)/Bachelor of Science student currently undertaking a vacation scholarship with the School of IT, working on the Keep in Touch project.
Slides
:: Improving reputations in Sydney
Speaker:
Ian Wakeman
Description:
This is an introductory talk about who I am and what I hope to achieve here. I've been doing Internet things since 1988, working on variously congestion control for video, conference control, multicast, active and programmable networks, and more recently policy configuration, trust and reputation for pervasive computing systems. The talk will talk briefly about what I've done, what I plan to do, why its interesting, and some very preliminary thoughts about how to go forward.
Slides
:: Context-Aware Systems in the Wild
Speaker:
A/Prof. Anind Dey
Description:
Context-aware systems have reached a certain level of maturity: researchers can build reliable infrastructure to support applications, and have compelling applications to build. However, in order to make context-aware systems usable by end-users, a number of additional steps have to be taken, including advanced modeling, improved intelligibility, and enhanced control. In this talk, I will discuss the state-of-the-art in context-aware systems, and describe how this current state is not yet sufficient for supporting usable and adoptable context-aware systems for end-users, using a number of case studies (both successes and failures) to illustrate these points.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Anind K. Dey is an Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie at the intersection of human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing. Specifically he performs research in context-aware computing and sensor-based interactions. He has conducted research in building context-aware infrastructures (including the Context Toolkit), models for context-aware systems, applications of context-aware applications and definitions for context-aware systems. Recently his interests have focused on how to make context-aware systems usable and adoptable by end-users.
Anind received a Bachelors of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada in 1993, and Masters of Science in AeroSpace Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1995. He received a 2nd Masters of Science and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in 2000. He was a Senior Researcher at Intel Research Berkeley from 2001-2004 and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley from 2002 to 2005.
Slides
Past Seminars
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