INTERACTION DESIGN

Designing a novel mobile device for theme park use (October - )
I am designing interaction strategy for a mobile device that could be used in Disney theme parks. Main challenges are to design to support variety of types of users (any member of a family), incorporating fun factor as well as usability, and the usual issues of mobile characteristics.

Design for Dublin Port Traffic Search Application (October - )
I sketched a series of interfaces that allows a user to search and browse for 'events' as detected by the system with number plate recognition and related techniques. I completed the first round of sketches focusing on overall concept, layout and strategies, and now moving into high-fidelity design.

Designing In-Home Display for energy use monitoring (June- )
I am working with the members in the Karbon Footprinting demo in CLARITY to come up with suitable interaction and visualisation strategies for In-Home Display that allows a home user to easily see useful information about the power consumptions at home. Devices such as this carrie with them special characteristics in its presentation and interaction: being always ON means it should have quiet and dark background (at least at night time) to minimise its brightness, almost like a digital display of alarm clock; it should show useful pieces of information upfront on the screen at all times without starting with 'main menu' - a passying-by person should benefit just simply by glancing at the screen not by engaing 15 minute interaction; it should show contextual information to compare the data with. Simply showing '50kW consumed today' doesn't mean much until it is juxtaposed with yesterday's consumption or average consumption or my neighbour's consumption, or anything else that can help make sense of the reading better. Understanding these special characteristics of the In-Home Display device is the first step in designing usable interaction.

Designing a novel app for Sentiment Analysis (February - October)
I spent a considerable time this year in designing interaction for Sentiment Analysis - SA is yet another novel technology and early stage of its development today. Designing possible applications that leverage SA is an interesting concept, and I started my usual approach: (i) understand what the technology can do, what the characteristics of the output data; (ii) explore design space for providing interaction strategies and visualisation schemes; (iii) sketch some of these to establish the design language and template. As of 10 March, two initial sketches have been already drawn and discussion with the project members is on the way.

RESEARCH VISITS, CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS

Talk at the Data Explosion Seminar Series, CWI Amsterdam (17 December)
I visited CWI Amsterdam and discussed our work. On the second day, I presented my current development of the novel application design issue at CWI's Data Explosion Seminar Series. I will be visiting the group again in January, to continue discussing our work.

Seminar at Ubiquitous Interaction Group, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) (27 November)
I visited the group for a workshop titled Multitouch: Design Issues and Knowledges: Limitiations and Affordances, where I presented my work on designing novel applications and the design knowledge that we have for different interaction platforms.

Seminar at Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) (26 November)
In this trip to Helsinki, I visited TKK where our colleague Markus is, and gave a seminar on my work on designing applications for Multimedia technology.

Research visit to Interaction Design Lab, University of North Carolina (3-7 August)
I had a 1-week visit to North Carolina to discuss the issue of browsing and jumping between video clips, and attended Designing for Interactive Video Symposium where I gave a talk on my design experiences. Feedback from the talks and discussion with the Interaction Design Lab at UNC helped me form my argument better for my novel application design idea. I'm strengthening it to make a full-fledged framework leveraging my experience in design and bringing design research into it. This was my 1-week research visit #2 (after City University London) with my DCU Research Fellowship.

Presenting a paper at Create 2009, London (1-2 July)
I attended a conference called Create 2009: Creative Inventions and Innovations for Everyday HCI in London and presented my full paper on framing the design of novel technologies.

Presenting at the CLARITY seminar (18 June)
CLARITY seminar in June I presented my HCI work on framing the design of novel applications that incorporating novel technologies. It was first time I presented to all CLARITY members about my research. Unlike most of the CLARITY members' work where novel technology of Sensor Web is the main interest of research, my contribution is to give end-user perspective of the group's work and also design interaction strategies for the demonstrators we develop in the group.

Research visit to Centre for HCI Design, City University London (1-5 June)
I had a 1-week visit to City University London to learn about creativity workshop and how requirements elicitation could work where the system in concern is novel. I discussed with many members of the Centre, who were all very helpful and friendly, and it was most useful and educational to see the work of the expertise in requirements engineering. While I am trying to bring in what I saw and discussed into my own research in framing the design of novel applications that incorporate novel technologies, the Centre and I are working on collaborative work in bringing together our knowledge together.

Seminar at KMi Open University, Milton Keynes (29 April)
I visited the Knolwedge Media Institute in Open University to give an overview of my multimedia interaction design research. Some of the members and I discussed about user-interface issuse of relevance feedback and ideas to reduce the problem of system algorithm failing due to the user's inconsistent feedback indications.

Attending CHI 2009, Boston (5-9 April)
I attended ACM CHI conference in Boston... lots of ideas, views, and discussions. It was a great chance to catch up the latest arguments, trends and concpets currently going on in HCI community. There were so many parallel sessions that it was difficult to choose. Most useful ones for me were Web interaction session and informed design session. How design can be explained in the HCI perspective is something that interestes me greatly.

Visit to Interaction Design Lab, University of North Carolina (3 April)
Before attending CHI 2009 in Boston, I visited the Interaction Design Lab in North Carolina, and gave a talk on my novel application design work. This was the second time I visited the group, after 2002. I summarised my design activities and also briefly discussed how interaction design seem to require more than a set of tools and methodologies.

Seminar at the Centre for HCI Design, City University London (27 March)
I visited London to give a seminar at the Centre for HCI Design, City University, on my design experiences of novel applications for multimedia technologies. First time meeting the group, it served as a good introduction to each other. I plan to visit the group again, for a longer-period visit.

Postgrad seminar in the School (26 March)
Revival of the postgrad seminar in the School of Computing, the first event's theme was HCI - Together with Naz, Daragh and Graham, we presented an overview of our group's HCI activities to the postgrad students in the School.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

Attending DCU training course: Project Management for Researchers (14-15 July)
I attended two-day course on effective project management for researchers, hosted by DCU. I attended this in order to learn more about the issues, concepts, tips and tools in successfully planning, executing and managing research projects.

Talk on my platform-centric approach (18 Feburary)
In January I have been thinking about a particular approach of thinking about novel technology applications and also reflecting how I have been designing new application interfaces. I volunteered a presentation of this initial shaping of my thoughts at CDVP weekly meeting, and did in the mid Feburary. I also tried to apply this concept to CLARITY-related applications also. More things to think about, more discussions required, but it nicely 'set the scene' in what I want to do. There is one main diagram that shows my idea as a whole, and it took me 1 week of refinement (8 versions of the diagram) to come to the presented one.

Analysis of eye-tracking experiment for SenseCam visual diary (January)
Aiden and I worked on analysing the eye-tracking experiment Aiden conducted in December, and we wrote a paper and submitted on the last day of January.

Funding applications (January)
During Christmas and New Year break, I was busy writing funding applications (SFI and EI) and in January, I managed to juggle the two and submitted both. Regardless of its outcomes, the process of writing these was very beneficial in itself as it got me more focused and think more sharply on the research I am currently planning with DCU Research Fellowship.

PAPER AND BOOK REVIEW

IUI 2010 - International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (reviewed November)

ECIR 2010 - 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (reviewed November)

CHI 2010 - ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (reviewed October)

Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services (reviewed August)

Information Processing and Management Journal (reviewed August)

DSMSA 2009 - 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Data Semantics for Multimedia Systems and Applications (reviewed August)

SAMT 2009 - 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (reviewed July)

iHCI 2009 - Irish Human-Computer Interaction Conference (reviewed July)

Multimedia Tools and Applications journal (April)