Honours Projects 2010

Projects supervised by Judy Kay

Accessing and keeping digital media at a surface computing interface
Co-supervisor: Anthony Collins

Surface computing, where a user can interact with an embedded computer at a surface, typically a table or a wall, is creating interesting new ways for people to make use of digital information. This project involves exploration of new interfaces for fundamental tasks associated with accessing different forms of digital media at a tabletop. Challenges of the design come from the attributes of the interface, lack of keyboard or mouse, as well as the role of surface computing as a form of "single display groupware", meaning that multiple people use it together to collaborate or work in parallel. We currently have three forms of tabletop hardware and will be building new ones this year. We also have multiple software platforms to create the software. Depending upon the interests of the student, we will select the most appropriate combination. This set of projects each focus on one aspect of accessing digital media, for example, how best to manage large documents, and how to keep the results of tabletop interaction and collaboration.

Skills: Interface design, programming to implement new interfaces, user studies. Students interested in this project should have a strong background in any one of these areas and the project can be tailored to match that strength.

Links:
Cruiser and Focus: Exploring collaborative tabletop file system and personal information access

One touch or more - a change for interaction design on touch surfaces
Co-supervisor: Anthony Collins

Emerging touch interfaces, including phones and embedded surfaces computing on walls and tables, creates new possibilities for interaction, as well as new limitations. This project explores one tightly defined aspect that has not had the attention it deserves: whether and when to use multi-finger gestures and when not to. For example, to enlarge an object, the emerging gesture involves two-fingers, as on the iPhone and the Microsoft surface. By contrast, our own Cruiser framework provides a one-finger resize action. This project explores the literature on the broader issue and then conducts experiments to compare the two approaches for a range of interface types and tasks. This will contribute to a better understanding of how to best use this emerging interaction medium.

Links:
Cruiser and Focus: Exploring collaborative tabletop file system and personal information access

Exploration of large, multipage documents on tabletops
Co-supervisor: Anthony Collins

Emerging touch interfaces, including phones and embedded surfaces computing on walls and tables, creates new possibilities for interaction, as well as new limitations. This project explores one important challenge for the tabletop: interfaces for multipage documents. On desktops, there are several tools for viewing these, including word processors, and document viewers such as evince. This project explores new ways to support effective use of multi-page documents at a tabletop.

Links:
Cruiser, Focus: Exploring collaborative tabletop file system and personal information access and a recent paper on document navigation.

Lifelong learning
Co-supervisor: Bob Kummerfeld

One of the keys to improved support for elearning is to maintain a long term model of each learner's emerging knowledge. So, for example, learning achievements from the first Java programming unit should be captured so that the teaching in the next and subsequent units can be adapted to match the individual's level of knowledge. This would mean that a student who had difficulties in the first unit would be given a set of gentler learning activities and scaffolding for the aspects needed in the next unit, but not mastered. By contrast, students with solid understanding of these aspects could be offered more challenging tasks and could progress faster. This set of projects includes creating systems in an area of either learning or health.

Skills: Projects in this area all require solid technical programming skills and will make use of tools written in Python. In addition, there are opportunities to include studies of the learning effectiveness of new interfaces and tools.

Links:
Reflect, Wattle, Narcissus, WikiNavMap, and EDM

Lifelong memory prosthesis for the people in your life
Co-supervisor: Bob Kummerfeld

Remembering the people in our lives is important: we need to remember who has been kind, competent and helpful; we need to remember who has demonstrated we cannot trust them for some things; and we just need to remember who we have met so we can look kind and competent. Essentially, this calls for an aid, or prosthesis, for our long term model of other people. To make it effective, we need very quick and easy ways to add information to the system, when we are out and about. For this, we need to explore light weight and flexible ways to capture context-aware capture of data. We then need effective ways to access the aggregated information and to scrutinise it to check conclusions and inferences from the system. The project builds from work in three diverse areas which have not previously been combined: CRM (customer relationship management) software which has similar goals of at a corporate level; context-aware light weight capture of information; user modelling frameworks (though we will use the Personis framework for this project).

Skills: Projects in this area all require solid technical programming skills and will make use of tools written in Python. There will be opportunities to learn about interface design and conducting user studies.

Lifelong user model and ontologies
Co-supervisor: Bob Kummerfeld

In spite of the jargon in this title, this project has a goal that is easy to understand. Essentially, a lifelong user model aims to represent their interests (e.g. being a keen cricketer), preferences (e.g. liking Bach but not Schubert), knowledge (e.g. knowing how to write C loops but not knowing about pointers). To create a lifelong model, we want to be able to make use of lots of information that is currently ignored, such as: music you play often, results on tests in the C course. The "ontology problem" is that it is hard to aggregate data from different places because it is hard to determine what is the same, similar, different etc. So, for example, we want to be able to make use of a student's perfect results on the first year Java test on for-loops to conclude that they know C for-loops. And we want this to be really easy to do, without putting needless load on the people teaching those courses. There are several ways to tackle this but an excellent start comes from previous work cited below.

Skills: Projects in this area all require solid technical programming skills and will make use of tools written in Python and Java. There will be opportunities to learn about interface design and conducting user studies.

Links: MECUREO ontology and modelling tools by Trent Apted and Judy Kay

Personal information management
Co-supervisor: Bob Kummerfeld

Current computing systems have a well-established but rather restricted set of ways of managing personal information. One of the real challenges that people face is to ensure that they can easily access and organise their digital information associated across a range of applications, including mail, document creation tools like word processors, shared spaces such as wikis, calendars, to do-lists, web pages viewed. Projects in this area explore new ways to establish which "files" are relevant to a particular context or activity, as well as the mechanisms that can underpin such access.

Skills: This area is broad and the actual project will be a tightly focused part of the area. This can be highly technical, required
strength at the operating systems level, or more user centred, involving studies of the ways that people manage information and how new approaches give more effective support for these.

Links:
Focus: Exploring collaborative tabletop file system and personal information access
WikiNavMap

Personalised museum tours
Co-supervisors: Bob Kummerfeld and Rainer Wasinger

As more people carry increasingly powerful mobile phones, they can use these to keep a long term model of the things that they are interested in, that they know and want to know, where they have been and when. This project exploits such a model so that when the user visits (or revisits) a museum, they can request a guided tour, personalised on the basis of their model, and making use of interfaces that are embedded in the museum. This project can build upon our framework for managing the models on a phone and on our linkages between mobile phones and tabletops (see above). This set of projects tackles aspects such as modelling the user's accurate location in the museum and what they are looking at, delivery of personalised information on a mobile phone or on a tabletop.

Skills: Projects in this area all require solid technical programming skills. There will be opportunities to learn about interface design and conducting user studies.

Lifelong careers advice with a client-side personalisation
Co-supervisors: Bob Kummerfeld, Kalina Yacef, Irena Koprinska, Luiz Pizzato, Rainer Wasinger

A career can be viewed as a lifelong planning activity, including planning education, part time work, the first full time job, later jobs and interlaced education and training. This set of projects explores elements of creating a personalised advisory system. Importantly, as some of the information that would be valuable to such an advisor includes the user's personal data, we aim to ensure that these parts remain client-side and under the complete control of the user who can selectively release just parts to external web sites and applications. This project links with a project in the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre, with an industry partner in this area.

Skills: Projects in this area all require background in machine learning and data mining