Roel Vertegaal, Nectar Researcher and Associate Professor of Human- Computer Interaction at Queen’s University’s prestigious Human Media Laboratory received $397,773 from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Leaders Opportunities Fund. The funds will be used towards expanding the Human Media Lab. This expansion will facilitate Dr. Vertegaal’s research program into advanced input and display techniques for organic user interface technologies, which include interfaces for paper, rubber and foldable computers. The award is part of a $28-million package to support 193 researchers working at 35 institutions across Canada.

“This award allows us to initiate new research in one of the most exciting areas of development in computing interfaces today,” says Roel Vertegaal, “It will allows us to develop completely flexible computers, computers that can have any shape or form, based on new display technologies such as e-ink, and new flexible circuit board substrates for displays.”

“CFI has provided us with an excellent mechanism for attracting top- flight researchers through their Leaders Opportunity Fund,” says Vice- Principal (Research) Kerry Rowe of Queen’s University. “The results of this competition will enable Queen’s researchers to acquire the equipment and infrastructure required to do world-class research.”

In announcing the new funding, CFI president and CEO Eliot Phillipson said: “Access to modern, cutting-edge equipment and facilities is imperative to research in the 21st century. Over the past decade, the CFI has provided thousands of world-class researchers with the tools they need to do their work. Without the infrastructure, they quite simply wouldn’t be in Canada.”

CFI’s Leaders Opportunity Fund program, created in 2006, was designed to give Canadian universities the flexibility to both attract and retain the very best researchers, at a time of intense international competition for leading faculty

Two NECTAR students working at UBC with Dr. Kellogg Booth have each been awarded Pacific Century Graduate Scholarships. This scholarship was created by a $10 million investment by the BC government to attract the best and brightest graduate students to universities in British Columbia.

Vicki Ha completed her bachelor’s degree in computer science at Dalhousie, working with NECTAR researcher Dr. Kori Inkpen. Vicki is now in the master’s program in Architecture at UBC and working on the ARTIFACT project led by Dr. Sheryl Staub-French in the Department of Civil Engineering. ARTIFACT is investigating how collaboration technology can be deployed in the construction industry, supported by a three-year NSERC strategic grant that grew out of research partially funded through NECTAR. Booth and former NECTAR postdoctoral fellow Dr. Melanie Tory are co-investigators.

Anthony Tang completed his master’s degree in computer science at Calgary, working with NECTAR researchers Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale and Dr. Saul Greenberg. Tony is now in the doctoral program in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC working with Dr. Sidney Fels, a frequent collaborator on NECTAR research. Tony’s dissertation research is looking at collaboration patterns for shared displays.

Each award is for $10,000 per year. The University of British Columbia is contributing an additional $7,000 per year for the duration of the scholarships.

More information at:

Colin recently defended his Ph.D. research on ways to measure and elicit emotional responses, such as surprise, fear, anger, and acceptance, from physical manual controls. The visceral emotional reactions that users have to technologies are increasingly understood to be important in terms of safety, performance, and pleasure in its own right. The thesis systematically explores users’s emotional (affect) reactions to everyday physical manual controls, in order to inform a design process that considers appropriate affective response as well as performance relationships.

Design of both mechanical and emerging mechatronic physical controls are addressed through a novel design process that includes parameterizing second order (inertial) dynamics using a system identification technique, and rendering models on a custom force- feedback knob.

The thesis also examines biometric and self-reported measures of the affective responses elicited by these dynamics, and develops an iterative prototyping tool for rapid refinement of the “feel” of physical controls. This research impacts use of the passive physical interfaces such as mechanical knobs and sliders that are already ubiquitous in our everyday environments, as well as the active physical controls that are emerging in embedded computing environments such as cars, games, and medical devices.

One use for this technology is to enhance collaborative interfaces with haptic feedback that conveys a sense of the participants’
emotional states. The supervisory committee was Kellogg Booth, Karon MacLean, and Joanna McGrenere. Colin is currently working with Incaa Designs on novel pen and paper computing. Incaa Designs is the research branch of Adapx (http://www.adapx.com/).

Thesis: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell/pubs/
ColinSwindellsPhDThesis_07March2007.pdf

Website: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell

Photo: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell/colin_swindells.jpg

For more information

• Thesis Defence
• Thesis
• Colin’s Web Site

You may want to navigate to the archived events, and peruse some of the talks there. For example, Graduate students will find interesting talks on topics such as Dealing with Writer’s Block’and How to Get Your Stuff Published.

Wired reports on the eyebox2 from xuuk (a startup), based on CEO and Nectar researcher Roel Vertegaal at Queens University. It describes an eye-tracking device that offers an automated method to find hot spots of eye activity in the real world, and how it could be applied to digital advertising and to create more ‘polite’ devices.

For more information: Read the article

The ORION Leadership Award recognizes the achievements of an individual for significant contributions to advancing research, education, science, or discovery through development and/or application of innovative information and communication technologies.

More information on ORION and a full description of all winners is available at:

A year away from completing his PhD. Chris created DocuBurst as a final course project and continues to build on his work. In the meantime, DocuBurst’s keyword search feature will be road-tested at the University of England this fall, when Chris will be asked to help analyze Victorian literature to determine how often authors used rare words, and in what context. Collins also just entered the Future of the Book contest in which he converted MacKenzie Wark’s open source book Gamer Theory into DocuBurst format.

More information and the full Toronto Star article are available at:

• A Digital Family Calendar in the Home: Lessons from Field Trials of LINC, Neustaedter, C., Brush, A.J., and Greenberg, S. Proc. Graphics Interface, May 28-30.
• Contact carman@cpsc.ucalgary.ca

This paper was previously provided in this blog. This work was performed in association with Microsoft Research, and was part of Carman’s Nectar-funded PhD work.

More about what she does and how she got there is on the web.