HCI 08 – Awards for International Excellence

An innovation at this year’s HCI conference was a series of awards for International Excellence in HCI. Aimed at projects which have been carried out by teams comprising researchers from different countries, the awards recognise the power of international co-operation and collaboration in developing new technologies.

The first winner was a system of Data Visualisation and Data Mining Technology for Supporting Care for Older People , led by John Arnott and Nubia Gill, with Nicolas Hine, Julienne Hanson and Richard Curry. The overall purpose of the research was the enhancement of home-based care through modelling the "busyness" of activity in an individual’s dwelling. This reveals individual patterns in that person’s life, so that care can be better tailored to their needs and changing circumstances. The use of data mining and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) offers the possibility of exploring, detecting and predicting changes in the level of activity which may reflect changes in well-being. The project used data mining and visualisation to illustrate activity from sensor data from a trial project run in a domestic context.

The second award went to Nicholas Adams, Mark Witkowski and Robert Spence for their work on The Inspection of Very Large Images by Eye-gaze Control. The researchers presented novel methods for navigating and inspecting extremely large images solely or primarily using eye gaze control. The need to inspect large images occurs in, for example, mapping, medicine, astronomy and surveillance, and this project considered the inspection of very large aerial images, held in Google Earth. Comparative search and navigation tasks suggest that, while gaze methods are effective for image navigation, they lag behind more conventional methods, so interaction designers might consider combining these techniques for greatest effect.

Finally, the third award was won by Bill Buxton’s team, comprising Steve Hodges, Shahram Izadi, Alex Butler, and Alban Rrustemi, for their development of ThinSight: Versatile Multi-touch Sensing for Thin Formfactor Displays. ThinSight is a novel optical sensing system, fully integrated into a thin form factor display, capable of detecting multiple fingers placed on or near the display surface. The team presentation described this new hardware in detail, and demonstrated how it can be embedded behind a regular LCD, allowing sensing without degradation of display capability. Discusion included other novel capabilities of the system: interaction at a distance using IR pointing devices, and IR-based communication with other electronic devices through the display. A major advantage of ThinSight over existing camera and projector based optical systems is its compact, thin form-factor making such systems even more deployable.

Associated Link: HCI08

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