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 13th of January: Stefanie Mueller (MIT). Advancing Personal Fabrication by Making Physical Objects as Reprogrammable as Digital Data

Computing has revolutionized how we process and interact with data today, unfortunately, these capabilities are constraint to the digital realm and cannot yet be applied to physical matter. For instance, today, we can already quickly update the appearance of a digital photo by applying a filter or…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 9th of December: Sriram Subramanian (UCLIC). My Current and Future research plans at UCL

I want to use this talk to chart my past, present and future research plans. I would like this to be a very informal talk where I outline some of our past successes and failures along with details of projects we will be starting in 2021.
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UCLIC Research Seminar 2nd of December: Neha Kumar (Georgia Tech). Making Play Work 4D

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, like other mechanisms for conceptualizing societal wellbeing, center problems of immediate and pervasive importance: gender equality, world hunger, global health, quality education, and more. These are challenges of global relevance to be examined,…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 25th of November: Katarzyna Stawarz (Cardiff University). Integrating the Digital and the Traditional to Deliver Therapy for Depression: A User-Centred Design Study

Traditional approaches to psychotherapy emphasise face-to-face contact between patients and therapists, while current computerised approaches tend to minimise this contact. This can limit the range of mental health difficulties for which computerised approaches are effective. In this talk, Kathy…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 18th of November: Mark Perry (Brunel University). Rich interactions with digital money: from use to design

From cryptocurrencies to mobile banking apps, and QR codes to facial recognition-enabled payment, digital currencies and financial technologies are changing the ways that we think about and use money. The emergence of various forms of digital money and innovative digital financial services allows…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 4th of November: Marios Constantinides (Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge University). Tools for augmenting meetings experience.

In this talk, I will present a series of projects that aim at augmenting our workplace experience through tools that not only improve our productivity, but also account for our emotional and psychological experience. Taking meetings as a common workplace activity, I will demonstrate how the use of…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 14th of October: Praminda Caleb-Solly (Bristol Robotics Laboratory). Connected and Collaborative – designing assistive robots to change the dynamics of health and social care.

Assistive robots offer the potential to transform people's ability to manage their own health, particularly those with the greatest need and lack of adequate support. Our research is exploring how connecting robots with different types of sensors can provide real-time information to not only…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 7th of October: Ana Javornik (University of Bristol). The effects of augmented reality mirrors on consumers’ self-concept .

Augmented reality mirrors are popular marketing tools that allow virtual try-on of beauty products, such as make-up. In this talk I will discuss my current reserch project where I examined how such sensory experiences affect consumer perception of the self, specifically how consumers experience a…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 8th of July: Ahmed Alqaraawi (University College London). Evaluating Saliency Map Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) offer great machine learning performance over a range of applications, but their operation is hard to interpret, even for experts. Various explanation algorithms have been proposed to address this issue, yet limited research effort has been reported concerning…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 24th of June: Amid Ayobi (University College London and University of Bristol). Trackly: A Customisable and Pictorial Self-Tracking App to Support Agency in Multiple Sclerosis Self-Care

Self-tracking is for many people an important part of understanding and managing their health and wellbeing. However, predefined self-tracking approaches can impede people's self-care agency. In this talk, I will share the findings of our recent CHI paper that addresses this issue. We investigated…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 10th of June: Bran Knowles (Lancaster University), Understanding older adults' distrust of digital technology

It is well known that older adults continue to lag behind younger adults in terms of their breadth of uptake of digital technologies, amount and quality of engagement in these tools and ability to critically engage with the online world. Can these differences be explained by older adults' distrust…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 3rd of June: Mark Warner (Northumbria University), Can we effectively remain silent online? Exploring non-disclosure of sensitive information in the context of HIV status within dating apps.

In this talk, I will discuss research I conducted as part of my PhD. The topic centres on people's (in)ability to remain silent online. Within the context of HIV status disclosure in online dating or "hook-up" apps used by gay and bisexual men, I will discuss my research exploring the…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 20th of May: Chris Janssen (Utrecht University), Interrupted by Automation? Why and how to account for human behaviour in human-automation interaction settings

In the past, automated technology was mostly used by trained professionals, in dedicated environments, for specific purposes (e.g., control operators in factories, and pilots of aircraft). At the moment, this is radically changing. Automated technology is used more and more by regular people, for a…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 6th of May: Benjamin Cowan (University College Dublin), Perspective taking in human-machine dialogue: human-likeness, partner models and language production in voice user interface interaction

Voice has now become a mainstream interaction modality. It's therefore surprising how little we know about user centered issues, in particular how design guides a user's mental model (i.e. their partner model) and interaction behaviours. Current voice interfaces fundamentally rely on human…
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UCLIC CHI2020 Seminar Series: 29th April - How can Affect be Detected and Represented in Technological Support for Physical Rehabilitation?

Although clinical best practice suggests that affect awareness could enable more effective technological support for physical rehabilitation through personalisation to psychological needs, designers need to consider what affective states matter and how they should be tracked and addressed. In this…
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UCLIC CHI2020 Seminar Series: 22nd April - The Social Network: How People with Visual Impairment use Mobile Phones in Kibera

In low and middle income countries people with visual impairment are constantly faced with challenges that can affect their abilities to access opportunities and live life to their full potential. In recent years mobile phones have become increasingly common in low resourced settings and they have…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 19th of February: Birsen Donmez (University of Toronto), Young drivers, distraction, and automated vehicle technologies

Distraction is a significant contributing factor to young driver crashes. Crash risk is known to decrease with driving experience, partly because of the improved skills to control the vehicle, but also because of the improved capability to distribute attention, even when distracted. Although driver…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 12th of February: Yiannis Demiris (Imperial College London), Personalisation in Human Robot Interaction

As humans and robots increasingly co-exist in home and rehabilitation settings for extended periods of time, it is crucial to account for the users' constantly evolving profiles and adapt the interaction to the personal characteristics of the individuals involved. I will describe our predictive…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 5th of February: Jo Iacovides (Univeristy of York), Impact beyond play: Exploring the complexity of player experience

Gameplay frequently involves a combination of positive and negative emotions, where there is increasing interest in understanding more complex forms of player experience. In this talk I will present the findings of three different studies that consider overlooked aspects of gameplay. The first…
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UCLIC Research Seminar 29th of January: Simone Stumpf (City University of London), Making AI Intelligible

We are currently on the cusp of a revolution in smart technologies based on complex algorithmic decision-making, data science and machine learning. These systems are starting to be integrated into everyday life but it has been shown that users need to understand how these systems work, so that…
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