Past Seminars
Seminars held over the last six months.
- 02/07/2008: Graeme Coleman - Research Presentation
Within computer science, the field of auditory display has provided many valuable frameworks for the design, analysis and evaluation of non-speech sound within user interfaces. Traditional auditory display research has focused upon the use of non-speech sound to represent aural equivalents of various visual objects and events within the interface, and ‘sonifying’, as opposed to visualising, large amounts of data into auditory formats that can be interpreted, understood and acted upon. Influenced largely by traditional HCI method and practice, this research has predominately been concerned with cognitive, usability, and technology-lead issues such as the perception/learnability of, and reaction time to, different forms of auditory representation. However, while HCI itself has evolved beyond this ‘desktop’ model of interaction, auditory display research has been slow to take into account the myriad of challenges and opportunities posed as technology increasingly moves away from the desktop metaphor and into everyday objects within our everyday lives – objects that are no longer simply functional items for accomplishing tasks but which have become part of our environments and leisure activities. In my research presentation, I shall introduce what I believe to be some of the key challenges facing the field of auditory display and, through a discussion of some empirical work carried out during the course of my PhD research, the methods I have developed that I hope will contribute to the tackling of such challenges and thus to the field as a whole.
- 25/06/2008: Rami Abboud - Biomechanics: vision within visions!
Biomechanics is the study of "engineering" in "medicine" and in particular that of normal mechanics in the musculoskeletal system that analyses forces and their effects upon anatomical structures during movement. Studying movement properly is an art that requires an in-depth understanding of the science related to the biomechanics of the lower limb and in particular the foot, which is the only component of our body that acts upon an external surface - the ground. This in turn leads us to appreciate gait which describes the way we walk and the way we run. It has been possible to study gait in Dundee due to the establishment of a dedicated Gait Laboratory that was set up as far back as the 1960s, a Foot Pressure Analysis Laboratory in 1993 and most recently the Institute of Motion Analysis & Research (IMAR) in 2003. We are now in the position of providing a unique and comprehensive clinical service in motion analysis at IMAR. Unique in the sense that the Foot Pressure Analysis Laboratory is the only UK clinic for studying foot pressure analysis; comprehensive in that it incorporates a plethora of the latest state-of-the-art gait analysis equipment within five interlinked laboratories facilitating close and solid collaboration between Engineers, Physiotherapists, Orthotists, Prosthetists, Podiatirists, Surgeons and Physicians.
This presentation will describe work undertaken at IMAR through a series of clinical cases.
Host: Manuel Trucco
- 18/06/2008: Joaquim Salvi - Visual SLAM for 3D sea floor acquisition
The talk is about a new technique to acquire large 3D scenes from a sequence of video images by combining the benefits of Bayesian Filtering techniques and state-of-art 3D computer vision, two disciplines that unfortunately have seen little convergence in air and underwater scenarios. The proposed approach performs the alignment of sequences of 3D partial reconstructions of the scene using the navigation of the vehicle (position and velocity) and a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approach. After a pre-processing stage to denoise and enhance the input images, partial 3D scenes are obtained using stereo techniques. Landmarks are then extracted and characterized using a combination of 2D and 3D features. A linear Kalman Filter is used to perform SLAM. Experimental results show examples of image enhancement of underwater images in poor visibility; the reconstruction of a man-made object from a ground truth sequence; and the reconstruction of large scale 3D seabeds using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping of the vehicle in a virtual scenario. Results are readily applicable to land and air robotics.
Host: Manuel Trucco
- 17/06/2008: Mike Coutts - Teradata Technology
Mike Coutts will present the Teradata Architecture and Embedded Analytical capabilities with the intention of sparking joint research between University of Dundee and Teradata. Mike is the Enterprise Applications Architect for Teradata (San Diego, CA, USA) and holds an MSc by research in computing from University of Dundee.
Teradata is a well established database company that provides a massively scaleable database solution (Terabytes to Petabytes) capable of holding billions of rows of data. All standard data types (INTEGER, FLOAT etc) are supported as are more complex objects like Character and Binary Logical Objects (text documents or images). However, Teradata is much more than just another database, its massively parallel architecture makes it a Parallel Processing Engine that allows analytic algorithms (User Defined Function written in C/C++) to be run, in parallel, directly within the database against all of the available data. The latest version of Teradata also allows for the use of Java External Stored Procedures that allow Java algorithms to be run directly within the database.
Host: Ian Ricketts
- 11/06/2008: Wendy Moncur and Chris Martin - Research Presentations
What Do You Want to Know? Investigating the Information Requirements of Patient Supporters
The research project BabyTalk-Clan will create tailored summaries of information about sick newborn babies receiving hospital care, intended for the friends and family of the baby's parents. There can be a vast amount of data associated with any one baby - for example, medication given, test results, notes made by medical staff, continuous physiological signals such as heart rate. It is challenging for medical staff to understand all this data, and even harder for a lay person. I will be talking about a qualitative study that I carried out to establish what information friends and family want when a baby is sick.
Cognitive Dimensions Questionnaire Applied to Exploratory Algorithm Design
In software engineering, the stage between problem realization and implementation of a solution is not well supported by technology. It is common to see work being carried out on paper or whiteboards. This paper documents a pilot study to identify some reasons as to why paper and whiteboards are useful tools in early exploratory design and exposes some questions about where technology may fit in augmenting this stage of software engineering. The cognitive dimensions questionnaire was used to investigate notations and devices used in exploratory algorithm design.
- 04/06/2008: Peter Sharp and Alan Fleming - How image analysis is set to transform diabetic retinopathy screening
Diabetic retinopathy is one of the main causes of blindness. Retinal screening programmes for people with diabetes require thousands of retinal images to be analysed each year. While this image grading can be performed manually, separating the minority of images showing signs of disease from those without disease is a laborious and expensive process. A collaboration between ophthalmologists and medical physics in Aberdeen has resulted in software capable of removing many of the normal images leaving a much smaller number to be examined by human graders. The software checks the image quality and, if acceptable, searches for disease in the form of dot-like lesions in the images. Clinical guidance has been essential in guiding the technical development and in validating the performance of the software. The result is a commercialisable product which is achieving acceptance within the medical community.
Host: Manuel Trucco
- 21/05/2008: - POSTPONED - - The Usable Image Project
Unfortunately this seminar has had to be postponed.
- 14/05/2008: Reyer Zwiggelaar - CAD in Medical Imaging - Two Case Studies
After providing a brief introduction about computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems I will concentrate on two case studies, covering prostate and breast cancer. For prostate cancer staging it is important to determine if cancer is confined to the prostate and this information will determine the treatment that is most suitable. The second case study will address issues around mammographic risk assessment (to determine the chance that breast cancer will develop in the future) based on image information alone. In both cases I will cover some of the underlying computer vision and pattern recognition techniques.
Host: Manuel Trucco
- 07/05/2008: Rami Abboud - Research Presentation
This seminar has been postponed due to illness.
- 30/04/2008: Anne Anderson - Communication and Communication Technologies: The Role of Feedback
The fundamental form of communication is conversation. Speakers and listeners use a wide variety of verbal, visual and contextual cues as they communicate. When we use technology to communicate over time and distance, these cues are missing or attenuated. The talk will describe studies conducted over a number of years on face-to-face communication. In particular the research has highlighted how visual and verbal signals are used as feedback on how well speakers and listeners understand one another. In addition the talk will outline parallel studies on communication supported by various forms of communication technologies such as videoconferencing. The methods used to explore communication and to derive design guidelines for communication will be described. These include performance measures, dialogue analysis, and eye-tracking of speakers' behaviour.
Please note that this seminar will be at 12:30-1:30.
- 16/04/2008: Andrew French and Tony Pridmore - Image Analysis at the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology
We introduce the new BBSRC/EPSRC Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB) and give a brief overview of the image analysis problems faced by the centre. We then present recent work on the semi-automatic measurement of the lengths of plated roots. Measurement is achieved using a particle filter tracker, normally applied to object tracking though time, to trace along a root in an image. The samples the particle filter generates are used to build a probabilistic graph across the root location in the image, and this is traversed to produce a final estimate of length. The software is compared to real-world and artificial length data. Extensions of the algorithm are noted, including the automatic detection of the end of the root, and the detection of multiple growth modes using a mixed state particle filter.
Host: Stephen McKenna
- 09/04/2008: Richard Harvey - Computer lip-reading or when will HAL be a reality?
In the film 2001, the multi-talented, but wayward computer HAL lip-reads humans. Since then, there has been a general assumption that computer lip-reading is feasible. Actually lip-reading is incredibly tricky for humans let alone computers. In this talk, I will review some of the research on human computer lip-reading and present the latest results from a joint project running between the Universities of East Anglia and Surrey. The talk should be a broad interest to people working in accessibility, speech technology and computer vision.
Host: Manuel Trucco
- 12/03/2008: Nubia Gil - Data Mining and Visualisation for Supporting Care for Older People
The purpose of this research is the enhancement of home-based care for older or disabled people by detecting and modelling patterns of the "busyness" (activity) in their dwelling, so that care can be tailored to individual need. The use of on-line analytical processing (OLAP), followed by data mining is potentially interesting in this context because of the possibility of detecting, exploring and predicting changes in the level of people's movements and interactions with objects within their dwelling that may reflect change in their well-being. The measure of presence and activity might provide information to characterise an individual's lifestyle. An investigation is presented here into the use of data mining and visualisation to illustrate activity from sensor data from a trial project run in a domestic context. Trend analysis was used to reveal the underlying changes in busyness in the life of a person. While some deviations may give indication of a developing crisis, and be interpreted as an alarm situation, other changes take place more slowly but can reflect significant changes in the evolving life of the older or disabled person. We found that evidence of change can be presented through visual interfaces for discussion between residents and their carers. Interfaces have been designed in collaboration between a group of participants and the researcher.
Any questions, comments or speaker suggestions? Contact Joseph Devereux.
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