Student projects
Prof Russell Beale
Room: 141
russellbeale.com
General principles
I am interested in any projects involving the user at the centre of the
design, and am happy to supervise your own ideas for projects if they are
doing something novel, innovative or design-led. I am also interested in
projects that attempt to advance theories fof HCI.
Major project areas are outlined below: where I have particular projects wth
specific details and requirements, they are also identified, but any projects
that fit within these areas will be of interest.
Behaviour change
How do we change people's approaches to using electrical energy? How do we help
them eat more effectively, or stop smoking, or cut down their drinking? How can
we stop people procrastinating? I'm interested in projects that use technical
interventions to change how people behave - current smartphones can sense and
provide itnterruptions to user activity, and so are a good platform for
developing new ideas. This work builds on psychology, design and HCI.
New project - Rehabilitation via gaming
Using new techniques to measure muscle contractions, the aim is to modify a
game to allow it to be controlled by this new data stream. It might be a Wii
game, or a shoot-em-up - whatever, it will be used in both collaborative and
competititive play to encourage patients to continue to exercise their muscles
even when lying horizontal in bed. This proejct is in collaboration with
SportEx and patients in the QE hospital, so as well as coding you will be
running experiments and seeing how well it works in practice.
Affective interaction
The role of emotion, affect and personality in interactive systems is becoming
more understood, but its effective utilisation is not. This research will
investigate what and how affect can be effective in enhancing human interaction
with systems.
Social signal processing
The combined use of multimodal processing (speech, video, interaction analysis,
social network analysis) can lead to a more complete understanding of how
individuals and groups are reacting and interacting. The student will work
alongside experts in these domains to develop concepts and theories for such an
approach that can be tested and evaluated.
Interaction with multitouch
This research will investigate the relationship between the different styles
and type of interaction afforded by multitouch devices and interactive
surfaces, and can look at a variety of things; for example, the nature of the
supported interactions, the forms of visualisations used, how to interact with
3d touchtables, the relationship between collaborative multitouch and
engagement.
Context-aware interaction
The use of intelligent sensing, mobile and ambient, can be used to create more
effective interactive system, whether they be location-aware social networks,
contextually relevant visualisations, or pattern recognition systems that could
negotiate lower costs for your health insurance as they notice you go to the
gym regularly. This research will investigate this work in more detail.
Health
We are interested in a number of health-related areas, from the use of
monitoring technologies for assisted living through to developing and evaluate
approaches to supporting rehabilitation and post-trauma recovery in real-time
3D virtual settings (using games engine technologies).
Ambient displays
Ambient displays present artistic, visualisation design, and appropriateness
challenges: what should they be used for, and how? How do people understand and
interpret them? The work will investigate this in more detail.
Psychological principles
Many concepts in Psychology, although highly relevant to HCI are not prominent
in the their application and investigation. Concepts such as syntactic and
semantic alignment, social identity , visual processing and working memory all
impact on our experiences with technologies as interactions move from the
individual to the social and from the mouse and keyboard to more gestural and
spatial methods of interaction. A PhD in this area would explore one of these
concepts and its relevance and impact into HCI research over a range of
modalities.
HCI4D
Interactive systems have great potential to support the developing world,
especially those focussed on mobile technologies. We are interested in research
that supports this.