News, Events, Seminars

Seminars, Jun 19 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 19th of June: James Gadsby Peet (William Joseph Ltd) on "Designing Digital for older audiences"

Over the last couple of years, William Joseph have been asked to build more and more digital experiences for older users of the internet. Through these experiences we've learned a few things that you should consider when designing for people who have not grown up using digital tools. In this…

Seminars, Jun 12 2019 @ 14:30

UCLIC Research Seminar 12th of June: Sarah Bell (University of Exeter) on "Sensing Nature: Exploring nature with sight impairment"

Over the last few years, we have seen growing research and policy interest in the potential for time spent with nature to promote feelings of health and wellbeing. Yet relatively little effort has been made to understand such experiences in the varied contexts of life with impairment or disability.…

Seminars, Jun 05 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 5th of June: Bernardino Romera-Paredes (DeepMind) on "The U-net and its impact to medical imaging"

The U-net has become the predominant choice when facing any medical image segmentation task. This is due to its high performance in many different medical domains. In this talk, I will introduce the U-net, and I will present three projects from DeepMind Health Research that use the U-net to address…

Seminars, Jun 04 2019 @ 14:00

Joint UCL Knowledge Lab & UCLIC Seminar 4th of June: Gijs Huisman (Amsterdam University of Applied Science) on "A personal touch: adventures in haptic technology"

In this talk I will share my work on haptic technology, in particular haptics applied to social communication, from creating wearable technology for academic research to joining a startup company to create actual products. I will draw on work from psychology to outline my thoughts on social touch…

Seminars, May 22 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 22nd of May: Joel Fischer (University of Nottingham) on "The trouble with Alexa: voice interfaces and conversation design"

In this talk I will present our conversation analytic study of recordings of people's talk with Alexa in several homes in the UK, developed with colleagues Martin Porcheron and Stuart Reeves. I will examine fragments of Alexa-talk to show key features of the interaction of importance to those…

Seminars, May 15 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 15th of May: Ron Baecker (University of Toronto) on What society must require from AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, especially machine learning (ML) programs, are now being employed or proposed for use in: a) scanning résumés to weed out job applicants; b) evaluating risks children face in their families; c) informing judicial decisions about bail, sentencing, and parole; d…

Seminars, Apr 24 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 24th of April: Sarah Bell (UCL) on Co-designing infrastructure: engaging communities in complex, urban decisions

Infrastructure resilience is vital for the safety of the public, the strength of the economy, the health of the environment and local quality of life. Community resilience is also recognised as a key factor in determining responses to extreme events and delivering climate adaptation. To date,…

Seminars, Mar 20 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 20th of March: Lola Cañamero (University of Hertfordshire) on Embodied Affect in Autonomous and Social Robots

Emotions are a key aspect of human behavior, communication and cognition. Affective computing and human-oriented approaches to technology design take into account different aspects of emotions and their expression in order to create technology that humans feel comfortable with. However, the…

Seminars, Feb 27 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 27th of February: Tim Adlam (UCL) on Technology for capability: technology to enable exploration

Assistive technology design and product creation has been conservative and incremental for many years. This is changing with a new focus on the needs and desires of the user; the emergence of enabling innovations in sensing, control, manufacturing, information systems and service delivery; and a …

Seminars, Feb 06 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 6th of February: Youngjun Cho (UCL) on Physiological Computing towards Mental Disability Innovation

Physiological computing is an emerging research area enabling technologies to listen to our bodily functions and psychological needs. This talk provides an overview of my computational works in this area, summarised by three key components: physiological sensing, automatic affect recognition,…

Seminars, Jan 30 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 30th January: Leigh Clark (University College Dublin) on "Mapping Speech Research in HCI: Trends, Themes and Challenges"

Speech interfaces are growing in popularity and while their technical underpinnings are well documented, less is understood about the user side in the HCI field. This talk presents work from a review of 68 research papers on speech interfaces in HCI, where the trends, themes, findings and methods…

Seminars, Jan 23 2019 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 23rd January: Giles Bergel (University College London) on "Computer vision, facial recognition and the face as interface"

Computer vision is increasingly ubiquitous. This talk will, first, outline the state of the art in computer vision, demonstrating a number of open-source tools and resources developed as a result of colllaborations within the digital humanities. It will then outline some of the problems and…

Seminars, Dec 12 2018 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 12th December: Stuart Reeves (University of Nottingham) on "How UX practitioners produce findings in usability testing"

Usability testing has long been a core interest of HCI research and forms a key element of industry practice. Yet our knowledge of it presents striking absences. There are few, if any detailed accounts of the contingent, material ways in which usability testing is actually practiced. Further, it is…

Seminars, Dec 05 2018 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 5th December: Ana Tajadura-Jiménez (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid & UCLIC) on "The Hearing body: Body-centred sound technologies for emotional and physical health"

People, through their bodily actions, engage in sensorimotor loops that connect them to the surrounding world and to their own bodies. The incoming sensory information is integrated to form perceptions of one's own body appearance and capabilities. These body perceptions highly impact on people's…

Seminars, Nov 28 2018 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 28th November: Effie Lai-Chong Law (University of Leicester) on "Pick the Right Game Type and Game Experience Tool: Not that Easy!"

Picking a right game type to maximise the impact of a digital educational game (DEG) for learning a particular topic is not easy. Picking a right tool for evaluating game experience with digital games is not easy either. In fact, both tasks proved very challenging. In this talk I illustrate these…

Seminars, Nov 21 2018 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 21st November: Alessio Malizia (University of Hertfordshire) on "User Experience: a step towards Natural User Interfaces"

The road to natural interfaces is still long and we are now witnessing an artificial naturality. These interfaces are natural, in the sense they employ hand gestures, but they are also artificial, because the system designer imposes the set of gestures. In this lecture we will explore together the…

Seminars, Nov 14 2018 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 14th November: Matt Jones (University of Swansea) on "Designed in California... Whose future is it anyway? "

Mobile and ubiquitous computing researchers have long imagined future worlds for users in developed regions. Steered by such visions, they have innovated devices and services exploring the value of these with and for individuals, groups and communities. Meanwhile, such radical and long-term…

Seminars, Oct 31 2018 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 31st October: Ifat Yasin (University College London) on "Past, Present and Future: Assistive Devices for the Hearing Impaired"

The World Health Organisation (2010, 2013) has identified hearing loss as a significant global problem, not least because of the long-term effects of any untreated/unmanaged hearing loss on speech development, social integration, educational achievement and the psychological well-being of an…

Seminars, Oct 17 2018 @ 16:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 17th October: Lynne Baillie (Heriot-Watt University) on "Designing User Centered Rehabilitation Technologies"

My research has recently been focused on health technology (see Uzor and Baillie, 2012, Ayoade and Baillie, 2014, Micallef and Baillie, 2016, Salai and Baillie, 2018; Uzor & Baillie 2018). My talk, as a result, will concentrate on some of my recent research projects which have investigated how…

Seminars, Oct 10 2018 @ 15:00

UCLIC Research Seminar 10th October: Alan Dix (Swansea University) on "More than a Moment"

In understanding and designing effective and engaging interaction, we often focus on the moments of interaction the periods of minutes or hours while keystrokes, mouse clicks or finger movements across the screen elicit changing patterns of pixels and bits on computer memory. Yet these moments of…