Event Archive – all

Effective and resource-bounded dimensions were defined by Lutz in 2003 and have proven to be useful and meaningful for quantitative analysis in the contexts of algorithmic randomness, computational complexity and fractal geometry.

The point-to-set principle (PSP) of J. Lutz and N. Lutz (2018) fully characterizes Hausdorff and packing dimensions in terms of effective dimensions in the Euclidean space, enabling effective dimensions to be used to answer open questions about fractal geometry, with already an interesting list of geometric measure theory results.

In this talk I will review the point-to-set principles focusing on recent applications and extensions and presenting open questions as well as further application opportunities.

Latin squares have been studied since the days of Euler. After some overview on the history and background, an effort for a complete enumeration of special types of Latin squares of order 13, by as completely automated means as possible (which is currently actually not possible), will be presented and evaluated. The main method here is Cube-and-Conquer, a kind of 2-stage SAT-solving (as invented by the presenter). Quite some fine-tuning of representation and choice of solver was needed, and will be discussed (at some high level).

Designing logical frameworks to reason about the properties of concurrent programs while accurately capturing the essence of concurrency is a challenging task. The main difficulties can be traced back to the syntactic constraints of the languages used for this purpose.

In this talk, I will present my ongoing line of research, which aims to provide a new computation-as-deduction paradigm for the study of concurrent programs. In particular, I will show you a non-commutative logic where we can interpret proofs as computation trees for the pi-calculus, and use proof nets to provide canonical representations of these trees modulo interleaving concurrency.

This work is based on joint works with Giulia Manara and Fabrizio Montesi

Research on the semantics of programming language has tended towards formalisation. Following the successful deployment and myriad uses of formal syntax, many of those working on semantics assumed similar successes would be realised with formal semantics. The reality was different, and the resultant language specifications were large, complicated, technical artefacts.  My previous historical research has studied those from a technical perspective. 

In this talk, I will explore the conceptual surroundings of the semantics, examining the use of metaphors, analogies, and illustrative language used to accompany or explain the formal documents. It is early stage research and will focus primarily on picking examples from the history of semantics for deeper analysis in the future. I will also present some philosophical frameworks I am considering for use in this analysis and begin to discuss how they might help us understand the topic. This research will ultimately lead to a conference presentation and journal article next year,  as well as forming a pilot study for a research grant proposal.

Consequently, I particularly welcome discussion and suggestions.

Humans vary considerably from one another– with each of us having an idiosyncratic, subjective viewpoint.  How inter-individual variation in behaviour relates to diversity in brain function is poorly understood. In my talk, I will focus on brain-fingerprints, a set of functional neuroimaging features that reliably distinguish individuals from one another.  I will describe work from my PhD studies at McGill University on brain-fingerprinting and its application to clinical and cognitive neuroscience.

We all know what we SHOULD have ready, and what to do.  But reality will include untested plans, egos and the pressures to get a business up and running. This will give a first-hand account of a Ransomware attack and the, many, lessons learned.

In this talk, Galileo will give an overview of a modular system for representing and reasoning with legal aspects of traffic rules for autonomous vehicles.

We focus on a subset of the United Kingdom’s Highway Code (HC) related to junctions.
As human drivers and automated vehicles (AVs) will interact on the roads, especially in urban environments, we claim that an accessible, unitary, high-level computational model should exist and be applicable to both users.

Martin Johnes is Professor of Modern History and specialises in the histories of Wales and popular culture in modern Britain. His latest book is Welsh Not: Elementary Education and the Anglicization of 19th Century Wales, which will be published in 2024. It is the first academic study of the infamous Welsh Not and examines how the Welsh language was treated and viewed in schools in the nineteenth century.

In this presentation, I will outline the importance of abstractions in the interfaces of systems, and sketch the history of their evolution and design. The role of abstractions in HCI is, needless to say, a somewhat abstract topic, and may seem distant from AI and in LLMs in particular. As most of the audience will know, interaction with LLMs typically entails ‘natural interaction’: in this mode, a user says something (or writes) and the LLM responds through a chatbot function.  So why worry about abstractions? I will show you do have to worry, and how ChatGPT (4) and other chatbot-based LLMs are designed around abstractions that have not been thought through. This poor HCI (which it is) leads to misunderstandings about what LLMs do, how their outputs can be used, and what role users have in constructing the processings of the LLMs through their prompts. I will show how the implications of the analysis apply for all AI tools that depend on interaction with users.      

The presentation derives from research reported in Richard’s latest book, The Shape of Thought: Reasoning in the Age of AI, (McGill-Queens Press, Montreal, Forthcoming).

The purpose of this talk is to give an overview of effective fractal dimension

The overall aim of developing a game that is fun to play is often hard to achieve due to the complexities of the game development process. An accurate understanding of player behaviour and their gameplay experiences can help identify and resolve any potential problem areas before release. In this talk, I will use commercial case studies and academic research projects to provide a summary of my work in developing new evaluation methodologies, tools and data visualisations for games UX evaluation.

Accessible and inclusive digital security is an emergent area of security technology and service design. In the UK there is a growing examination of what it means to design statutory services that are not only digital by default but that are also realisably secure for most in society. A library of universal barriers has been developed by the UK’s Government Digital Service in collaboration with designer and anthropologist Ute Schauberger. Such a library offers one means to evaluate the accessibility of a digital service. This talk sets out the 11 universal barriers, explores how they are relevant to security design and reflects on how security design processes might incorporate universal barriers as a design method.

ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI, has the ability to generate human-like text, making it a powerful tool for natural language processing tasks such as language translation, question answering, and text generation. This talk will explore the capabilities and potential of ChatGPT and other large language models, with a focus on their ability to interact with users. We will delve into the inner workings of these models and discuss the challenges associated with training and deploying them, as well as the ethical considerations that arise when using them. Additionally, we will showcase examples of how ChatGPT and other language models are being used in industry and research, and discuss future possibilities for the technology. Attendees will come away with a deeper understanding of the power and potential of large language models and how they can be used to enhance human-computer interaction.

NOTE: the title and abstract of this talk about ChatGPT has been generated by, you guessed it, ChatGPT. I indeed intend to talk about ChatGPT, but my title is: ChatGPT: tool or threat? Some thoughts on LLMs from an interactional perspective.

In this master class, as a researcher and computer scientist, you would be able to investigate ethical awareness and action in a range of technology-focused disciplines. For example, developers/UX designers/practitioners’ experiences and attitudes around ethics. This you would do through a method that would help to increase practitioners’ (your present/future self) everyday ethical awareness and action. This class would train you to be better “everyday ethicists.”

In this talk, I share findings from over five years of my work on dark patterns that addresses the growing threat of deceptive design practices on technology systems. I use the concept of “dark patterns” as a point of connection to identify emerging synergies among design, computer science, ethics, law, and policy. In the last two years there has been a surge of scholarship that describes both the presence and the impact of dark patterns in digital systems. Scholarly and regulatory efforts are increasingly intertwined, with the potential to link emerging definitional work with guidance for technology practitioners and enforcement action. I will describe a portion of my recent work in mapping a preliminary ontology of dark patterns, using examples to show impact and the potential for harm. Building on a synthesis of dominant taxonomies of dark patterns from academic literature and regulatory reports, I will share a proposal that maps interrelated high-level, meso-level, and low-level patterns—building towards a characterization of knowledge types that can be used to describe dark patterns at multiple scales—engaging HCI scholars and regulators in identifying and fighting back against these harmful practices. I will then link these efforts to a systematic review of dark patterns scholarship to demonstrate areas of strength and opportunities for future study.

In the field of human-computer interaction, a number of influential visions have inspired researchers to make interaction with digital information richer, more sensual, and better integrated in the real world. Examples of such visions include ubiquitous and pervasive computing, as well as tangible, embedded and embodied interfaces. However, while the impact in the research community has been extensive, there are not as many examples of physical or embodied interfaces in the consumer domain as one would expect. The reasons for this relative lack of real-world impact are complex, but ultimately can be summarised as bits are cheap, atoms are expensive – to create; control; modify; maintain; mass-produce; and distribute. Finally, I will point the way to a novel paradigm that might combine the advantages of bits and atoms, called Liberated Pixels.

With the exponential increase in government and corporate surveillance of online activities, there is an increasingly important need for usable tools that help individuals maintain privacy. While the Tor Browser is a popular anonymity tool, it has yet to achieve notable levels of mainstream usage. Making the Tor Browser appealing to the general population would require greater attention to usability and user experience aspects. To this end, we carried out two studies to examine user understanding of Tor operation and user experience of browsing the Web using the Tor Browser, respectively. The first study found significant differences in the mental models of experts and non-experts regarding Tor operation and threat model. The second study uncovered a number of significant challenges users encounter when using the Tor Browser for everyday online activities. Based on these findings, we offer a number of suggestions for making the Tor Browser more usable, thus helping boost privacy and anonymity for everyone.

In this talk, I’ll introduce you a range of our recent work in BBC R&D, and especially our new Audience Research Area. I’ll whizz through the work we’ve done investigating how synthetic cinematography could allow broadcasters to cover the Edinburgh Festival like the Olympics; how creative professionals, like journalists, can better collaborative with algorithmic systems; how to research effectively with the people who create and the people who use media; and how we might help the digital media industry wean itself off metric that ramp up consumption and bingeing to use measures that reflect human values. In each case, I’ll talk about how we work hand-in-hand with brilliant university partners, including Swansea.

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.
Another exciting possibility is the use of ultrasound to levitate small particles to create ‘physical’ pixels in the air in front of the user. These physical pixels can be precisely controlled to levitate 3D shapes and objects, which can be controlled dynamically. This opens many new opportunities for displaying 3D models and data. In the talk, I will describe how to make this highly novel form of display possible and some of the interesting problems that arise around selecting and manipulating the levitated objects.

Gather.Town is an online virtual world where communication occurs through proximity chat between nearby avatars. The platform can be used in place of a traditional video-conferencing system for meetings and education, and has a number of interesting affordances that provide both opportunities for social engagement during pandemic-related physical distancing situations. I have taught numerous large classes in Gather.Town, hosted conferences and an interactive art gallery in Gather.Town, and run studies to understand the impact on students and artists. In this talk, which will take place in a Gather.Town space, I will introduce attendees to the platform, and provide a brief tour of a GT classroom and a GT art gallery. I will then present some results from studies I have conducted with colleagues to investigate the artist and student user experiences in the platform, and present my reflections on designing spaces for creative engagement.

A new synthesis is emerging that integrates AI technologies with HCI approaches to produce Human-Centered AI (HCAI). Advocates of this new synthesis seek to amplify, augment, and enhance human abilities, so as to empower people, build their self-efficacy, support creativity, recognize responsibility, and promote social connections.

Researchers, developers, business leaders, policy makers and others are expanding the technology-centered scope of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to include Human-Centered AI (HCAI) ways of thinking. This expansion from an algorithm-focused view to embrace a human-centered perspective, can shape the future of technology so as to better serve human needs. Educators, designers, software engineers, product managers, evaluators, and government agency staffers
can build on AI-driven technologies to design products and services that make life better for the users. These human-centered products and services will enable people to better care for each other, build sustainable communities, and restore the environment. The passionate advocates of HCAI are devoted to furthering human values, rights, justice, and dignity, by building reliable, safe, and trustworthy systems.

There has been growing interest in the application of data-driven and artificially intelligent (AI) systems in frontline health, further spurred by the global COVID-19 pandemic. In this talk, I will draw attention to the work and workers that are increasingly the focus of such systems. I will present findings from an extensive literature review of 347 papers on ongoing AI efforts for frontline health, as well as ethnographic fieldwork conducted over three years with frontline health workers engaged in data work in Delhi (India). Many of these workers are women already engaged in underpaid and invisible care work, primarily with women from underserved communities. This is work led by Azra Ismail, my PhD advisee. Our analysis uncovers gaps in current data-driven efforts and outlines opportunities for design, centering the perspectives of frontline health workers. We distill lessons from literature on Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D), post-development critique, and transnational feminist theory to present insights relevant for AI or data-driven efforts that target “social good”, more broadly.

The increasing use of small-size drones is both exciting and frightening. The success and acceptability of these automated devices will depend on how well they will be able to communicate with users and passersby alike. How will people be able to make sense of a drone’s intentions and abilities? How will drones respond to people in complex situations? While the research community has developed many techniques and interfaces to interact with both mobile devices and robots, interaction with drones remain challenging as this technology presents unique features, such as its ability to fly. During this talk, I will discuss how we can leverage techniques at the intersection between technology and design to build novel interaction techniques for human-drone interaction. I will describe several methodologies that proved successful in understanding user’s expectations with drones and that will enable their future integration into human teams. Finally, I will present how these new flying technologies re-invent our understanding of ubiquitous and mobile computing and share my vision for future collocated human-drone interaction.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the buzzword of the last decade. Advances so far have been largely technical and only recently have we been seeing a shift towards focusing on human aspects of artificial intelligence. Particularly the notion of making AI interactive and explainable are in the center, which is a very narrow view. In the talk, I will suggest a definition for “Interactive Human Centered Artificial Intelligence” and outline the required properties to start a discussion on the goals of AI research and the properties that we should expect of future systems. It is central to be able to state who will benefit from a system or service. Staying in control is essential for humans to feel safe and have self-determination. I will discuss the key challenge of control and understanding of AI based systems and show that levels of abstractions and granularity of control are a potential solution. I further argue that AI and machine learning (ML) are very much comparable to raw materials (like stone, iron, or bronze). Historical periods are named after these materials as they have change what humans can build and what tools humans can engineer. Hence, I argue in the AI age we need to shift the focus from the material (e.g. the AI algorithms, as there will be plenty of material) towards the tools that are enabled and that are beneficial for humans. It is apparent that AI will allow the automation of mental routine tasks and that it will extend our ability to perceive things and foresee events. For me, the central question is how to create these tools for amplifying the human mind, without compromising human values.

will discuss soma design — a process that allows designers to examine and improve on connections between sensation, feeling, emotion, subjective understanding and values. Soma design builds on pragmatics and in particular on somaesthetics by Shusterman. It combines soma as in our first-person sensual experience of the world, with aesthetics as in deepening our knowledge of our sensory experiences to live a better life. In my talk, I will discuss how aesthetics and ethics are enacted in a soma design process. Our cultural practices and digitally-enabled objects enforce a form of sedimented, agreed-upon movements, enabling variation, but with certain prescribed ways to act, feel and think. This leaves designers with a great responsibility, as these become the movements that we invite our end-users to engage with, in turning shaping them, their movements, their bodies, their feelings and thoughts. I will argue that by engaging in a soma design process we can better probe which movements lead to deepened somatic awareness; social awareness of others in the environment and how they are affected by the human-technology assemblage; enactments of bodily freedoms rather than limitations; making norms explicit; engage with a pluralist feminist position on who we are designing for; and aesthetic experience and expression.

Multisensory experiences, that is, experiences that involve more than one of our senses, are part of our everyday life. However, we often tend to take them for granted, at least when our different senses function normally (normal sight functioning) or are corrected-to-normal (using glasses). However, closer inspection to any, even the most mundane experiences, reveals the remarkable sensory world in which we live in. While we have built tools, experiences and computing systems that have played to the human advantages of hearing and sight (e.g., signage, modes of communication, visual and musical arts, theatre, cinema and media), we have long neglected the opportunities around touch, taste, or smell as interface/interaction modalities. Within this talk, I will share my vision for the future of computing/HCI and what role touch, taste, and smell can play in it.

Automation, as a design goal, focusses mainly on the migration of tasks from a human operator to a mechanical or digital system. Designing automation thus usually consists in removing tasks or activities from that operator and in designing systems that will be able to perform them. When these automations are not adequately designed (or correctly understood by the operator), they may result in so called automation surprises that degrade, instead of enhance, the overall performance of the couple (operator, system). Usually, these tasks are considered at a high level of abstraction (related to work and work objectives) leaving unconsidered low-level, repetitive tasks. This paper proposes a decomposition of automation for interactive systems highlighting the diverse objectives it may target at. Beyond, multiple complementary views of automation for interactive systems design are presented to better define the multiform concept of automation. It provides numerous concrete examples illustrating each view and identifies ten rules for designing interactive systems embedding automations.