Seminar with Ollie Hanton: 3D Printing Interactive Devices

Time: April 10, 14.00-16.00
Place: Waverley 129

What shape is a screen and why do flat, rectangular interfaces limit the way we interact with digital information? Free-form interactive devices such as custom-fitted wearables, bespoke controllers and integrated interactive surfaces hold the potential to revolutionise environments including education, vehicular travel, workplaces and homes. However, manufacturing is limited to high quantity runs of identical devices and component-based fabrication is limited in form and quality. By harnessing 1) state-of-the-art active materials that can enable input and output and 2) additive manufacturing methods to enable automated deposition, the next step in manifesting interfaces is through decentralised production where makers can design and produce physical devices on-demand. 

Ollie Hanton is a lecturer (assistant professor) at the University of Bath. Before joining the University of Bath, he attained his Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, supervised by Professor Anne Roudaut and Professor Mike Faser. There he focused his research on the Personal Fabrication of Interactive Devices through spraying and 3D printing. Ollie publishes work at top HCI conferences (CHI, TEI) where he has received multiple awards for his research.

Seminar with Max Wilson: Brain Data as Cognitive Personal Informatics

Time: March 27, 14.00-16.00
Place: Waverley 129

Classifying the cognitive states of people, using physiological data is basically a machine learning problem now, whether its brain data, heart/breathing data, or off-body camera data. So what is the HCI question? For us, the question is how will this become mixed up in wearable tech and personal informatics. Especially since you can already buy consumer home neurotech for £200-1000 (!), but also because our watches and apps like Welltory are similarly trying to help manage our cognitive effort. Further, because we still don’t really know what goals people should have for e.g. their mental workload levels throughout the day, nor what is healthy. In this talk I will describe several of our research projects that are building our understanding of a Future Living with Consumer Neurotechnology.

Max L. Wilson is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, in the Mixed Reality Lab, and Director of Student Experience in the School of Computer Science. His EPSRC, European, and Google funded research is focused on the use of fNIRS brain data, about mental workload and other cognitive activity, as a form of personal data, that can be used to evaluate technology and work tasks. This work has emerged from his earlier research on the evaluation of user interfaces for interacting with information. Max is on the steering committees of both ACM CHI and ACM CHIIR conferences, as well as a member of the SIGCHI Conferences Working Group, and a Deputy Editor at the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.