A lot has happened in this time, I’ve finished my exams. Most of which went relatively well, barring of course the Grid Computing exam which was always going to be a wildcard. I’m now officially finished University as well after handing in my research dissertation last Monday. All-in-all it went well, however running out of time towards the end, my personal calling card, did mean that the report tends to tapper off in quality towards the final sections – but at least it’s finished.

Since finishing I’ve been looking after the pub at home as my parents were on holiday and returned yesterday. Other than that I’ve been sitting here at my computer playing World of Warcraft a hell of a lot, watching the majority of the Friends seasons on DVD and over the past two days watching Supernatural season one on DVD as well.

After only a week and a half of freedom from University I’m starting to feel lost as there’s no paticular direction to my life just now. I’m hoping to start a PhD next year but that all depends upon a funding grant from the EPSRC, so I’m currently caught in limbo between either finding a real job or a filler one until I hear for sure about the funding.

Procrastinating isn’t half as fun as it is when you’re meant to be doing something else. Sitting playing WoW doesn’t appeal as much now as it did when I had work which I was supposed to be doing at the time. Doing things you do to “take a break” from something doesn’t appeal when the thing you’re doing is actually the thing you’re taking a break from [some punctuation was harmed in the making of this sentance].

Other than playing world of warcraft and starting to keep a World of Warcraft blog to track your progress in the game (killer of a good few hours that could’ve been used for work), watching DVDs and playing cards I’ve not done anything. It sounds great but not doing anything when there’s nothing to do is pretty damn boring.

Other than doing nothing I’ve also managed to break my new XDA Exec which is currently en-route to O2 who will be replacing it with a new unit. Somehow whilst trying to flash the new WM5 version onto the device it seems to have deleted the original version, as expected, but not written the new version, not as expected. This means that when I did a hard reset on the device to update the OS there was nothing there to install and the device would just hang at an O2 splash screen. After some searching on the web and trying some wierd fixes nothing worked so it was on to O2 who asked me to send the device to them.

There’s nothing much left to add really, suppose I’d best start looking for a job to fill in the time between watching DVDs, playing World of Warcraft and sleeping; but I’ll get around to that later as it’s Friday night and I can hear a game of cards a-calling me from the pub…
- Chris

Also on the agenda has been getting a new mobile phone, after looking around for a while I found the perfect (or so it seems) fusion of the two: the XDA Exec.

The Exec is the O2 version of the i-mate JasJar and boasts the same list of impresive features. I managed to pick mine up with a contract for less than a quarter of the £600+ that would be required to buy a JasJar alone.

It should hopefully arrive on Tuesday morning and I can have a play around with it then. I’ll post more about the workings of the device then. For now look at the purty pictures above.
- Chris

I am currently running a questionnaire into how people organise and browse their music collections in order to investigate browsing techniques for browsing large collections (in this case of music) from a sonified and gesture controlled interface. The study will look at the applicability of this type of interface for browsing large collections and attempt to find a suitable browsing method for doing so.

I would kindly ask anyone reading this to fill in a relatively short music questionnaire about how you browse and organise your music collections. It doesn’t matter if your collection is large or small, digital or CDs, all input is welcomed.

If you would take the time to fill in the questionnaire I would be very grateful.
- Chris

The rubrik of this exam was 7 questions out of 7, so no room for breathing space.

Question 1

• A – Easy question outlining the three driving factors for integration driving factors and tactical vs. strategic initiatives
• B – Another easy question to indicate the level of integration that should be used in three different companies, giving justification for each

Question 2

• Seemed initially an easy question, although upon reflection may have been harder than I thought. Basically give reasons why using a MOM and integrated enterprise would be better than the existing system. The part I was unsure of was the discussion of “integration facets”, a term which I don’t remember ever hearing – hopefully it just refers to the properties and isn’t something I’ve totally missed

Question 3

• Discussion of a paper by Nicholas Carr called IT Doesn’t Matter, just mentioning the main points of the paper and explaining your standpoint

Question 4

• A – Discussion of how to integrate legacy systems
• B – Legacy system maintenance, wasn’t quite sure how to answer this question, ended up reiterating parts from A

Question 5

• Another tricky question, in two parts to discuss the use of either interoperability, federation, consolidation or integration with respect to two companies. For a total of 8 marks there didn’t seem that much to say.

Question 6

• Easy question to discuss the issue of performance in Internet-Based systems and to draw a couple of failsafe devices used for the hardware

Question 7

• Another simple question to write a small essay based upon parts of the course, I did the essay on EDI vs. XML as a method of data exchange

All in all not a bad exam, one of the nicer ones to have as the first anyway.
- Chris

I’ve just had nothing worth saying… until now!

It’s that time of the year for an obligitory exams-are-coming post, here it is.

I have in total, 8 exams this year, 1 less than the grand total last year although starting 9 days earlier.

Before that starts I’ve got to hand in my proposal for my project, it’s nearly done and has to be handed in on Tuesday 2nd May. Once that’s out of the way it’s onto exams, the line up is as follows:

• Wed 3rd May: Enterprise Computing (M) – Business / Computing type course
• Mon 8th May: Information Retrieval (M) – Search engines, retrieval functions
• Tue 9th May: Professoinal Skills (M) – PI for dummies
• Wed 10th May: Grid Computing (M) – DAS and some
• Fri 12th May: Compilers 4 – Writing machine code
• Thur 18th May: Network Communication Technology 4 – Cables and RFCs
• Tue 23rd May: Advanced Research Readings in Computing Science (Software Engineering) – Readings in the area of Web Engineering
• Thur 25th May: Types and Programming Languages (M) – Functional language implementations

So it looks like a fun month ahead for me then!
- Chris

Research Journal

On the MSc course at Glasgow we have all been asked to buy a hardback ledger in which we are to keep a diary of what we are doing in our research. That’s fine, but I’m a computing scientist, writing things down goes against the grain – I want a computing related solution to this problem.

After a while contemplating I concluded that alternatives to having a hardback book would be:

1. blogging software (i.e. WordPress)
2. wiki software (i.e. MediaWiki)

Blogs

Blogs lend themselves to chronological recording of data, after-all they are in necessity online diaries. Blogs can be a simple way to record ideas, dates of events and so on.

Wikis

Wikis, although not strictly ordering entries by time and date, allow for very easy addition and formatting of new content. Most wikis will allow you to create categorised or special pages. For example in MediaWiki pages can be prefixed when naming them, this can be used to categorise the pages.

Combinations

Both blogging software and wikis can be used in combination of course, blogs giving the chronological progression between different research papers and wikis showing the resulting thoughts, summaries and so on that you generate.

Why do it?

Keeping a digital version of this information means we don’t have any issue with loosing the research journal or spilling coffee over it (note: don’t spill coffee over your computer either).

Project co-ordinators can see how you are progressing, comment on what they think of your research via comment mechanisms in a blog and talk/discuss pages on a wiki.

Collaborations

Online versions of research journals can help in collaborative projects – the research journal becomes a platform for collective reasoning, interaction, and the sharing of ideas.

If you don’t want to do it electronically

The real lesson to take away from this post is that a research journal is a good thing to have, be it a bound book, wiki, blog or whatever combination.

My Wiki usage

I am currently doing research on my project for the year, which is what sparked this article, SonG. For the project I use a wiki to manage my research, post ideas, and transcribe meeting minutes to mention a few things. I thought it may be useful to share the page title formats I use for doing so.

Meetings:

• Index: Meetings
• Meeting: Meeting:[YYYY][MM][DD]
• YYYY = year, MM = month and DD = day

Papers:

• Index: Papers
• Paper: Paper:[KEY]
• KEY = the bibliography key for the paper

Project specific:

• Title: [Project]:[Title]
• I.e. SonG:Links

I hope this is useful to anyone doing a project involving any type of research, although this type of journal is not restricted to only research based projects.

- Chris

Media

First get a good .PDF or .PS copy of the paper in question. Print the document, I usually go for double sided to save space and 2-up if it’s a particularly long paper.

If the paper has a lot of pictures or diagrams take the time and expense to print it in colour. You’d be amazed at how much more a colourful document will hold your attention over a grayscale one, also detail will not be obscured due to poor colour choice from the author.

Meta

If you’re using any sort of bibliography database, and you really should be – BibTeX is my preference, then you’ll be generating keys for all the documents you enter into it. Write the paper’s key on the top of the paper along with the year it was published.

This saves time if you’re citing the paper later, rather than having to search though the database, usually a flat file, to find the title or author of the paper, you simply have to glance at the first page.

Leave space at the top of the paper for any general comments you have about the paper overall. Don’t write a critical review, just a quick note which you will be able to use to identify the contents of the paper quickly. Another useful thing to add to any paper is a list of keywords. Many conferences and journals add these to papers but your own keywords will have more meaning to you than the general ones produced by the publishers.

Once you have read the paper look through the list of references, highlight any that you think are potentially useful and try and find them, this is possibly the path your research will follow and maybe the next paper you should read. Once you have a copy and thus a key for the paper, due to your corresponding bibliography entry, note the key next to the reference. This allows you to quickly find out if you have the paper at a later date for example when rereading the paper for other research and allows you to quickly assess which paper it is.

Reading the paper

Something we’ve had knocked into us on the MSc course at Glasgow is how to read a research paper. The general consensus is a 5 stage process:

1. Read the abstract – this should roughly tell you what the paper is about, what the problem addressed is, what the authors did and what they found.
2. Read the introduction and conclusion – skipping to the end of a book usually gives away the plot, skipping to the end of a research paper will help you understand the ideas in the paper as it will contain a concise version of everything the author has said. You should have a fair idea of what’s coming from reading the abstract anyway. Reading the start and end of the paper will give a better insight into what the paper is about and help you decide if it applies to your area of research or not.
3. Read the whole paper – jumping past anything which you get stuck on. Read all the details quickly, glance at figures, tables and equations but don’t over invest time in trying to understand them. Reading the whole paper quickly will give you an overall feel for the argument put forward in the paper.
4. Re-read the paper – this time going into the fine details and trying to understand the parts of the paper which eluded you the first time round. If necessary look at some of the supporting material, consult books, websites, peers, colleagues and so forth.

   Make notes in the margins of the paper, most papers are typeset in either one or two columns, this gives space on either side of the text to annotate it – make
   notes, reference other works, point out problems e.t.c.. This is where it is useful to have a physical copy of the paper. Highlight key areas of the paper using whatever means you wish, I will go on to talk about this in the next section.

5. Summarise – write your blurb on the front page of the paper and then try and write a page summary of the whole paper. Aim to include the main points of the paper, the arguments, methodologies uses, results and conclusions which you feel relate to your research or may do in the future.

   This is useful if you need to grasp the idea of the paper quickly at a later date, don’t rely on remembering about the paper – you will forget the details.

Highlighting content

Everyone has a different method for marking parts of the paper they are reading. I prefer to use highlighter pens as they do not obscure the detail or text in the document unlike circling or underlining.

Most papers, I find, tend to break down into four main sections:

1. Introduction and related work
2. Problem definition and intended methodology
3. Experiment details and results
4. Discussion and conclusions

Each of these sections I match to a different coloured highlighter pen, the same for every paper to make it easier to find sections of the document. I use:

Yellow

Introduction

Orange

Problem definition

Green

Experiment details

Red

Conclusion

Obviously some papers don’t follow this general pattern, such as survey papers, in this case I use the yellow and red pens as before, for the introduction and conclusion. I then alternate between the orange and green highlighters for different sections or ideas within the paper body.

Storage

I urge you to keep all research papers after you’ve read them. Keep a digital copy, but also keep the printed copy which contains your annotations. It is also useful to keep a printed copy of your page summaries with the corresponding papers for a quick reference to the paper.

As the physical copy of the paper is likely to be the only annotated version of the paper you have make sure you don’t loose it. As I’ve mentioned you will forget the details and annotations can be a low cost solution to jogging the memory.

Get a box file, put the papers and summaries into it, organise them in any manner you wish but just keep them.

Re-visiting

All this seems a lot of work just for reading one research paper, but the this time is an investment which will be paid back in droves later.

Whenever you are required to cite papers or give related/supporting work sections in reports or your own papers the page summaries will provide you with the textual descriptions of the content that you will likely use. Re-writing a section on a particular paper five times, and consequently re-reading the paper five times, will take up more time than annotating and summarising the paper originally.

Enjoy!

I enjoy reading research papers, as long as they’re not too technically heavy, but reading research papers can take a long time. I’ve found that using a formulated and structured approach to reading, annotating and summarising the papers make the process easier and quicker, this is why I’m sharing my guide with you.

That’s all I have to say, if anyone has anything to add, or their own unique style for reading papers, feel free to add a comment detailing it.
- Chris

The project I’m undertaking is entitled 3D Sonification with Gestures. It is a self proposed project which myself and Steve Brewster came up with, and thus Steve will be supervising the project.

I wrote a small blurb (below) which presents the main idea of the project, which was then submitted to the projects coordinator (who this year happens to be David Watt) and it was accepted.

There has been a lot of work over recent years into the use of gestures with computers, work in this area continues and is constantly being integrated with different technologies and other types of interactions to create new and more sophisticated interactions between humans and computers.

The project proposed here is to combine gestures with sonification on a handheld device such as a PDA for an application such as the browsing and selection of music through the use of 3D spacial audio.

The research would study the effectiveness of use of 3D spacial audio for the selection of items which are placed around a user at different angles and distances, the study would specifically look into the way in which users would use such a system and any possible implications in the area of handheld/mobile devices.

My project proposal has to be finished and in for the 2nd May and the whole project and dissertation finished for the 11th September. Hopefully I’ll get a fair bit of reading done over Christmas (but is that really likely?).
- Chris

And the name of the pub quiz team that was entered into the Compsoc Pub Quiz 2005, that entailed a lot of obscene looking photos of men, some very evil questions on the part of Peter Dickman and some pretty nifty computer games (a lot more nifty than we had last year – we had a Heat round!).

It was a good night had by, dare I say, all. I’ve got a few photos which will appear in the Gallery soon.

C.L.I.T.O.R.I.S, what a team, apparently we won! I had to leave half way through the last round, I’m hoping we won best name as well.
- Chris

Today is that day.

I’m sitting at home in Dumfries, although I’m meant to be sitting in a lecture in Glasgow, because my lift to the station this morning didn’t turn up. I’d usually catch a ride off my dad but he’s off on holiday in another country.

Naturally I was a little displeased about this state of affairs. Anyway, everything else today seems to be annoying the hell out of me, my dog’s being a pain in the ass and things just don’t seem to be going smoothly at all!

For instance my iPod wont connect to my PowerBook through the dock anymore, normally I’d just shrug my shoulders and connect it via the firewire connection which plugs into the dock (which it seems to work perfectly through). However today I’m in a perpetual state of anger, shouting at the dock and threatening to throw it out of the window. Perhaps it’s because of this film I watched last night, The Last Horror Movie, which looked as if it was going to be a decent enough film but turned out to be an utter pile of steaming, freshly lain shit (seriously, never see this movie, not even for the sake of curiosity as to how shit it is). Perhaps it’s because of this itch I have on my back but can’t quite reach.

The thing that seems to be pissing me off the most is the fact that I’m pissed off for no real reason at all.

If you don’t hear from me in a while it’s because I’ve murdered someone, been caught, and have been sent down for 20-to-life!
- Chris

I used to do all my LaTeX writing under Windows XP, using a program called WinEdt with the MiKTeX version of LaTeX.

Since changing to Mac OS for writing LaTeX I’ve been looking around for some good tools for managing and writing anything I have to and here’s what I’ve found:

TeXShop

Good, free tool for editing and typesetting LaTeX documents. Comes complete with BibTeX integration as well as a lot of useful templates and shortcuts (a very nice feature is an automatically updating .pdf viewer), the inclusion of syntax highlighting and auto completion is very useful. I’ve been using this for the past few months and have found no flaws in it.

Here’s some speel of the site:

TeXShop is a TeX previewer for Mac OS X, written in Cocoa. Since pdf is a native file format on OS X, TeXShop uses “pdftex” and “pdflatex” rather than “tex” and “latex” to typeset; these programs in the standard teTeX distribution of TeX produce pdf output instead of dvi output.

TeXShop uses TeXLive and teTeX, standard distributions of Tex programs for Unix machines. The distributions include tex, latex, dvips, tex fonts, cyrillic fonts, and virtually all other programs and supporting files commonly used in the TeX world. These distributions are maintained for the Mac by Gerben Wierda, and available below.

The latest TeXShop release requires System 10.4 (Tiger). Users with systems 10.2 or 10.3 should use TeXShop 1.40, also available on this site. Users with systems 10.0 and 10.1 should use TeXShop 1.19, available here.

TeXShop is distributed under the GPL public license, and thus free.

Here’s the links to:

• the developer site, and
• download page

I’d recommend trying it out if you’re likely to be writing any serious documentation.

BibDesk

Another really useful tool which I’ve found for academic use. It’s basically a BibTeX organiser with a lot of addons.

As well as allowing you to add, edit and organise BibTeX entries it allows you to:

• locally link papers or articles,
• self-organises these linked articles if you wish (much like the iTunes music folder will if you ask it to),
• URL linking of articles,
• drag and drop LaTeX citation code for entry into .tex documents (in a variety of formats, i.e. \cite{Miller:2005}, \citet{Miller:2005}, …),
• auto cite key generation from BibTeX entry (based upon a user specified pattern},
• searching of BibTeX entries,
• import and export of the BibTeX file in a variety of formats (XML, RSS and Atom included among others), and
• previewing specific or ranges of entries as they would appear in a LaTeX document.

This is the kind of tool I’ve been looking for ages for, not only does it hold the details of the articles for referencing in reviews/papers, it holds and organises the articles themselves. This tool has made using BibTeX with LaTeX a hell of a lot easier for me, I’d highly recommend this to anyone who is ever going to keep a record of the papers that he/she has read.

The definition of BibDesk on this site is given as:

BibDesk is a graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager for Mac OS X. BibDesk is designed to help organize and use bibliographic databases in BibTeX .bib format. In addition to manual typing, BibDesk lets you drag & drop or cut & paste .bib files into the bibliographic database and automatically opens files downloaded from PubMed. BibDesk also keeps track of electronic copies of literature on your computer and allows for searching your database through several keys.

BibDesk integrates well with TeX for creating citations and bibliographies. This integration includes a Citation search completion service, and drag & drop (cut & paste) support for adding citations to TeX files.

Here’s the links to:

• the developer site, and
• download page

So not only can you generate nice looking, transferrable documents; but you can do so on a good OS with some great tools, making the LaTeX experience (not the rubbery kind!) much more stress free and enjoyable for all!
- Chris

I finished my job at the University over two weeks ago now, spent a week looking after the pub at home for my folks when they were on holiday and am now back at University and into my second week.

The Job

Went well, everything was finished, more or less, and all wrapped up. Steve Brewster and David McGookin colaborated and wrote a paper based upon what I did over the Summer. They’ve submitted it to CHI 2006, whether it gets accepted or not, we’ll have to see.

The Pub

An eventful week was had by all, consisting of things blowing up, throwing people out of the bar and kicking in doors. I’ll say no more.

The University

Uni is going fine, although the research readings course is a bit hefty. I’ve decided to do Information Retrieval (M), Types and Programming Languages (M) and Network Communications Technology 4.

The courses seem interesting enough, with TPL and IR both grabbing the attention quickly (Simon actually seems pleased about the class size dwindling each session. As I’ve said the Research Readings is taking up a lot of time: reading 4 papers a week and summarising 2 of them (all four for the first few weeks). Then there’s two in-depth reviews to be done throughout this term!

There’s another few courses which I am privy to, Research Methods and Techniques (M) is one which starts this Thursday and Professional Skills (M) (a sort of masters level Professional Issues) is due to start in another 3 weeks. Anyway, everything’s going well and all this reading and discussion of papers can be exciting at times. Most of the time it’s pretty boring though.

That’s the lot folks, hope everyone is having as good a time as me at their respective jobs or courses (or mid-morning TV watchings),
- Chris

P.S. I’ve now also managed to break the 3 st barrier on my diet, now having lost 3 st 2 lb (or 0.019958064 metric tonnes).

This has gotten me thinking about what else smell could be used for.

It occurs to me that smell, rather than being used as an input, would be better used as a notification system. The idea that shot straight to mind was an Olfactory Clock.

The use of ambient smell to mark status is one which can be done with relative ease, say 2 smells, one for AM and the other for PM. All you’d need to do is smell the air and you’d know if it was morning or night (assuming you had no grasp at all of the time of day).

A smell an hour

Say we then did this for the hours of the day, 24 different smells which represent the hour that it is. Although you don’t get the fine grained information you would from a clock, you’d still know that if you’d smelt the 10 AM smell that you still had at least an hour before the big 12 PM meeting you are meant to attend.

So the main premise is to have a range of 24 (even 12 would do) smells which represent the hours 00 – 24 (or in the case of 12 smells 00 – 12 and 12 – 24 again). By recognising the smells you could roughly tell the time of day.

Say if we had 24 smells for each hour and the smells for the hour bore some resemblance to that hour of the day, for example in the early morning, at say 7 AM, you would get the light fresh smell of a new day, whereas at 7 PM you would be greeted with the danker and more Autumn smell of the evening.

If we have smells which migrate throughout the day, from the fresh morning smell to the height of the day and on to the dusk/night then we can have a continuous output of the time of day, represented by the changing mixture of the smell of that time of day.

Silent chimes

If we have this continuous output we will never be able to tell when the hours change, there’s no way to chime the hour in.

Perhaps if we had silent chimes that were smelled rather than heard. A few strong blasts of that hours smell should alert anyone in the vicinity of the new hour or at least alert them that another hour has passed.

Alarming

So if we can alert people to the time and the changes in the hours, wouldn’t it be useful to be able to have some sort of alarm system? Yes it would!

We can do this is much the same way that we are chiming in the hours, using a strong burst of smell to indicate the event or time has been reached. This also gives us the added option to somehow link the alarm to the time or event that is being alerted. For example say an alarm was set on an ordinary clock for 12:00 PM to show it was lunch time. When it goes off you are told it is 12:00 PM but not that it’s lunch time. If, however, we use a smell to tell you that it’s 12:00 PM and that smell is associated with lunch time then we can give you information about the time and the event. So perhaps a smell of apples could be used to show that it’s lunch time, then whenever you smell that apple scent you’d know that you should be off to the canteen to get the best choice of the muffins.

This allows us then to have different alarms with different meanings, instead of having an alarm at 12:00 PM then another at 5:00 PM you’d have a lunch related one at 12:00 and a travel related one at 5:00 to signal to you that it’s time to go home.

That’s all fine and well…

But how can you do it?

I’ve seen some papers which discuss the use of readily available (but at a large price) components that will allow you to generate smell by connecting the device to your computer via USB. These devices use wax, which is heat up, to generate the smell. A small fan then blows the smell into the air.

Something like this would be ideal, with the ability to buy different wax disks to place in the clock allowing users to customise the smell of their clock.

When I first had this idea I drew a few sketches of the idea which you can see below:

This is the main view of the clock, the grill on the top dispenses the smell into the air.

The back of the clock, it has two trays (one for AM and one for PM) into which the wax disks for the smell could be loaded/replaced.

Side of the clock, with trays which would contain the wax disks used for the alarm smells.

The face of the clock, with an analogue face to allow the user to read the time, also a digital one (why not). Buttons could be used to set the clock and change date times (although if the device was attached to a computer it would probably seem best to do this via a GUI rather than physically on the clock!).

Clock of the future

So there it is folks, the clock of the future! Pre-order one now, send me £1000 in the mail and I’ll send one to you as soon as the first batch rolls off.
- Chris

Actually it was just a drill, the deafening alarm went off, ringing in my ears. Stumbling, from the pain of the alarm, I managed to lock the PowerBook (I considered taking it with me!) and the PC (which I was definately leaving), and made my way to the nearest fire escape.

Then I went outside for a chat with David McGookin and Stephen Brewster, all very civalised. Then I came back inside. Disaster everted.

Derek had a far more interesting time of it all, he got to bread the dome of escapage:

Life in lilybank is never dull!
- Chris

I thought all the smells would be light, subtle smells that hinted towards grass, flowers, chocolate and so on. They are, in fact, the strongest artificial smells I’ve ever had the displeasure of smelling.

And that’s just to start, I’ll be working with these smells for the next month. Oh the joy,
- Chris

I snuck out into the secret garden and managed to take some pictures for all to enjoy, here are a few samples:

Don’t tell anyone, remember this is a Secret garden,
- Chris

The project is as mentioned before about tagging photos with smells, something that has had little practical research done on it. The main idea is to use RFID tagged smell cubes to allow users to flag photos as being connected with any one or more smells. The tag (and smell cube) is waved across the RFID reader and this is used to tag the photos. The reverse is done to search through photos with the smell cube being used to identify the smells to isolate and the reader picking up the ID of the smells.

The first day went really well (apart from the extreeme tierdness from being up at 5:45 AM for my commute – something I will get used to I hope), with me looking into various photo browsing software and trying to isolate the appeal and faults of each for a task such as this and playing around with the Phidgets which I will be using for the RFID tags. The first four applications to come to mind (the first through Steve Brewster) are:

• Adobe Elements
• iPhoto
• Flickr
• Picassa

Both Elements and Flickr seem to be the lead runners as the other two don’t seem to have any publicly available APIs (at least none that I can find). This could lead to either an Adobe Elements plugin or an application which uses Flickr as a back end to store and organise the photos. Time will tell which will prevail.
- Chris

Nothing much has been happening at all, I’ve been sleeping a lot, playing darts and dominos, learning to play a card came called crib, drinking and the odd once and a while, playing World of Warcraft.

Uni’s finished and the graduation ball was excellent, my photos of the event are available as are a copy of Lynsey’s photos. Thanks to all the people who organised the night and all those who were there and made it an enjoyable evening, the most notable memory possibly being Rory climbing over the Sherbrooke castle roof!

So the summer is starting to plod along, I have moved back to the pub in Dumfries and have just gotten everything into my new bedroom. I’m getting settled back in and have started living healthier (after my junk food filled revision), having joined the local gym and gone on a diet (one week down and 7lbs lost, but a fair few still to go!).

Other than this I am just waiting out the remaining 8 days until I start my summer scholarship on the 1st of July, looking forward to getting back into a routine but also dreading the 4-5 hour roundtrip commute I will have to make every day. I’ve been thinking about the scholarship and trying to gather my thoughts on how to approach the problem, but there is nothing substantial as of yet to mention, I will post more when I have started the job.

Anyway, life is going fine and I’m looking forward to seeing anyone who will be around in Glasgow when I’m finally back up regularly.
- Chris

So I decided to do all of Matthew’s questions as the question Phil wrote contained too much that I didn’t know. Details of the questions are given below:

Question 1

• A – Functionality of DigitalDesk focusing on user context [3]
• B – Affordances, descriptions of basic affordances illustrating via the DigitalDesk example [9]
• C – Ubicomp, description of and examples of “focusing on the task, not the tool” [5]
• D – Weiser’s ubicomp approach is “unachievable or incomplete”, argue for this claim [8]

Question 2

• A – Name 3 wide area positioning systems, outlining coverage, accuracy, cost and availability [6]
• B – RF positioning for ubicomp, factors that affect quality, transmission and detection in terms of objective and subjective satisfaction [6]
• C – Outline two design methods for using RF tags with spacial and temporal variation taken into account[7]
• D – Critique the notion of separate physical and digital worlds, explain why ubicomp can be treated as part of language [6]

Question 3

• A – Outline Wegner’s proof that human interaction with a computer cannot be reduced to an algorithmic representation [3]
• B – Describe basic functionality and interaction design of Coordinator workflow system [4]
• C – Draw upon this and ‘situated action’ critique to discuss limitations of the Coordinator’s central representations [6]
• D – Describe the Placeless Documents systems, and the SE tool built with it [8]
• E – How does Placeless’ design fit with philosophical and sociological theories? [4]

Question 4

• A – Describe the GOMS model of task performance [5]
• B – Fitt’s Law, relationship between it and GOMS-based predictions of task completion times [6]
• C – Text entry on mobile devices, findings of performance studies and relationships to GOMS performance measures [7]
• D – Plasticity, reference models and how they are linked to task modeling and empirical studies [7]

I was sitting through the whole exam, missing out the questions which I couldn’t do, but still feeling like it was all going fine because I knew that come 11.15 I would be finished. It feels good. From there it was off to the pub for a night out.
- Chris

I have been hoping to work in the department after doing so last year, and heard of a scholarship that was up for grabs to do with olfactory tagging of photos.

Anyway, I applied a while ago and managed to get an interview yesterday (after my last exam and before the pubbage). I heard back earlier today and I have been offered the job, it’s a ten week scholarship in the department which pays £240 a week. The main idea is to tag photos with smells, much in the same way that flickr.com uses words to tag photos. I’m not set to start until the 1st of July but thought I would post some early details I have on the project.

Below is an extract from the outline of the project, defining exactly what it is about:

In order to investigate the use of olfaction as part of HCI, the work undertaken during the studentship will centre on the construction of an application which will be intended to both exploit the advantages of olfaction (memory and learning), and apply these advantages to a current problem in human computer interaction – the browsing of large non-textual media collections such as digital photographs. The design and construction of this application will contribute to the general aims of the studentship to improve our understanding of olfaction in HCI and the expected outcomes which are described in detail in the following sections.

The problems of browsing large collections of non-textual digital media are well known, with ineffective tools currently available for browsing and searching such collections. Most of the proposed methods to overcome the problems of browsing and searching involve the tagging of individual, or groups of photographs, with keywords which can be later used for retrieval. However, other research has found that many people find such tagging of photographs inconvenient and many do not store digital photographs in any systematic way. In any event, such a system may still break down if inconsistent labels are given to different photographs.

The application to be constructed as part of this studentship will build on existing research with Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), to allow users to build search queries over digital photograph collections via RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags attached to “smell cubes” (small plastic cubes containing a fragrance impregnated in a cotton wool pad – www.daleair.com). This would allow users to associate smells easily and quickly with collections of photographs by moving the appropriate cube close to the RFID tag reader, and would help to make the process of recall easier by using the powerful memory effects of smell to remind users of the environment in which they took the photographs and thus aid their recall. For example, photographs of a holiday in India may be quickly associated with the smell of spices. In years to come the user may be looking for a particular photograph of a friend. The user can remember the friend was standing outside a building but cannot quite remember where or when the photograph was taken (such attributes being the current way in which images are tagged). To find the photograph the user would waft each smell cube under their nose. On using the spice smell cube, the user is transported back to their holiday in India and can remember where the photograph was taken. On passing the smell cube (with attached RFID tag) over the RFID sensor, the system filters the photographs on screen to show only a small subset, one of which is the photograph desired by the user – the user’s friend standing outside the building.

The work will be broken down in the 10 weeks as follows:

• Weeks 1 – 3
  The student will carry out a literature review into olfaction. Additionally the student will begin to elicit requirements for the photo browsing application. Participants will be recruited and categorisation of photographs will be undertaken.
• Weeks 4 – 7
  The student will construct the photo browsing application based on the literature review and derived requirements.
• Weeks 8 – 10
  The student will carry out an evaluation of the photo browsing application to determine the usefulness of the incorporation of olfaction. The student will produce a report on the design and evaluation of the photo browsing application that will form the basis of a paper submission to the ACM SIG CHI conference.

Anyway, I’m quite pleased with getting the scholarship and look forward to an interesting summer working on it. Sorry to the other guys who were in for it (Dave et al), I’m sure you’ll all find something soon enough.
- Chris