UCLIC research seminars generally take place on Wednesdays at 3PM during term-time. Please see notices below in case of deviating dates/times of individual seminars (indicated in italic). Coffee and tea will be served afterwards around 4PM. If you would like to arrange to meet with a seminar speaker before/after a talk, kindly contact the host(s) or one of the seminar organisers: Duncan Brumby, Georgia Panagiotidou, Jeremy Opie.
To arrange to give a seminar talk at UCLIC, please contact one of the seminar organisers (see above).
Calendar
Past seminars
UCLIC Research Seminar 15th December: Dr Judith Odili Uchidiuno, Designing culturally relevant early literacy and STEM educational technologies that supplement formal education for underserved students

Education technologies are often posited as solutions for closing early literacy and STEM gaps for students with limited access to quality formal education. Some technologies have shown success as educational interventions; however, many others fail as they do not account for the culture and…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 24th November: Andrew McStay, Gauging civic feeling of emotion recognition: ethics, policy, and citizen opinion

Focus Drawing on past and ongoing work, this talk will consider the social trajectory of technologies that pertain to gauge and interact with human emotion. With hitherto unseen attention from policymakers and civil society groups, emotion recognition is now high on human rights and data…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 17th November Nithya Sambasivan, Google Research, The myopia of model centrism

AI models seek to intervene in increasingly higher stakes domains, such as cancer detection and microloan allocation. What is the view of the world that guides AI development in high risk areas, and how does this view regard the complexity of the real world? In this talk, I will present results…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 3rd November Matthew Lease (University of Texas at Austin) Content Moderation: Understanding Health Risks for Workers and Designing Interventions

Social media platforms must detect and block a variety of unacceptable user-generated content, such such as adult or violent images. This detection task is difficult to automate due to high accuracy requirements, costs of errors, and nuanced rules for what is and is not acceptable. Consequently,…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 27th of October: Katie Shilton (University of Maryland, College Park). Levers for Ethics in Technology Design

The values and ethics built into technological systems are gaining increasing attention. This talk will introduce the challenges of values-oriented design for technologies which are meant to be flexible, adaptable, interoperable, and global. It will then present research on two salient values for…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 13th of October: Carsten Sørensen (London School of Economics and Political Science). The Age of Value-Sensitive Digital Infrastructures?

The technical process of digitizing analogue data into digital bit-streams and the associated socio-technical processes of digitalisation has yet to fully reveal their disruptive potentials - yet researchers and practitioners alike must comprehend these phenomena. Digitalization removes tight…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 6th of October: Leah Findlater (University of Washington). The Potential, Challenges and Risks of AI-based Accessibility: An HCI Perspective

AI-based accessibility tools hold tremendous potential to counter everyday disabling experiences with computing technologies and the physical world—from personalizing how a device interprets each user's input to amplifying a user's sensory abilities with additional information. In this talk,…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 23rd of June: Arunesh Mathur (Princeton University). Unravelling the web of manipulative and deceptive user interfaces.

Manipulative and deceptive user interfaces --- the so-called "dark patterns" --- have been the focus of growing scrutiny from researchers, legislators, and regulators. The academic literature on dark patterns has curated collections of objectionable user interface designs, describing them…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 16th of June: Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy (BBC R&D) . Designing for the Future: Anticipating the needs of BBC audiences.

The role of BBC Research & Development is to provide world-class leading edge technical research and innovation expertise to the BBC in order to better serve the UK audience. This enables the corporation to continue to create and deliver innovative high-quality content and services, on a wide…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 9th of June: Angelika Strohmayer (Northumbria University). Reflections on Justice-oriented Design and Academia.

In this talk, Angelika will talk about justice-oriented design and development of technologies. She will first explain what this ethos of work relates to, and illustrate this with examples of her own practice. Furthermore, Angelika will discuss how this way of working can seep into all the nooks…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 26th of May: Xing-Dong Yang (Dartmouth College). Creating Smart Everyday Things.

In my vision, the user interfaces of the future are in a blend of smart physical and virtual environments. My research focuses on the physical side by bringing interactivity to everyday things. I believe this vision is only achievable if people with varying backgrounds and abilities can work…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 14th of April: Ali Goode (Gorilla in the room). Ways of researching documentary: research into, for and through documentary.

George Bernard Shaw said "England and America are two countries separated by the same language". Having moved from academic cognitive science to market research Dr Ali Goode tells how business and academia can be similarly separated by the concept of what research is.
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UCLIC Research Seminar 31st of March: Dave Green (Lancaster University). Ways of researching documentary: research into, for and through documentary.

In this talk, I will discuss my experiences as a researcher and documentary-maker in various contexts. I will focus on projects I have been involved in that combine documentary and research in interesting ways, including my current research, which seeks to develop new ways of understanding design…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 24th of March: Audrey Girouard (Carleton University, Ottawa). Deformable and wearable devices: Leveraging new devices for more tangible interactions.

Deformable and shape-changing devices offer users the ability to physically manipulate objects to interact with them, which in turns can offer new interaction techniques to users. When wearable, devices can integrate on the body or on clothes to make this interaction more ubiquitous. These devices…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 17th of March: Thijs Roumen (Hasso Plattner Institute). Portable Laser Cutting

Laser-cut 3D models shared online tend to be basic and trivial—models build over long periods of time and by multiple designers are few/nonexistent. I argue that this is caused by a lack of an exchange format that would allow continuing the work. At first glance, it may seem like such a…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 10th of March: Carl Hayden Smith(Ravensbourne University London). Generating New Forms of Media from the Horizon Programme to the XPRIZE: Wearable experience (WE) and Neuroadaptive Mixed Reality Training.

The Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) conducts design research into the application of information and communication technologies to augment, support and transform cognition. LTRC research areas include i) XR technologies and techniques for learning, industry and work-based learning. ii)…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 3rd of March: Marianna Obrist (UCLIC). A ‘Flavour’ of Things to Come: Feeling Human in a Digital World

Nature has provided us with many senses for perceiving and interacting with the world around us. The multisensory world we live in is increasingly transformed through technological advances like novel multisensory devices and interfaces. Such multisensory technologies not only stimulate our eyes…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 24th of February: Khan M. Iftekharuddin (Batten College of Engineering and Technology). Deep Simultaneous Recurrent Learning

Deep neural networks have revolutionized the use of artificial neural networks for recognition tasks. Deep learning alleviates the need for hand-crafted feature discovery and enables autonomous learning using large scale data. The organization and workings of recurrent neural networks mimics the…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 10th of February: Daniel Leithinger (University of Colorado Boulder). Shape Displays for Remote Togetherness

We need physicality in computing now more than ever, and shape displays may help us reclaim it. While socially distant, our daily experience of work and learning is a stark reminder that videos on a flat computer screen cannot replace the intimacy of touch and the sense of presence when sharing a…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 20th of January: Diego Martinez Plasencia (UCL). Seamless Multimodal 3D Interfaces.

Virtual and Augmented Reality interfaces have long promised to revolutionize the way we visualize and interact with 3D information. However, the need for devices such as headsets, controllers or feedback devices means that these benefits remain behind a prior boundary. That is, users will need to…
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