EIS Seminar Schedule 2011-12
Time: Wednesdays 3pm-5pm
Location: Grove Building G229
A more up to date version is available here.
| Date | Speaker | Title | Further Information |
| 11 January in WG05 | Dr. Chris Lim (Surrey) | Creative Sandpits: Engaging and using the creative potential of older people in design | We are living in a society where developments in technology not only are changing the way people work, play and live but also have to accommodate a greater diversity of users. This growing proportion of our society is represented by older people and contributes to a very diverse population with different physiological and psychological capabilities as well as economic and lifestyle profiles It is known that Digital ICT products have the potential to support and enhance the quality of life (QoL) of older people by allowing them to live independently, mediate their wellbeing and prevent social exclusion. However with the continual development of technology, this will disadvantage some groups of older people who have never engaged with digital technology, or find it increasingly difficult to do so because of changing capabilities, product complexity social and/or economic circumstances. To engage and include older users in the digital age, it is crucial that designers are not only sensitive to older people's changing needs and capabilities but are also able to mediate the appropriate technology developments into new products and services. It is also vitally important that potential users (i.e. older people) are involved early in the design process especially in the conceptual stage as any potential issues like viability, usability or desirability can be assessed and if need be, any mismatch between product specifications and user capabilities and profiles can be quickly resolved This talk shares a strand of work done in Sus-IT (a New Dynamic of Ageing funded research project concerned with understanding better the relationships between aging and digital disengagement) where a new methodology for engaging older people in the design of new digital technologies called 'sandpit process' will be introduced. This process involves giving older participants a voice and role in specifying requirements for new and emerging digital technologies by engaging them in the redesign of product concepts with design facilitators. |
| 18 January | Dr. Ray Adams | Forgotten Websites - a study of human memory in the wwwild | Abstract: Human memory is a central component of most laboratory-based theories of human cognition. However, emerging research appears to contradict these theories, suggesting that human memory for website contents, for example, is characteristically meager! Perhaps memory is not the backbone of cognition after all, but just an optional by-product? When people expect to have future access to facts, they typically remember them poorly, suggesting an increasing reliance on external systems (transactive memory) rather than internal human memory. Do current concepts of human memory survive in the context of website navigation, or does transactive memory dominate? These questions are important for both practical and theoretical reasons. Our four experiments investigated human memory for website navigation, measuring memory performance with a set of operationally designed, unexpected cued recall tasks (free recall, cued recall or context-cued recall). Experiment One showed that participants in a web evaluation task could perform well on unexpected free recall and cued recall tests. In Experiment Two, a significant superiority of cued recall over free recall suggests that our memories of websites may be strongly context specific. A significant primacy effect in the serial position curve also replicates a familiar laboratory result. However, both results are significant, new results in this context, generalizing laboratory results. Experiment Three compared forward cued recall (“Where does this hyperlink lead?”) versus backward cued recall (“Where did this hyperlink come from?”) and context-cued recall within the same page. As predicted, forward cued recall was significantly superior to backward cued recall, reflecting the direction of main use. More surprisingly, context-cued recall (within webpages) was much better than either forward or backward cued recall (between webpages). Clearly the context of the webpage was very influential. In Experiment Four, cued recall performance increased significantly with quantity of contextual information provided. Our four experiments raise some important conclusions, explaining why the recall of websites often appears poor. First, we often can recall substantial amounts of web-based materials in unexpected tests. Second, traditional laboratory findings can be replicated in and generalize to interactions with webpage environments. Third, within-webpage encoding appears to be much more influential than between-webpages encoding. Fourth, recall of web-based materials is highly context sensitive and may fail when the context is not adequately reconstituted. In conclusion, contextual encoding seems to be very influential in the wild, in real-world contexts such as the World Wide Web. Judging by the present results, failure to remember website content may be ameliorated to some extent by designing in better support for between-webpage associations in the user’s memory. |
| 25 January in WG05 | Elli Georgiadou | The origin, nature and purpose of education and lifelong learning | Europe has around 4000 higher education institutions, with over 19 million students and 1.5 million staff. Some European universities are among the best in the world, but, overall, the potential of European higher education systems is not being fully realised. The long-term strategic objectives of EU education and training policies are: to improve participation, make lifelong learning and mobility a reality, improve the quality and efficiency of education and training, promote equity, social cohesion and active citizenship and enhance creativity and innovation. Much emphasis has been placed on lifelong for the realisation of a Europe of knowledge which maximises the talents and capacities of its citizens while widening participation in Higher Education. This talk will trace the origins of the nature and role of education (institution and non-institution based), lifelong learning and the contribution of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to the intellectual process and the very joy of reasoning and using this way of thinking in order to understand issues, to carry out research and to reach conclusions. They pioneered in their analyses of intellectual development and in the importance of the use of the mind throughout the life span. Plato and Aristotle added metaphysical arguments to support their systems of thought. Both outlined a specific sequence of studies to develop the powers of reasoning, and both established institutions [schools, lyceums, academies] wherein students and scholars could pursue learning for an indefinite period of time. The talk will outline the holistic nature of the Socratic (dialectic) method of 'questioning not telling ' in developing transferable skills. The talk will pose questions on the challenges and contradictions between widening participation and the current funding (non-funding) of education, quality and productivity, personal fulfilment and societal utilitarianism. The talk will conclude with some reflections from 34 years of teaching (and twice as many learning of course!) in secondary, further and higher education and 25 years of research (on aspects of quality and pedagogy) as well as active involvement in European and International initiatives and projects. |
| 1 February in WG05 | Prof. Nigel Forman (Middlesex Psychology) | Limits on Gathering Information from Virtual Environments: Why the hell are they so useful? | |
| 8 February, back in G229 until further notice. | Chris Rooney | ||
| 15 February | Dr Georgios Dafoulas | ||
| 22 February | Dr. Donng-Han Ham | Model-Based Identification and Use of Task Complexity Factors of Human Integrated Systems | Abstract: Task complexity is one of conceptual constructs that are critical to explain and predict human performance in human integrated systems. A basic approach to evaluating the complexity of tasks is to identify task complexity factors and measure them. Although a great deal of task complexity factors have been studied, there is still a lack of conceptual frameworks for identifying and organizing them analytically, which can be generally used irrespective of the types of domains and tasks. This study proposes a model-based approach to identifying and using task complexity factors, which has two facets-the design aspects of a task and complexity dimensions. Three levels of design abstraction, which are functional, behavioural, and structural aspect of a task, characterize the design aspect of a task. The behavioural aspect is further classified into five cognitive processing activity types. The complexity dimensions explain a task complexity from different perspectives, which are size, variety, and order/organization. Twenty-one task complexity factors are identified by the combination of the attributes of each facet. Identification and evaluation of task complexity factors based on this model is believed to give insights for improving the design quality of tasks. This model for complexity factors can also be used as a referential framework for allocating tasks and designing information aids. The proposed approach is applied to procedure-based tasks of nuclear power plants (NPPs) as a case study to demonstrate its use. Last, we compare the proposed approach with other studies and then suggest some future research directions. (This talk is based on one of my papers, which was recently accepted for publication to ‘Reliability Engineering and System Safety’) |
| 29 February | Prof. Richard Bayford (HSSC) | An overview of Middlesex University Cancer centre's research. | |
| 7 March | Dr. Purav Shah | Clustering technique in Wireless Sensor Networks | |
| 14 March | Dr. Bob Fields | ||
| 21 March | Dr. Geeta Abeysinghe | ||
| 28 March | Dr. Jeremy Wyatt (Birmingham) | ||
| 4 April | Open | ||
| 11 April | Sukhy Hara | ||
| 11 April | Dr. Glenford Mapp | ||
| 25 April | Dr. Leonardo Mostarda | Distributed Fault Tolerant Controllers | |
| 2 May | Prof. John Cave (director Mindsets Ltd) | Smart Materials. Transforming education: a perspective from the university's own company | |
| 9 May | Dr. Serengal Smith | ||
| 16 May | Dr. Roman Belavkin | Evolution as an Information Dynamic System | Abstract: I will speak about the the EPSRC funded research project `Evolution as an information dynamic system', which is lead by Middlesex University and in collaboration with Universities of Warwick, Manchester and Keele. The aim of the project is to develop new understanding of information dynamics in evolution and biology. In particular, we are going to derive new optimality conditions for some evolutionary operators, such as mutation and recombination. Evolutionary states are be represented by probability measures on the space of genetic sequences, and different operators produce different evolutions of the states. We define the optimality conditions for evolution based on the maximisation of utility (or fitness) of information principle. The optimal evolution in this sense achieves the shortest `information distance', and it can be different from an evolution optimal in another sense, such as the shortest convergence time. We argue that the former achieves a better adaptation of organisms living in a dynamic environment. I will present several early results related to the optimisation of mutation rate parameter. I will review these results in the light of the classical theories of adaptation (e.g. Fisher's geometric model) and error threshold. Then I will outline some future theoretical and experimental work of the project. |
| 23 May | Dr. Chris Kindberg | ||
| 30 May | Julie Stockdale (IEEE Explore) | IEEE Xplore - Learn time-saving techniques and find out what's new | You are invited to attend a free training session to learn time-saving techniques for finding engineering, computing and technology content using IEEE Xplore, the online delivery platform for the university's IEEE subscription.
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| 6 June | Dr. Kai Xu | ||
| 13 June | Prof. Darren Dalcher | ||
| 20 June | Dr. Huan Nguyen | ||
| 27 June | External Speaker | ||
| 4 July | Aregebesola Akinola | ||
| 11 July | Dr. Enver Ever | Multi-Dimensional Modelling for Performability Evaluation of Heterogenous Wireless Communication System Integration. | The existing solution approach we introduced is three dimensional and it seems like the 4th dimension is also required http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377042708000502 |
| 18 July | Dr. Rui Loureiro | ROBIN: Rehabilitation of Brain INjuries multimodal sensorimotor environment for the upper limbs while sitting or standing. | The ROBIN System |
| 25 July | Dr. Florian Kammueller | Security of Active Objects | |
| 1 August | External speaker | ||
| 8 August | Open | ||
| 15 August | Open | ||
| 22 August | Summer break | ||
| 29 August | Summer break | ||
| 6 June | Dr Siri Bavan | ||
| 13 June | Prof. Darren Dalcher | ||
| 20 June | Dr Huan Nguyen | ||
| 27 June | External Speaker | ||
| 4 July | Open | ||
| 11 July | Open | ||
| 18 July | Dr. Rui Loureiro | ROBIN: Rehabilitation of Brain INjuries multimodal sensorimotor environment for the upper limbs while sitting or standing | The ROBIN System |
| 25 July | Dr Florian Kammueller | Security of Active Objects | |
| 1 August | External Speaker | ||
| 8 August | Open | ||
| 15 August | Open | ||
| 22 August | Summer Break | ||
| 29 August | Summer Break |
