Seminars
Wang Yun
Link: Register here
Date: 22 Sept, 2023
Venue: School of Economics/School of Computing & Information Systems 2 (SOE/SCIS 2) Level 3, Seminar Room 3-10
Talk title: Human-AI Collaborative Creation of Visual Storytelling
About the talk: Visual storytelling is a powerful form of communication that uses visual elements, such as charts, infographics, images, animations, and videos, to create narratives. However, creating engaging visual stories is a challenging task, especially for non-experts, as it requires a deep understanding of the content and logic, the visual design principles, and the narrative structures. Moreover, it often takes a lot of time and effort to produce high-quality visual stories. In this talk, the speaker will present her work on how human-AI collaboration can enhance the process and outcome of visual storytelling. She will show how to generate expressive and informative visualizations, compose visualizations and infographics into stories, and transform visualizations into more engaging animations. She will also examine how humans and AIs can collaborate in the creative process of visual storytelling, and how such collaboration can augment both human creativity and AI capabilities. Finally, she will discuss the future research opportunities and challenges in this domain.
About the speaker: Dr. Yun Wang is a senior researcher in the Data, Knowledge, Intelligence (DKI) Area at Microsoft Research Asia. Her research interests lie at the intersection of human-computer interaction, information visualization, artificial intelligence, and data science. Her work aims to facilitate human-data interaction, human-AI collaboration, and visual storytelling with novel techniques, tools, and systems. Yun's recent research focus on enhancing human communication with visualizations infused with AI techniques. She has developed techniques and systems for creating visual stories in diverse forms, such as infographics, interactive web pages, motion graphics, and animated videos. She has also explored how to simplify and improve the data interaction workflows between humans and AI for analysis, ideation, authoring, and storytelling. She envisions a future where humans and AI can co-create engaging and informative visual stories. She has published over 40 papers in high-impact venues such as VIS, CHI, UIST, TVCG, and CG&A and serves as reviewers, program committees for a variety of venues. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from HKUST, and a joint B.Eng. in software engineering and B.Sc. in computer science from Fudan and UCD. More information can be found on her personal page (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/wangyun/).
Zhang Tengxiang
Link: Register here
Date: 8 Sept, 2023
Time: 11:00am-12:00pm
Venue: School of Economics/School of Computing & Information Systems 2 (SOE/SCIS 2) Level 4, Seminar Room 4-2
Talk title: Merging Digital and Physical Realities: A Human-centered Approach
About the talk: The convergence of the digital and physical realms presents a complex yet fascinating challenge. This talk will introduce a human-centered approach to this intersection, with a focus on the interactions among on-body wearables, off-body devices, and humans. The discussion will highlight the potential of next-generation wearables and ubiquitous devices, particularly smart head-worn devices and backscatter tags, as unique tools for unified representations of digital and physical resources. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the future human-computer interaction technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective.
About the speaker: Dr. Zhang Tengxiang is an Associate Research Scientist at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Zhang’s research lines in the technical side of ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction. He builds smart wearables (e.g., glasses, rings), develop sensing algorithms (e.g., for gestures/facial actions), and design interaction interfaces (e.g., with AR/MR) to understand and merge the tagged physical world, the digital metaverse, and the humans. Such effort has led to various patents and publications on top venues including CHI and IMWUT. He received his Ph.D. with Honors in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in 2019, and his master’s degree from the ECE department of the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Biomedical Engineering Department at NUS working on skin electronics.
Online Panel: What I Wish I Knew About CHI Submission Preparation 5 Years Ago
Link: https://smu-sg.zoom.us/j/93653544645 (event ended)
Date: 11 Aug, 2023
Venue: Online event
About the panel: This week, we run a panel about CHI submission preparation. Join us to pick up advice from Shengdong ZHAO (NUS), FOONG Pin Sym (NUS) and Simon PERRAULT (SUTD).
Maria Wolters
Date: 7 March, 2023
Time: 1:00-2:00pm
Venue: School of Economics/School of Computing & Information Systems 2 SOE/SCIS2, Level 3, Seminar Room 3-9
Talk title: Introducing the Experience Sampling Method into Clinical Practice - What Makes It Acceptable?
About the talk: In this talk, I will present initial findings from stakeholder requirements gathering done for the IMMERSE project. In the EU project IMMERSE, we will implement a solution in clinical practice that allows patients with mental health conditions to document their mental health throughout their day in various different situations. This is called the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Patients’ ESM data is then shared with the health professional who treats them in the form of a dashboard. The goal of IMMERSE is to find out, using a Randomised Clinical Trial approach, whether ESM can improve shared decision making and treatment efficacy in clinical practice. The IMMERSE trial will run in four countries: Belgium, Germany, Scotland, and Slovakia. I will summarise the strategy used for gathering stakeholder requirements in IMMERSE and discuss factors that affect patients’ and clinicians’ readiness to engage with an ESM solution, as determined through a survey of over 400 patients in four European countries.
About the speaker: Dr Maria Wolters is the incoming Research Group leader for the group SOC (digital participation) at the German research institute OFFIS and Reader (associate professor) in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. She has published over 90 peer reviewed papers in Human-Computer Interaction, eHealth, and Computational Linguistics.
Maria is interested in digital inclusion. Around 10% of the population will be excluded from online-only services due to lack of access to technology, a badly designed user experience, lack of interest, or lack of trust. This results in systemic gaps and biases in data-driven systems to support health and social care. Maria is looking at ways to mitigate this by designing solutions that span digital and physical, online and in person.
Jude Yew
Staff User Experience Researcher, Google
Date: 15 February, 2023
Time: 3:30-4:30 pm
Venue: School of Economics/School of Computing & Information Systems 2 (SOE/SCIS 2) Level 4, Seminar Room 4-1
About the talk: Building an Operating System (OS) is a large endeavor and requires us to think about the developer’s experience in unique ways that are different from consumer product experiences. Unlike interfaces that cater to individual users, there is no one universal developer archetype that we have to cater for. Operating Systems have to take into account the collective and collaborative needs of teams that maintain different parts of the OS for instance, their different development contexts and tools used, which lead to different sets of requirements for different sets of users.
In this presentation, the speaker will share some of the recent work that he has carried out in better accounting for Fuchsia’s diverse sets of users and the various methods himself and how his team of UXers go about ensuring that their platform is simple to use, easy to understand and is effective in enabling developers to realize their goals.
About the speaker: Jude is currently a Staff User Experience Researcher at Google working on Fuchsia, Google’s next generation Operating System. His current work focuses on improving the developer’s experiences on Fuchsia via tooling and workflows. Specifically, he is pursuing a data-driven and mixed-methods approach, combining data science and interviews, to help inform teams about the developer’s experiences using their product.
Jude was formerly a tenure-track faculty member at the Dept. of Communications and New Media, NUS, where his research focused on harnessing collective intelligence, collaboration and cooperation for prosocial good. He received his PhD and Mac from the University of Michigan and has been awarded grants from the National Science foundation, National Heritage Board and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies.
Anusha Withana
Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney
Date: 17 January 2023, Tuesday
Time: 1:00-2:00pm
Venue: Meeting Room 5.1, Level 5 School of Computing & Information Systems 1 Singapore Management University 80 Stamford Road Singapore 178902
About the talk: Wearable sensors, especially sensing technologies are of critical importance in a wide variety of applications including disability management, age care, physical rehabilitation, and sports. Despite the growing need, adherence to these technologies is still low. Research finds that a major factor of technology abandonment is the poor fit between the user’s abilities and the system’s characteristics. This is not a surprise considering the challenges faced by people in these applications areas manifest in dramatically different ways in individuals and change over time.
This talk explores an approach to creating wearable technologies by replacing mass production, i.e. “designed for many” with personal fabrication, i.e. “designed for me”. Combining understanding and modelling user activities with novel fabrication technologies such as 3D and 2D functional, “designed for me” aims to create highly customisable wearable devices from on-skin interfaces to personalized accessories.
About the speaker: Anusha Withana is an ARD DECRA fellow and a senior lecturer (Asst. Prof.) at the School of Computer Science, the University of Sydney where he leads the AID-LAB. He received his Masters and Ph.D. from Keio University, Japan, and was a postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University before joining the University of Sydney. He works in the research field of human-computer interaction (HCI), mainly focusing on creating personalized enabling technologies, where technology blend and harmonizes with users and the environment leveraging on natural affordances of the context. His research work has been published in top-tier HCI conferences and journals such as ACM SIGCHI/UIST. He has won numerous awards including the Most Innovative Engineers in Australia award 2020, Most Promising Technology Award at Innovfest unBound 2016, and his research have featured in leading media outlets such as CNN, Discovery TV, SBS, Straits Times, Gizmodo, and Engadget.