Category: Events

On 26 May 2022, A/Prof Young-Woo Park of UNIST gave a talk for the SydCHI community. This talk was co-organised by ACM SydCHI, Materialising Memories research program (led by Prof van den Hoven), and the UTS Visualisation Institute (as part of our regular talk series).

Exploring Self-reflective Experiences through Tangible Interaction with Personal Lifelog data

Abstract

People create and consume digital possessions such as photographs, digital music, videos, posts, texts, and documents through smart devices in their daily lives. This behavior has caused an increase in the types and amount of individuals’ accumulated data over time, and storing everything “just in case” has made it difficult for people to organize and retrieve the data. Although cloud services and AI make the revisiting experience easy to navigate for particular themes, digital possessions’ intangible and indiscriminate nature still affects the limited experiences revisiting individuals’ past data. Our research team has investigated ways to provide new designs and interactions using data-driven technologies for meaningful everyday activities, which link to enriching self-reflective experiences. At this point, we utilized everyday objects to show and provide tangible interaction with personal lifelog data to support new experiences in daily life. This seminar will introduce examples of how people perceive and interact with personal lifelog data (e.g., photos, music listening history, schedules, and reading activity) through everyday artifacts in homes.

Bio

I am an Associate Professor of Design at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea and leading Interactive Product Design Lab. As an interaction design researcher, I was Program Chair of ACM TEI’22 and Papers Program Committee for ACM CHI’19 & ’20, DIS’18 & ’20~’22, along with South Korea’s HCI and Design community. My research highlights the significance of ‘physical richness’ during interaction with technologies by utilizing personal data as a material for designing interactive artifacts enabling tangible exploration of digital archives in everyday lives.

Please save the date and join us for our joint UNSW – SydCHI talk by Prof. Mark Billinghurst.

You can register your interest to attend via the Eventbrite page.
Please share this with your students, colleagues, or anyone interested in this topic!

Date

Thursday, 14 April 2022, 10:00 AM-11:00 AM

Where

Physical location: Room#113, K17, UNSW Sydney

Online: via MS Teams, with limited interactions (Link will be shared later).

Empathic Computing: Creating Shared Understanding

Abstract

This talk provides an introduction to Empathic Computing, a new approach to creating shared understanding between people. Communication is a basic need for people, and over thousands of years a wide range of technologies have been used to enhance face to face and remote collaboration. However, the recent COVID pandemic has shown how limited these technologies are, with current remote collaborative experiences being far from face-to-face conversation. Empathic Computing is a new approach to collaboration that combines elements of Natural Collaboration, Experience Capture and Implicit Understanding. This talk provides an overview of the topic and then gives examples of research from the Empathic Computing Laboratory and others.

Bio

Mark Billinghurst is Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory, and Professor at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, and also at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. He earned a PhD in 2002 from the University of Washington and conducts research on how virtual and real worlds can be merged, publishing over 650 papers on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, remote collaboration, Empathic Computing, and related topics. In 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2019 was given the ISMAR Career Impact Award in recognition for lifetime contribution to AR research and commercialization.

Please save the date and join us for the joint USyd Basser Seminar – SydCHI talk by A./Prof. Shengdong Zhao.

You can register your interest to attend via the Eventbrite page.
Please share this with your students, colleagues, or anyone interested in this topic!

Date

Thursday, 10 March 2022, 2:00-3:30pm (via Zoom, link no longer up)

Heads-up Computing: Towards the next interaction paradigm

Abstract

Interaction paradigms (the style of interaction between humans and computers) can significantly change the way we work and live.
However, as much as we are empowered by interaction paradigms, we are also significantly constrained by them. Existing interaction paradigms limits our movements and activities, which can negatively affect our overall well-being. Desktop computing, described as “sitting at a desk, interpreting and manipulating symbols”, isolates human beings from interacting with other human beings and nature. Mobile computing, although free us from the office environment, demands constant eye-and-hand engagement, leading to the notorious phenomenon called “smartphone zombies”.

We need a new style of interaction that can better support human activities in nature and with other people as well as reducing cognitive load by blending reactive operations with appropriately designed proactive initiatives that can offer just-in-time assistance.

Bio

Dr. Shengdong Zhao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore. He established the NUS-HCI research lab. Dr. Zhao completed his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He also holds a Master’s degree in Information Management & Systems from the University of California at Berkeley.

On 11 February 2022, from 4-5pm, Dr Barrett Ens will give a talk for the SydCHI community.

Using Space Around Us to Support Data Exploration

Abstract

The past several decades have brought about several iterations of computer form factors methods of interacting with them. While the computer itself has miniaturised, the computer as we know it has come to be defined by the rectangular glass form of its user interface. Immersive technologies now provide the potential for us to ‘step through the glass’ and interact with information in the 3D space around us. Can spatial interaction improve the way we perceive, interact with, and understand information? In this talk I will present my work on spatial interface design, and recent applications in immersive analytics. I will discuss what we have learned about the benefits of using space around us and some of the challenges that lie ahead.

Bio

Dr Barrett Ens is currently a member of the Data Visualisation and Immersive Analytics research group at Monash University. His research interests include novel input methods for augmented reality, spatial user interfaces, and immersive analytics. During his PhD work at the University of Manitoba, he completed two research internships with the User Interface Research Group at Autodesk Research. He later worked as an NSERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UniSA’s Empathic Computing Lab.

Please do not hesitate to share this with your students and colleagues!

On 16 March 2021, from 9am to 10am, Prof Stephen Brewster will give a talk for the SydCHI community. We encourage everyone to join in via Zoom.

Haptics and Levitation Interfaces: The future of human-computer interaction?

Abstract of Stephen’s talk

Ultrasound provides some brand new opportunities for interaction in user interfaces. In this talk, I will describe this new modality and what it offers to HCI. By using standard loudspeakers, we can create soundfields that generate haptic feedback in mid-air, without the user having to hold or touch anything. We can control the position and texture of this feedback in real time. This ‘mid-air’ haptics enables new interaction techniques around devices. I will give examples of how it can be used for virtual controls and how novel interactions can be designed.

Bio of Prof Stephen Brewster

Stephen Brewster is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow where he leads the Multimodal Interaction Group, which is very active and has a strong international reputation in HCI (http://mig.dcs.gla.ac.uk/). His research focuses on multimodal HCI, or using multiple sensory modalities and control mechanisms (particularly audio, haptics and gesture) to create a rich, natural interaction between human and computer. He pioneered the study of non-speech audio and haptic interaction for mobile devices with work starting in the 1990’s. Brewster’s work has had over 18,000 citations. He was a General Chair of CHI 2019 in Glasgow, CHI papers chair in 2013 and 2014. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy, an ACM Distinguished Speaker and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

This talk is hosted as part of the Basser Seminar Series, by the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. Of course, everyone can join us online as Prof Brewster will join us remotely.

The first SydCHI Research Day will be held on December 7th, 2020, on the University of Sydney’s Darlington campus. It is a great opportunity to meet fellow HCI researchers and practitioners.

Our aim for the day is to give everyone a moment to introduce themselves and to explore common themes in our work.

Program

Time (AEDT)	Activity
09:30 – 10:00	Morning coffee and Registration
10:00 – 10:20	Welcome – Anusha Withana Introduction to ACM Local Chapters – Eunice Sari Introduction to SydCHI Day – Wafa Johal
10:20 – 11:40	Short talks session
11:40 – 12:00	Introduction to the afternoon workshop, finding themes
12:00 – 13:00	Lunch and making groups
13:00 – 14:00	Workshops in groups
14:00 – 14:30	Groups present Wrap up – Shlomo Berkovsky

The morning session (until lunch) will be made available live via Zoom and is open to a broader public, including other SIGCHI Local Chapters. Join via this Zoom link (password is SydCHI2020).

The afternoon program is private to registrants.

Preparations

We ask all participants to prepare a 2-minute lightning talk to introduce themselves and their research.

Location

LT123 (ground Floor) Building J12, School of Computer Science

The University of Sydney

1 Cleveland St, Darlington NSW 2008

Staying safe

We strongly encourage all attendees to keep all current safety precautions in mind. We’ll ensure the venue is set up in a way to allow us to keep a comfortable distance, have sanitiser on hand, etc. If you’re unable or uncomfortable joining in person, we’re making it possible to join us online.

Registration

Registration has now closed.

Sponsorship and support

This event is generously sponsored by ACM SIGCHI to encourage our community to come together and grow.

We are also grateful to the University of Sydney for allowing us to use the venue.