Past Seminars
Seminars held over the last six months.
- 19/03/2010: Prof Richard Shultz - Privacy Issues and Design Parameters for Quality of Life Technologies
Technology has become an integral part of everyday life and is being increasingly used to monitor, support, and augment the functioning of adults with disabilities. Technology has the potential to improve the quality of life and enhance independence while at the same time reducing formal health care utilization and costs. Realizing this potential requires that we develop technologies that are acceptable, usable, and cost-effective. In this presentation we describe research carried out by the Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center (QoLT ERC) based at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh with more than 2500 adult respondents varying in age and disability level. Key questions addressed include potential trade-offs related to loss of privacy in quality of life technology (QoLT) applications. We examine attitudes towards releasing various types of personal health information to different recipients using recording methods of varying intrusiveness, traded off against different levels of potential benefit (increased function; prevention of nursing home placement), for participants with varying levels of current disability. We also report preferences regarding the relative efficiency of the technology when compared to human help, training requirements, daily maintenance requirements, and the impact of technology on opportunities for social interaction. For each dimension examined, our analyses show that there are critical tipping points that significantly reduce the acceptability of quality of life technologies.
BIO:
Richard Schulz is Professor of Psychiatry, Director of the University Center for Social and Urban Research, and Associate Director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD in social psychology from Duke University.
Dr. Schulz has spent most of his career doing research and writing on adult development and aging. His work has focused on age-related illness and disability and it’s impact on older individuals and their families. He has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for more than three decades to conduct longitudinal and intervention research on psychosocial and behavioral aspects of illness and disability. Most recently his work has focused on the development and application of quality of life enhancing technologies for older persons and their family caregivers. His work is reflected in more than 250 publications, which have appeared in major medical, psychology, and aging journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Psychological Review, and Journals of Gerontolgy. He is also the author of numerous books including the Handbook of Alzheimer’s Caregiver Intervention Research and the Springer Encyclopedia of Aging. He is the year 2000 recipient of the Kleemeier award for his contributions to research on aging from the Gerontological Society of America.
Host: Vicki Hanson - 17/03/2010: Prof Sara Czaja - Technology Systems and Older Adults
We are currently witnessing two demographic trends that have vast societal implications. The number of older adults, especially those in the older cohorts (aged. 75+), in the population is increasing dramatically. At the same time rapid developments in and the deployment of technology is changing how we perform work, healthcare, educational, and daily living tasks. People of all ages continually need to engage in new learning to adapt to these technology systems to perform routine tasks and function independently. This presentation will discuss the potential implications of this “technology explosion” for older adults. The focus will be on issues related to employment and health. Data will be presented from large diverse samples of older adults regarding technology adoption among, attitudes towards technology, adaptation and use of technology systems and barriers to successful technology adoption. In addition, potential strategies to enhance successful use of technology among older adults will be discussed. Finally, ongoing research projects of the Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE) will be described. CREATE is a multisite center, funded by the National Institute on Aging, whose mission is to ensure that technology systems are useful to and usable by older adults and that the maximum benefits of technology are received by older people. The overall objective of the presentation is to underscore the importance of the issue of technology and aging and to outline needed areas of future research.
Biographical Sketch
Sara J. Czaja is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Industrial Engineering at the University of Miami. She is also the Co-Director of the Center on Aging at the University of Miami and the Director of the Center on Research and Education for Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE). CREATE is funded by the National Institute on Aging involves collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Florida State University. The focus of CREATE is on making technology more accessible, useful, and usable for older adult populations. One of the main focuses on CREATE at the University of Miami Site is on healthcare and healthcare technologies.
Dr. Czaja has extensive experience in aging research and a long commitment to developing strategies to improve the quality of life for older adults. Her research interests include: aging and cognition, aging and healthcare access and service delivery, family caregiving, aging and technology, human-computer interaction, training, and functional assessment. She has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Administration on Aging, National Science Foundation, the Markle and Langeloth Foundations, AT&T, and IBM to support her research. Dr. Czaja is very well published in the field of aging and has written numerous books, book chapters and scientific articles. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the Gerontological Society of America. She served as a member of the Technical Advisory Panel of the APA Presidential Task Force on Integrative Healthcare for an Aging Population and is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University/University of Pittsburgh. In addition, she is a member of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences Committee on Human Factors and Home Health Care.
Host: Vicki Hanson - 10/03/2010: Barbara Smith - Constraint Programming and Graceful Graphs
This seminar will be at 3pm
Constraint satisfaction problems require values to be assigned to discrete variables in such a way that a set of constraints on the assignments are satisfied. A wide range of problems from many different fields can be expressed in this way, and constraint solving software then allows us to search for solutions. The talk will introdice constraint programming and illustrate its use via a problem from graph theory.
A graceful graph is one whose vertices and edges can be labelled in a certain way. There are very few general results to help in determining whether a given graph is graceful, and constraint programming is thus a useful tool in trying to find a graceful labelling.
Two models of the problem as a constraint satisfaction problem are presented; one is a natural way to model the problem, the other is less straightforward, but more successful. The better model raises the question of whether we can use constraint programming to decide whether a whole class of graphs is ungraceful; the talk will suggest that we can.
Host: Karen Petrie - 03/03/2010: Suzanne Prior and Vijay John - Two Postgraduate Research Presentations
Suzanne Prior - HCI Methods for Including Adults with Complex Communication Needs in the Design of Technology
The demand for software, suitable for users with complex communication needs and other disabilities, is increasing. However, traditional HCI design methods are not always suitable for these users. To address this, the CHAMPION project is piloting adapted methods in the development of a patient hospital profile for this user group. Initial results show that users with cognitive and communication disabilities can be involved in user centred design. The challenge is now to develop meaningful evaluation methods for this group. During the talk I will be discussing the difficulties, benefits and rewards of working with these participants.
Vijay John - Tracking Human Articulated Motion using Pose Manifold
Tracking Human Articulated Motion is a high-dimensional search problem. We are investigating methods to reduce the search space to increase tracking accuracy and reduce computational time. We use a non-linear dimensionality reduction method called Charting, which generates a pose manifold from a training dataset. Human pose is then estimated from the pose manifold.
- 01/03/2010: David Fourney - Creating access to music through visualization
Music is an important medium for the conveyance of cultural information, such as shared experience and knowledge, and is also entertaining and enjoyable for its own sake. For deaf, deafened, and hard of hearing (D/HH) people, the experience of entertainment and enjoyment produced for hearing audiences is limited. People who are deaf do not have access to this shared experience because it is not provided in a modality that is more appropriate to this population of consumers. For people who are hard of hearing, their residual hearing may not allow the individual to hear the full range of tones or perceive sound in stereo and making the music louder may only make the situation worse.
One possible solution to creating access to music is making it visual. Any such visualization of music needs to convey the sense of music, emotional content, and overall entertainment to be successful. The lyrics alone are not enough. In addition, any such visualization needs to be sensitive to the cultures of the D/HH communities. Important questions arise as to whether meaningful and entertaining music visualization is feasible to meet the needs of D/HH music enthusiasts, and the extent to which it can be accomplished automatically without human intervention.
Some of the issues being explored include finding which constructs of music (e.g., pitch, tempo, loudness, etc.) best express its emotional and entertainment value, and investigating the optimal presentation of such constructs visually. Findings to date will be presented along with demonstrations of some of the potential solutions that have been designed and evaluated.
Bio:
David Fourney is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Ryerson University, Toronto Canada. He has a Master of Science (2008) in Computer Science focusing on Human Computer Interaction from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon Canada as well as baccalaureate degrees in Psychology and Computer Science. A hard of hearing person, Mr. Fourney is internationally recognized for his expertise in accessibility. He is a Canadian technical expert involved in the development of various international standards in the fields of human factors/ergonomics (ISO TC159/SC4) and user interfaces (ISO JTC1/SC35). He is the inventor of the Common Access Profile (ISO/IEC 24756). His research interests include accessible media, methods for inclusive design, and improving the usability and accessibility of computers and technology for all users.
Host: Deb Fels - 24/02/2010: David Prendergast and Dr Joe Wherton - Connecting Communities: Co-designing accessible communication technologies with older adults
Many factors have an impact on social isolation and loneliness in old age. Connections might be lost due to retirement, relocation or widowhood. Social engagement is also restricted by poor physical health, depression, lack of mobility and demand to care for a significant other (Victor et al., 2000). Evidence suggests that loneliness has a negative impact on mental and physical health, and is associated with problems such as depression, high blood pressure and poor sleep (O’Luanaigh & Lawlor, 2008). Modern technology and the internet offer innovative ways to help older adults remain connected with their peers and family members, if appropriately designed and implemented.
The Building Bridges project explores how communication technology can be developed to reduce risks of loneliness and social isolation. This has involved a user-centred design approach to develop a concept and interface that is easily used by older adults with little or no computer knowledge.The system is designed to provide opportunities for group interaction with other seniors. This is achieved through daily ‘broadcasts’ followed by a ‘group chat’. In addition, users can initiate one-to-one or group phone calls and send messages to the other seniors and family members.
A series of pilots took place in older people’s homes across Dublin. These trials evaluate the usability of the interface, users’ experience of the system, and the impact it has on loneliness.
This presentation will initially provide a broad overview of Intel Digital Health and the TRIL Centre and then focus on the example of the Building Bridges Project and its user-centred design approach. It will present outcomes from the home trials, and discuss the implications of the technology for reducing social isolation.
Host: Catriona Macaulay - 17/02/2010: Andreas Siebert - MoViLib: A Mobile Vision Library
We have developed a vision library to be used on mobile platforms for augmented reality applications.
Speed and portability were primary design concerns.
We demonstrate MoViLib's implementation of Rosten & Drummond's FAST keypoint detector and discuss Avidan & Shamir's seam carving algorithm.
Host: Jesse Hoey - 10/02/2010: Liz Black - Agreeing how to act
When deliberating about what to do, an autonomous agent must generate and consider the relative pros and cons of the different available options. The situation becomes even more complicated when multiple agents are involved in a joint deliberation, as each agent will have its own preferred outcome and this may change as new information is received from the other participating agents. This talk considers such joint deliberation through the use of argumentation techniques.
I will present a dialogue system that allows agents to come to an agreement about how to act in order to achieve a joint goal. During such a dialogue, an agent can use its perception of others in order to select arguments that it believes are likely to be particularly persuasive. I will discuss how an agent may develop a model of what is important to another agent and how it can then use this model to guide its dialogue behaviour.
Host: Chris Reed - 29/01/2010: Dr. JINAG (JIMMY) LIU - E-Health and Medical Imaging Research at the Institute of Infocomm Research (A-STAR, Singapore)
Dr Liu will introduce the Singapore A*Star research centre, and, within it, the institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and its research activities, in particular I2R's E-health research program. He will also present the Intelligent Medical Imaging Group (19 full-time research staff) and their current medical imaging research projects with hospitals.
He will introduce some of the projects from the group and focusing on ocular image processing for glaucoma diagnosis.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. JINAG (JIMMY) LIU is the leader of the Intelligent Medical Imaging group at the Institute for InfoComm Research (I2R), part of the A-STAR research centre of Singapore. He holds degrees from the University of Science and Technology (China) and the School of Computing, National University of Singapore.
During the past 22 years, he has worked for Singapore government-linked companies, multi-national corporations as well as Singapore local enterprises, holding technical development and management positions. In the past 6 years, Jimmy focused his research on medical imaging. He is heading the Feature and Segmentation Group and Intelligent Medical Imaging Group (iMED)in I2R, A*Star. Jimmy is working on MRI, CT, Retina medical image processing as well as medical image-based Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD)/Computer Aided Surgery (CAS). He is the adjunct Research Scientist in Singapore National Eye Research Institute in Singapore General Hospital, and supervising Ph.D. students from National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technology University Singapore.
Host: Manuel Trucco - 27/01/2010: Dr Yongmin Li - Video-based online detection and recognition of traffic signs
A comprehensive approach to online detection and recognition of traffic signs is presented in this work. The process is comprised of the typical three stages of detection, tracking and recognition, as commonly used in many object recognition problems. At the detection stage, a quad-tree operation is performed first on the densities of sign-specific colour gradients in order to locate the regions of interest. A regular polygon detector or a boosted classifier cascade is then used to detect the possible signs. We have also developed a Confidence-Weighted Mean Shift algorithm to refine the often redundant detection results. For the recognition, we have developed and evaluated several different approaches, including the model-based method of class specific discriminative features and data-driven methods of SimBoost and similarity-learning kernel regression trees. We have also demonstrated that these methods can be used for other general object recognition.
Host: Stephen McKenna - 20/01/2010: Telmo Amaral and Thomas Nind - Two Postgraduate Research Presentations
Telmo Amaral - Scoring of breast tissue microarray spots
Tissue microarray (TMA) slides are microscope slides that contain hundreds of very small tissue specimens (called "spots") laid out in an array fashion. These specimens can originate from dozens of different patients and are used for parallel detection of protein targets, facilitating the survey of very large numbers of tumours.
However, their analysis by pathologists is time consuming and not without error. An important step of that analysis is the "scoring"
of tissue spots, which reflects the proportion of epithelial cell nuclei that are immunostained, as well as the strength of that staining. We propose an automated approach to the scoring of breast TMA spots subjected to progesterone receptor immunohistochemistry.
Thomas Nind - Motivating Mobility
Stroke rehabilitation can be a long and repetative process involving regular exercises of affected limbs carried out many times a day. We have designed 4 personalised games and activities designed to be driven by the rehabilitative movements of users while being enjoyable. The ultimate aim of the project is to design a toolkit that allows personalised games to be driven by user specific sensors to achive a clinically effective and entertaining solution for any patient.
- 13/01/2010: Quoc Vy - Enhanced Captioning: Using Avatars for Speaker Identification
Captioning (or subtitling) is used by individuals, especially those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, to provide them access to television and its content. However, despite the continuing development of technology, captioning has more or less remained the same since its creation in the early 1970s. While there are a number of important issues that have arisen since those early days, one issue that has not been effectively addressed is how to convey non-speech information (e.g. speaker identification, speech prosody, sounds effects, and music) in a meaningful or useful manner. This lack of development to improve access for these individuals has unnecessarily hindered their cultural and entertainment experiences.
In this seminar, I will present and demonstrate my MSc research which is attempting to find a better solution for speaker identification. I have developed a captioning system that uses an avatar to visually represent the speaker, and which would appear next to their respective dialogue. The avatar consists of a coloured border around an image of the speaker and is labeled with the character’s name or role. The location and appearance of these components are customizable by the user. Preliminary results and findings from a user study that examined participants’ understanding and preferences between this enhanced captioning system and conventional captioning will also be presented.
SHORT BIO
Quoc Vy is an MSc candidate (Computer Science) at Ryerson University, also where he graduated with a BSc (2008) in the same discipline. Quoc is a researcher at the Centre for Learning Technologies (www.ryerson.ca/clt), which focuses on improving Human-Computer Interaction through Universal Design. He is currently finding solutions to convey speech information (e.g. dialogue, speech prosody, and speaker identification), sound effects, and music through innovative techniques and methods of visualization.
Host: Deborah Fels - 16/12/2009: Katarzyna Budzynska - Persuasive argumentation in real life and computer systems
The aim of the talk will be to present models for the structure of persuasive argumentation as well as applications of those models in computer systems.
Argumentation can be roughly understood as a process in which reasons (called arguments) are supposed to support a claim. When arguments are put forward to influence a hearer (his beliefs, attitudes or actions), we say that the argumentation fulfills a persuasive goal. This type of goal is especially important when we consider real life practice of human communication.
During the talk, I will first discuss the standard approach to representing the structure of persuasive argumentation proposed within informal logic. Logical models have been adapted to describe real life practice, however they still use the tools which were originally “designed”
to study deductive (mathematical) systems. This raises the question of their adequacy for representing argumentation in natural contexts.
Next, I will shortly describe applications of argumentation models in computer systems. As an example, I will take AIF and Araucaria systems developed by the ARG:Dundee group.
Finally, I will propose some modification to the standard approach of modeling persuasive argumentation. The modifications are based on the influential theory of persuasion from social psychology: Elaboration Likelihood Model (R. E. Petty and J. T. Cacioppo. Communication and
persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1986).
Host: Chris Reed - 09/12/2009: Andrew Arch - Web Accessibility and Older People
This seminar will be at 12:00-13:00 in the Wolfson Theatre
Andrew Arch is working on WAI-AGE, a European project to increase the accessibility of the Web for people with age-related accessibility needs as well as for people with disabilities. Andrew's talk will present some background on the changing demographic situation and the relationship between ageing and disability. He will discuss the WAI-AGE project including the findings of the extensive literature review and some of the gaps in previous investigations, the role of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative accessibility guidelines in meeting the needs of older people online, and the ongoing education work of the project to increase the awareness of web accessibility within industry and within the older people's community.
Biography
Andrew Arch joined W3C at the end of 2007 as a Web Accessibility and Ageing Specialist on WAI-AGE, a European project to increase the accessibility of the Web for people with age-related accessibility needs as well as for people with disabilities. The Web Accessibility Initiative: Ageing Education and Harmonisation (WAI-AGE) project is a European Commission-funded project of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
Prior to joining W3C, Andrew worked at Vision Australia for seven years, leading a team that provided consulting, reviewing and training services around Web accessibility. With Vision Australia's Web accessibility team Andrew delivered workshops nationally introducing developers and website owners to the benefits of providing accessible websites, the implications of not doing so, and how to assess and improve them. Vision Australia's Web accessibility consultancies included many major corporations, universities, banks, and community organisations, as well a large number of Commonwealth and State Government departments. Andrew was an active participant in the W3C WAI Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) during this time.
Before joining Vision Australia in 2001, Andrew worked in state government in Australia developing some of the earliest intranet and internet sites in Victoria in the mid 1990's and setting a government direction with customer oriented information architecture. Before the Web he was a natural resource economist, his Ph.D. field, with the Department of Agriculture.
Host: David Sloan - 09/12/2009: Dr Ekaterina Komendantskaya - Computational Logic and its Interdisciplinary Applications.
This Seminar will take place at 3pm in the Wolfson Theatre
In this talk, I will briefly outline my four main topics of research: Logic Programming;
Neuro-Symbolic Networks; Interactive Theorem Provers; and Category Theoretic Semantics of Computations. I will analyse in which sense these four distinct areas of Computer science could be described uniformly by a single term ``Computational (or Applied) Logic".
I will illustrate, on the example of my current EPSRC project CLANN, the ubiquitous role of Logic in Computer science.
CLANN -- Computational Logic and Artificial Neural Networks -- is a project intended to be an interdisciplinary study of the two separate areas of Computer science and it has already lead to new and exciting results that can be applied in both areas.
In particular, I will consider two recent results: implementation of the algorithm of unification by means of error-correction learning in neural networks; and applications of Type theory for ensuring correctness of relational learning in neural networks. - 02/12/2009: Manuel Trucco - AN INFORMAL WORKSHOP ON PROPOSAL WRITING:
This is an informal, open session meant to share experiences and information on writing good research proposals. The focus is on EPSRC but many aspects discussed will be applicable to most funding applications.
Some things which intend to achieve:
- share good practice from experienced researchers (incl. Prof Anne Anderson, VP and College Head)
- raise awareness of important issues related to EPSRC proposal writing (e.g., new rules and procedures)
- inform those less, or not at all, familiar with EPSRC, and stimulate them to think proposals
- capture useful messages and information in a summary to be made public
- ultimately, improve our success rate with funding bids.
This is not a listen-then-ask-questions seminar, but an open forum.
Bring your experience, your curiosity and your questions (or any proper subset thereof).
Host: Manuel Trucco - 25/11/2009: Marta Krukowska - Postgraduate Research Presentation - E-Mail work flow management for the aging workforce
The use of email has been studied in order to identify possible implications of improving the design, however studies up to date have not accounted for the physical and cognitive changes in ageing workers. With demographic change and an ageing workforce, we are facing a new type of computer savvy older adult, using computers as a part of their daily routines, but potentially experiencing- or beginning to experience difficulties because of cognitive and sensory ageing.
During my talk I will discuss results of my literature review and show how having identified a gap in the research, latest work on email workflow and Case-based Reasoning (CBR) techniques might to be utilised in order to develop a usable email workflow management tool to support older workers use of email within the workplace.
- 18/11/2009: Craig Mill - Portable Access Technology - Making the most of AccessApps
Craig Mill will demonstrate AccessApps, a range of open source and free portable software applications which run from a USB drive. AccessApps contains programs to support learners with a range of additional needs, for example, sensory, cognitive and physical difficulties. Craig will demonstrate how the AccessApps interface can be customised and explain how the project is being embedded and used in colleges and universities. There will also be an opportunity to see how AccessApps is being developed (AccessTools) by EA Draffan at Southampton University.
Bio: Craig Mill is an experienced assistive technology adviser with a passion for promoting and embedding e-inclusion practices in Further and Higher Education. After working in FE for 10 years, Craig has since worked for AbilityNet, set up his own company in assistive technology (Assist-IT) and is now the e-Learning Advisor with the JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland North & East.
Host: David Sloan - 11/11/2009: Andres Chiappe - Creating and analysing learning objects to be delivered through mobile devices
- A short personal background
- The purpose of the visit to the University of Dundee
- The Masters Programme in Educational Informatics (some collaboration opportunities).
- The research project I am currently involved in as PhD thesis: Creating and analysing learning objects to be delivered through mobile devices.
Host: Nick Hine - 04/11/2009: John Richards - Software Productivity Assessment
Following a quick tour of the Software Engineering Department at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, I'll review our work in support of the creation of a new, commercially viable, peta scale super computer. The fact that we are crossing the barrier to sustained petaflop performance is interesting. Even more interesting is the fact that the project has aggressive requirements for productivity, not just performance. This reflects the field's growing realization that a major barrier to further advances in parallel and scientific computing is the ability of humans to write, debug, tune, deploy, and administer software at this scale. I'll discuss how we are assessing improvements in human productivity attributable to new parallel programming languages and new tools and environments. I'll conclude with a few thoughts on how productivity assessment can be woven into the more general practice of software engineering.
Bio
John Richards joined the Computer Science research staff at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1978 after receiving his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. He has served in research, programming and management roles in numerous networking and interpersonal communications projects and has been recognized for his contributions in the area of digital voice mail systems by the Human Factors Society. Most recently, he has been involved in the design and programming of solutions in areas including Internet access for students and teachers, wireless e-business, web accessibility, social computing, end-user programming, and software productivity assessment.
Dr. Richards has been active in the ACM SIGCHI, SIGPLAN, and SIGACCESS communities. He chaired the OOPSLA'91 Conference and served as chair of the OOPSLA Steering Committee from 1991 to 1996. He was elected a Fellow of the ACM in 1997 and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 2006.
Host: Vicky Hanson - 28/10/2009: Dr Craig Robertson - Adventures in High Performance Machine Vision and Visualization
As a practitioner in the field of machine vision I have been involved in many exciting and demanding projects from 3D reverse-engineering to prototype medical devices. In this talk, I outline some of the work achieved and illustrate just how much scope there is to this rapidly expanding field.
I will develop the emergent theme that advances in hardware have impacted on both the speed and range of computability of complex machine vision algorithms and allowed the recent sudden uptake of machine vision rich products at a consumer level.
Host: Manuel Trucco - 21/10/2009: Mamie Bruce-Gardyne - How I Learned to Love TeleHealth and My Battle to Convince the GPs!
This seminar is at 13:00
Mamie Bruce-Gardyne is the founder of the award-winning Airlie Silver Surfers Cybercafe - still going strong after 10 years (this week they in fact are marking their 6000th attendance). Mamie's latest campaign is to get a TeleHealth initiative off the ground, to benefit older people in the remoter parts of Angus (and not so remote, if they are having mobility problems). She will be showing a professionally produced DVD to promote the ideas which she was involved in making, and will be sharing with us a personal view from the trenches (in her own quite inimitable style!).
A session not to be missed by all of those involved in older people and computing, healthcare computing and HCI.
Host: Norman Alm - 14/10/2009: Rachel Menzies and Scott Loynton - Two Postgraduate Research Presentations
Rachel Menzies - Promoting sharing behaviours in children through the use of a customised novel computer system.
ECHOEs is a research project that aims to develop an adventurous technology-enhanced learning environment in which both typically developing children and children with Asperger Syndrome (a form of autism) can explore and improve social interaction and communications skills. As part of this research project, I am investigating ways in which to promote sharing behaviours in children through the use of this novel computer system. I am interested in investigating the effect that customisation of the environment will have on the effectiveness of the system in improving sharing behaviours. Participatory Design will be employed throughout the project with teachers, therapists, parents and children, both typically developing and with Asperger Syndrome.
Scott Loynton - Academic scientific software development projects aim to provide valuable research tools to aid the scientific community in the process of discovery. The need for those tools to meet wider expectations of usability and good user experience design is critical to success; however the nature of academic e-science software development projects means they are often constrained by too narrow an understanding of the potential user base, and a focus on development at the expense of broad user research. We introduce the concept of the 'Scientific Software Community Framework' as a way of addressing these limitations in capacity to support effective “user research” that informs and influences longer-term marketing and outreach strategy as well as supporting the development of usable and useful scientific software. - 07/10/2009: Shehroz Khan - One Class Classification: Review and Application to Raman Spectroscopy
The One Class Classification (OCC) problem is different from the conventional binary/multi-class classification problem in the sense that in OCC, the negative class is either not present or not properly sampled. The problem of classifying positive (or target) cases in the absence of appropriately-characterized negative cases (or outliers) has gained increasing attention in recent years. Researchers have addressed the task of OCC by using different methodologies in a variety of application domains. In this talk, a taxonomy with three main categories will be presented based on the way OCC has been envisaged, implemented and applied by various researchers in different application domains. We then present an application of OCC for the identification of chemical spectral data using Raman Spectroscopy.
Host: Jesse Hoey - 30/09/2009: Wei Jia - Postgraduate Research Presentation
Segmentation, categorisation and retrieval of fabric design images
This talk will discuss segmentation of digital images and the usage for image categorisation and retrieval in a historical commercial archive owned by Liberty Fabric.
Our research involves building a good model to segment these fabric images and using the segmentation results to represent images for image retrieval and categorisation. The segmentation of fabric design is formulated as a pixel labelling problem. Algorithms based on Markov random field (MRF) optimisation and re-estimation are described. The performance of MRF models optimised using alpha-expansion and iterated conditional modes, both with and without parameter re-estimation are evaluated quantitatively. Based on the segmentation result, images are segmented into separated shapes which are represented by Generic Fourier descriptor. We are seeking feasible and efficient ways to use these local features for image retrieval and categorisation.
- 23/09/2009: Deborah Fels - Inclusive entertainment:
Multimodal interfaces for access to entertainment by people with sensory disabilities
Having access to entertainment and media is as important as access to work and daily living tasks for people with disabilities. We have been working on cross-modal and sensory substitution techniques for access to film, television and theatre. One key thesis that we employ is that film, television, and theatre are important forms of cultural expression and people consume them for the express purpose of entertainment. Any access feature should also consider that perspective but most do not because access is not considered part of the entertainment package but a simple add-on at the very end of the process. I will present our research in enhanced captioning, music visualization, vibrotactile music and audio description along with entertaining examples that demonstrate the concept of inclusive entertainment.
Short bio
Dr. Deborah Fels has a PhD (1994) in Human Factors from Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, and a Masters of Health Science (1987) in Clinical Engineering from the University of Toronto. She is currently employed as an associate professor in the School of Information Technology Management, and the Director of the Centre for Learning Technologies at Ryerson University. She is currently on sabbatical at the University of Dundee and working with Dr. Norman Alm.
Her research interests include access to multi-media computer applications for people with disabilities, accessible media, computer-based learning, and video conferencing. Current research projects include: 1) interactive video-mediated communication system for children in hospitals; 2) emotive captioning; 3) broadband learning environments supporting people with disabilities; 4) audio description; 5) SignLink Studio co-creator and on-line ASL see www.signlinkstudio.ca and 6) inclusive game design. She received one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 awards for the year 2001. She is also a professional engineer.
Any questions, comments or speaker suggestions? Contact Gemma Webster.