HotSoft

Date: 	Fri, 28 Apr 2017 16:00:19 -0400
From: 	Robert Biddle <robert.biddle@carleton.ca>

Today, Reza GhasemAghaei successfully defended his PhD thesis,
with only minor revisions required.
Congratulations Reza!

Reza’s Thesis: MULTIMODAL SOFTWARE FOR AFFECTIVE EDUCATION: USER INTERACTION DESIGN AND EVALUATION

Abstract:

Multimodal systems allow user interaction through various methods, or modalities, such as gesture, gaze, speech or head and body movements. There have been many frameworks proposed for the design of multimodal systems, but they focus principally on issues of tech- nical architecture. Some applications for multimodal systems, including education, however, involve issues relating to affective (emotional) user experience.

The thesis presents our experience with creating and applying a framework for multimodal software design and evaluation, with a focus on affect (i.e. emotion) in education. Our goal is to support the system designer, and indirectly also teachers and students. We outline our conceptual basis, adaptation of interaction design and evaluation techniques, and our experience over several case studies. In particular, we describe how our techniques were refined after each case study, and how the evaluation techniques led us to revisit our design techniques. We also gained new insight about the role of the teacher, leading us to develop a new affect visualization dashboard for teachers.

The SurfNet 2013 Workshop was at the University of Calgary again this year. We had the usual updates on research around the network, and interactive displays for our industry partners. The display space was in the wonderful Taylor Family Digital Library, which despite its name is a real bricks’n’mortar facility, but full of space and displays for digital media. We borrowed a multi-touch table, and showed our tool for collaborative security analysis, ACHW. It’s based on the “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” technique, but with touch interaction and visualizations for collaboration, structured walkthrough support, and seamless persistence across multiple devices, all using HTML5.

Our ISSNet workshops have been annual events to update ourselves on work across our network, hear about new ideas from outside, and brainstorm future plans. This year we were in Victoria, British Columbia at perhaps the most inspiring location we’ve had, right beside the inner harbour. The 2013 workshop followed the typical plan, although with more talks from people outside the network, Corman Herley and Jaeyeon Jung from Microsoft Research, Joe Bonneau from Google, and Ed Rebane and Catherine Hart from Bell.

We should say more about…

• Conferences:
  • ICSE 2013, San Franciso
  • EICS 2013, London
  • DUI 2013, London
  • SOUPS 2013 in Newcastle

We should say more about…

• Graduations:
  • Alain Forget, PhD
  • Bruna Machado Freitas, MASc
• Research Network Events:
  • ISSNet 2012 Workshop, Kingston
  • GRAND 2012, Montreal
  • ISSNet 2012 Summer School, Halifax
  • SurfNet 2012 Workshop, Waterloo
• Conferences:
  • CSCW 2012, Seattle
  • SOUPS 2012, Washington
  • PST 2012, Paris
  • VLHCC 2012, Innsbruck
  • Splash/Onward 2012, Tucson
  • SecureTech 2012, Ottawa

On May 6, we hosted grade 8-9 students from Ottawa in our lab for a session on user interaction technologies as part of Carleton’s Enrichment Mini-Courses.  Students learned about the technologies and got hands-on experience with multitouch tables, a haptic device, an eye tracker, a head-mounted display, and a digital pen.

We spent a week in Toronto for the ISSNet Annual Workshop. We heard updates on recent work on research projects in all three themes (Network-oriented Security, Software Systems-oriented Security, Human-oriented Security) and had plenty of opportunity to catch up and discuss research with members from other Universities and industry partners. Several students from our lab presented posters of their on-going research projects. Invited talks by Nart Villeneuve from Trend Micro and by N. Asokan and Valtteri Niemi from Nokia gave us interesting insight into current industry work.

Graduations:

• Nick Wright, MA
• Elizabeth Stobert, MA

Research Network Events:

• ISSNet 2011 Workshop, Toronto
• SurfNet 2011 Workshop, Calgary
• ISSNet 2012 Summer School, Vancouver

Conferences

• SOUPS 2011, Seattle

Join us for a one-day workshop on user authentication:
We are organizing a workshop on user authentication, co-located with Financial Cryptography 2011 in St. Lucia on March 4, 2011. The workshop will consist of invited talks and expert panels. A preliminary program is available and will be updated as details are finalized.

Workshop on The Future of User Authentication and Authorization on the Web:
Challenges in Current Practice, New Threats, and Research Directions

Friday, March 4, 2011 — St. Lucia

After SOUPS, we went directly to Vancouver for the 2nd annual ISSNet Summer School held at UBC. We had a week of tutorials on different security topics: Virtual Machine Monitors (VMM), Smart Phone Security, and Web Security. The academic work was combined with plenty of opportunity to get to know the other members of ISSNet. Our UBC hosts were great, and organized several of social events around the technical program.