Lab gets into wired (sort of) in the pitch black theater

The project for the visually impaired that Yvonne and Janet have contributed to has been reported on Wired

multi-touch

cheap light pen instructions

Movid - http://movid.org/Main/HomePage - worth a play

tBeta Open Community vision http://ccv.nuigroup.com/ - has this upgraded recently ?

Rectorvision no-change

DimondTouch with finger tracking (sound familiar?) http://gil.imag.fr/Downloads/Software

ObjectiveC multitouch framework for TUIO.

Nice light pen version - http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/multitouch ( looks a bit slow).

http://www.future-instruments.net/fr/download.html looks nice claims to be hight speed system using y OptiTrack cameras;

Cambridge Tourist multitouch table in the news

Here it is.

KMI do tables with Bram Vandeputte

Supporting research - research 2.0

A bit unclear - definitely web 2.0/semantic web ... mash-ups of data this time science data.

Gonzalo Parra - you want to know about the speaker at a conference - uses QR-code on your slides. He did some evaluation by asking some students to play with it.
http://stites.google.com/stite/ku/moreapp

Looks at the web of paper interconnection

the science table.
Looking at a number of papers for related papers at a conference - zoom in.
Current relation in graph by co-authorship.
app that lets you do multi-touch on apple touch pad.
Not tested - "do scientists need this needs to be established"

Getting the data - STELLAR. collect RSS Burst.

A fairly rubbish day

There isn't any one I can talk to about things at work so I'm going to moan into the blog instead.
Not a hot couple of days at the moment. Firstly I lost the EPSRC application which I can take. Today got to be a low moment I sat in a course meeting and had all my questions rejected outright.

Basically I try to make the questions interesting and informative open out the rather dull matter of the course and nod towards some of the more interesting digital stuff. The stuff that rather excited me when I was learning about computing. I have this great book called the  Armchair Universe which was  A collection of A.K. Dewdney's columns from "Scientific American" which was my inspiration. So I have questions about cellular automata. When I was learning about computing I had great building magazines like Byte which we are now long gone.

Any way I was told that having questions with Steve Wolfram in the preamble was scaring the potential students into thinking the question was harder than they actually where. Basically the pre-amble was putting the course team off and I was told  I should make the questions less 'computery'

Yeah I found it ironic too.

I know this is all for the best but I keep working and getting the work thrown away. It doesn't play well to the dyslexic in me.

Still what doesn't kill you only makes me stronger ( I don't hear anyone trying to kick me off the course).

Visual analytic for software evolution talk

Antonio González-Torres, University of Salamanca, Spain

Software evolution is looking at how the code of text changes as a program develops.

Keim D. Challenges in visual data analysis - Proceedings of conference on information visualisation Sixth International Conference on Information Visualisation: Proceedings (Amazon link). 

I like the grand system which lets you track changes to code, who did it, when it was done, where in the code. You do get lots of ways of looking at code in interesting ways.

Overly complex reliance of colour to represent a number of things - programmer/action. cloud problems.

I'm really excited and very envious of this. 

John Underkoffler points to the future of UI

the original mac didn't have networking Hah! shows how much he knows (google appletalk).

Amazing what people can do with cheap red/green/blue recognition stuff.

I'm not wildly impressed with this.

ELECTRONIC MEETING SYSTEMS TO SUPPORT GROUP WORK

ELECTRONIC MEETING SYSTEMS TO SUPPORT GROUP WORK

Joseph S. Valacich, Douglas R. Vogel, July 1991/Vol,3'1", No. 7/COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM

Positive gains from meetings. 

1. Group has more information than the individual
2. synergy - people use information in new ways from the one holding it. 
3. Stimulation - working as group encourage individual to perform 
4. Learning - from more skilled members

Negatives about meetings

1. Air time fragmentation - group must ration speaking time among members
2. Attenuation blocking - contributions begin dropped due to not speaking in direct response to stimulation
3. Attention blocking - fewer comments are made because your listening to someone else's comments and forget your own. 
4. Concentration blocking - having to hold on to your idea while waiting your turn 
5. Members lack focus on communication, missing or fogetting the contribution others make
6. Conformance pressure - members will not criticise the comments of others due to politeness or fear of reprisals. 
7. Evaluation of apprehension - people don't want to put ideas forward incase they sound stupid. 
8. Free riding - letting others do the talking
9. Cognitive inertia - (I would call this narrative inertia )  . The conversation follows one train of thought, people self censor contributions which are off topic. 
10. Socializing - excessive chat cuts down time. 
11. Domination - some members exercise undue influence and monopolise time unproductively. 
12. Information overload - to move information to fast. 
13. 'difficulty integrating members contributions because the group does not have an appropriate method leading to dysfunctional cycling or incomplete discussions leading to premature decisions
14. Incomplete information - partial information 

An interesting and strangely incomplete list. 

I would think that the positives list is much longer how about 'owner ship of decisions'. If you've participated in the decision making process then your much more likely to work for the new target even if your contribution was rejected. Many of the items on the list where linked to a paper so perhaps they avoided stuff which hand't been done before. 

What about time - consuming 20 peoples time costs more than consuming one persons time. 

Clearly some items have links to group size (1-airtime fragmentation gets worse with size of group).

Electronic meeting systems (EMS) want to deliver 

1. process support ( ways of communicating). 
1. an EMS lets people talk in 'parallel'. 
2. process structure, ( pattern, timiing of content of this communication ) 
1. for example following agenda 
3. task support , - support for task related activittes ( external dadabases ) 
1. for example by having access to info about previsou meetings. 
2. also calculators or spreadsheets. 
4. task strcture.  - technques, rules or models for analyzing task related info to get new insight. 

I find this a curious ontology. 

OK what is nice is that electronic meeting systems sometimes work sometimes don't - because people hold meetings in differing ways. 

I like the notion of an EMS providing a 'group memory' - recording in a non linear way what has been said.  Its odd - does every one HAVE to type in an EMS - can someone talk too ? 

Note that the 24 line system caused people to look locally and loose global view. 

Possible to record in a way that captures the narrative of what's happening. For example a tag cloud that shows what's happening ( more used words get bigger ), perhaps some kind of time line of comments and what they relate to. 

I think this might work with multiple screens - perhaps many keyboards. This feels like its getting away from the small table top study I want to run. 

I like the notion of a narrative visualisation - 

Perhaps an EMS system might also ask how long the meeting is and then try to keep people on topic by fading in how much money is being spent when it starts to run over. 

Interaction styles 

• Chauffeured style ( one person does all the mouse clicking, public display )
• Supported style - everyone has a computer each
• Interative style - everyone has a computer but doesn't talk out loud. 

These styles worked better for different sizes of groups and depending upon activity. 

The over all taks is 

1.  exploration and idea generation 
2. idea organisation 
3. Prioritising 
4. policy development, evaluation stake holder anyslsis. 

I'm not sure about this. I think we now have

1.  current situation description, 
2. brain storming, 
3. Commenting ( attaching info to ideas ) 
4. idea organisation 
5. priortising/voting 
6. conclusion

Evaluation

 Anonymity worked out really well but also liberated people to begin 'flaming' got worse with bigger sizes.  But people like anonymity. 

 Terms to look out for 

group

Group Support Systems 
Group Decision Support Systems

Cambridge tourist app in the news

The tourist information app is currently in the local news !

Stairs vs Lifts

If you want to know who else is doing lift vs staircase stuff.

Sunghee Park