Supriya

Assoc Prof Supriya Singh,
Leader, UCD project, UE program
supriya.singh@rmit.edu.au

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2. Robert Cox presents at ICEIS in France
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Robert Cox, a PhD scholarship student in his second year with the User Environments Program, attended the International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS) in Angers, France last month. His poster presentation “What is the Value of Emotion in Communications? Implications for User-Centred Design,” was presented to an interested audience of some 750 researchers, academics and technicians.

Robert says his presentation was allocated two hours in a cubical-style arena in the main auditorium, which he shared with about 15 other researchers. Many of the researchers, including Robert, had queues of people waiting for an opportunity to question and interview them regarding their research.

Robert’s paper was very well received. There was interest from Brazil, Korea and the UK, particularly Edinburgh University’s School of Informatics’ project on Mediated Communications. There were also several offers from technicians who expressed interest in developing devices for such mediated communications.

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3. Annual PhD Scholarship Students Workshop
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The time has arrived for the Annual SITCRC PhD Scholarship Student Workshop. The inaugural workshop was held in May 2002, and this year it will be held on 5-6 June in the SITCRC’s headquarters in Technology Park in Sydney.

All SITCRC PhD scholarship students have been invited to attend a workshop/forum where SITCRC researchers such as Prof. Claude Sammut, Prof. Farzad Safaei and Assoc Prof Supriya Singh will present on their respective programs.

Dr. Roger Kermode of Motorola has been invited to present on the benefits of a PhD in a career in Industry and Dr. Gautum Tendulkar will present on the importance of managing Intellectual Property. Students will present their own research directions on the second day, in a series of informal presentations.

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3. Upcoming Conferences & Calls for Papers
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* ACIP 2003

The Eighth Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy will be held in Wollongong, Australia, 9-11 July 2003. The conference is sponsored by the Australasian Computer Society and will be held in cooperation with the IEEE-CS Task Force on Information Assurance.

Four distinguished guest speakers will speak at the conference, including Professor Andrew Odlyzko from the University of Minnesota, Professor Chris Mitchell from Royal Holloway University of London, Dr. Li Gong from Sun Microsystem and Professor Gerard Milburn from the University of Queensland

For further information, please visit: http://www.itacs.uow.edu.au/research/NSLabs/acisp03
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* AAMAS03

The second international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems will be held in Melbourne, July 14-18 2003. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as a merger of three highly respected individual conferences (ICMAS, AGENTS, and ATAL). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.

The conference will include workshops, tutorials, technical papers, panels, and invited speeches over a four-day program that will address all the key issues in contemporary agent systems research. Activities are intended to cover the whole spectrum of contemporary agent R&D research.

For further details, please visit: http://www.aamas-conference.org
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* ForUse 2003

The second international conference on Usage-Centered Design will be held on 19-22 October 2003 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A Conference on Usage-Centered, Task-Oriented, and Performance-Centered Design for Software and Web Applications, ForUse 2003 is devoted exclusively to the design of better software and Web-based tools that support efficient, effective, and satisfying performance.

The conference will feature keynote speaker Bill Buxton of Principal at Buxton Design plus presentations by other leaders in usability and user interface design, as well as a rich program of tutorials, seminars, and presentations.

For further details, please visit: http://www.foruse.com/2003/index.htm
or email: foruse2003@foruse.com
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* DESIGN 2004

The 8th International DESIGN Conference will explore the potentials and usability of advanced information technologies in design and investigate a way forward. The goal is to bring together researchers who have worked on or thought about engineering and industrial design from a variety of perspectives, disciplines, and fields: engineering, aesthetics, ergonomics, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines.

Contributions are encouraged that describe the role and importance of collaborative design in the overall product cycle and interdependencies between the design activity and other product development processes. The due date for submission of abstracts is September 26, 2003. Paper submissions are due January 16, 2004.

For further details, please visit: http://www.designconference.fsb.hr/index.php
or email: design2004@fsb.hr

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4. Useful links and references
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* P. Bourges-Waldegg & S.A.R. Scrivener, “Applying and testing an approach to design for culturally diverse user groups,” Interacting with Computers, 13 (2) (2000) pp. 111-126
http://dx.doi.org10.1016/S0953-5438(00)00029-1

This paper intends to illustrate how user interface designers can apply the Meaning in Mediated Action (MIMA) approach (P. Bourges-Waldegg, A.R. Scrivener, “Meaning; the central issue is cross-cultural HCI design,” Interacting with Computers, 9 (3) (1998) 287–310, special issue on "Shared Values and Shared Interfaces") to design for culturally diverse user groups. After outlining its theoretical foundation, the authors describe how the MIMA stages––observation, evaluation, analysis and design––were carried out to redesign a WWW system. Finally, they assess the efficacy of this approach by comparing the results of the evaluation of the original and the redesigned interfaces.
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* Scanlon J., & Percival L., “UCD for Different Project Types, Part 1: Overview of Core Design Activities,” (2002)
ftp://www6.software.ibm.com/software/developer/library/us-ucd.pdf

The user-centered design methodology employed within many parts of IBM incorporates many features of usage-centered design, including user roles and task modeling based on essential use cases. This first of a two-part article describes the methodology and the core design activities that might be needed in various types of projects to produce usable and useful software.
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* R.G. O'Hagan, A. Zelinsky and S. Rougeaux, “Visual gesture interfaces for virtual environments,” Interacting with Computers, 14 (3) (2002) pp. 231-250
http://dx.doi.org10.1016/S0953-5438(01)00050-9

Virtual environments provide a whole new way of viewing and manipulating 3D data. Current technology moves images out of desktop monitors and into the space immediately surrounding the user. Users can literally put their hands on virtual objects. Unfortunately, techniques for interacting with such environments are yet to mature. Gloves and sensor-based trackers are unwieldy, constraining and uncomfortable to use. The authors introduce a framework for a natural, more intuitive method of interaction that would allow users to grasp objects with their hands and manipulate them as if they were real objects. A gesture interface for navigation and object manipulation in virtual environments is presented.
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