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correction the meeting time is 12:30pm on Tuesday Nov 5.
by Cheng Lu 04 Nov '19

04 Nov '19

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DGP HI Meeting
by Cheng Lu 04 Nov '19

04 Nov '19

Hello all, We will have our bi-weekly HCI group meeting at 12.30pm on Tuesday Oct 22nd in the DGP seminar room. Caleb (Zhicong) Lu will be giving a practice talk. Food will be served. Additionally, if we have time left, we will take a look at UIST video preview. Title Vicariously Experiencing it all without Going Outside: A Study of Outdoor Live Streaming in China Abstract: The livestreaming industry in China is gaining greater traction than its European and North American counterparts and has a profound impact on the stakeholders' online and offline lives. An emerging genre of livestreaming that has become increasingly popular in China is outdoor livestreaming. With outdoor livestreams, streamers broadcast outdoor activities, travel, or socialize with passersby in outdoor settings, often for 6 or more hours, and viewers watch such streams for hours each day. However, given that professionally produced content about travel and outdoor activities are not very popular, it is currently unknown what makes this category of livestreams so engaging and how these techniques can be applied to other content or genres. Thus, we conducted a mixed methods study consisting of a survey (N=287) and interviews (N = 20) to understand how viewers watch and engage with outdoor livestreams in China. The data revealed that outdoor livestreams encompass many categories of content, environments and passersby behaviors create challenges and uncertainty for viewers and streamers, and viewers watch livestreams for surprising lengths of time (e.g., sometimes more than 5 continuous hours). We also gained insights into how live commenting and virtual gifting encourage engagement. Lastly, we detail how the behaviors of dedicated fans and casual viewers differ and provide implications for the design of livestreaming services that support outdoor activities. The preprint of the paper can be found here: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~luzhc/media/cscw025-lu-new.pdf Kind regards, Eric Lu

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[Tux] TUX: Sidewalk Lab's Siqi Zhu, Samara Trilling & Brian Ho tomorrow @ Autodesk!
by Shaza'a Fayyaz 28 Oct '19

28 Oct '19

Hello TUX! A reminder that tomorrow we have a Sanders Series Lecture by Siqi Zhu, Samara Trilling, Brian Ho (Sidewalk Labs) at Autodesk. We look forward to seeing you there! Ali, Fraser, Daniel and Tovi Sanders Series Invited Lecture: Siqi Zhu, Samara Trilling, Brian Ho (Sidewalk Labs): Notes from Computational Urban Design in Practice October 29, 2019. Autodesk-Research @ 661 University Avenue #200, Toronto, ON. Lunch reception begins at 12:30 pm. Presentation begins at 1:00 pm. Abstract Sidewalk Labs aims to improve the quality of human life in cities through technological innovation. One focus of our work is the improvement of existing urban design processes through interactive visualization, optimization, and cloud computation. In this talk, we will share a case study describing our ongoing experiences in applying computation to the design of the built environment; contextualize this work within a broader history of urbanism and technology; outline the ongoing partnership between domain experts, designers and engineers at Sidewalk Labs; and describe the challenges of making a useful and usable tool for district-scale planning and development. Bios Siqi Zhu Siqi is Associate Director, Public Realm at Sidewalk Labs, where his work imagines how technology transforms the design and implementation of urban streets and public realm. Before Sidewalk, Siqi headed up product design at Envelope, a NYC-based startup that visualizes development opportunities under NYC zoning. He also worked as a senior designer and project manager at Boston-based Sasaki and Utile, where he oversaw urban planning projects for a variety of public, private, and institutional clients across the US and internationally. Siqi is passionate about great urban public spaces. He is particularly interested in how a human-centered, research- and data-intensive design process can yield fresh insights about—and build stakeholder consensus around—how we improve the urban public realm. He played a key role in creating Boston’s first Complete Streets guidelines, an award-winning design manual noted for technical and visual communication excellence; and Boston’s 2030 city-wide mobility strategy, lauded for its use of data visualization to engage a city-wide constituency in complex mobility planning decisions. Siqi has also worked extensively with municipal transportation and parks departments, the National Park Service, and other public space managers around the country. Siqi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and a Masters in Urban Planning from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He has led research projects at MIT Senseable City Lab and currently teaches at Northeastern University’s College of Art, Media, and Design. Brian Ho I’m an <https://brian-ho.io/#Desk> interdisciplinary designer working at the intersection of society, technology and the built environment. I believe design creates joy, community and justice. I love <https://brian-ho.io/City> cities, <https://brian-ho.io/Space> infrastructure and <https://brian-ho.io/Interface> interfaces. I imagine better interactions for complex systems. I’ve helped make <https://brian-ho.io/Boston-Bench-Buddy> services, <https://brian-ho.io/Event-Detection-Interface> software, <https://brian-ho.io/Alley-Pond-Center> buildings and <https://brian-ho.io/St-Bernard-Land-Use-Plan> plans in <https://sidewalktoronto.ca/> Toronto, <https://www.boston.gov/departments/new-urban-mechanics> Boston, <http://www.mkthink.com/> SF, <http://www.leroystreetstudio.com/> NYC and <http://www.wbarchitects.com/> NOLA … and a few more <https://brian-ho.io/#Collaborations> things. I work at <https://www.sidewalklabs.com/> Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet company reimagining cities to improve quality of life. My work combines machine intelligence, urban futures and human-centered design. I graduated from the <http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/design-engineering/> Master in Design Engineering (MDE) program at the <http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/> Harvard GSD and <http://www.seas.harvard.edu/> SEAS. I studied at <https://www.arch.columbia.edu/> Columbia GSAPP and majored in architecture at <http://architecture.yale.edu/school/academic-programs/undergraduate-studies> Yale. Oh, and I’m <http://www.usgbc.org/> LEED AP BD+C certified. Samara Trilling Samara is a software engineer at Sidewalk Labs. She received her BA in computer science at Columbia University, and has worked at Google, SheEO, and Sidewalk Labs. OUR SPONSORS: TUX is made possible by the support of our sponsors, Steven Sanders, Autodesk, University of Toronto Department of Computer Science, and Chatham Labs. _______________________________________________ tux-announce mailing list tux-announce(a)dgp.toronto.edu https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tux-announce

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Watch HCI live streams from CMU 25th anniversary Human-Computer Interaction Institute-I found this really interesting for getting perspective on HCI
by Joseph Jay Williams 25 Oct '19

25 Oct '19

https://hcii.cmu.edu/node/7754 [Sent from smartphone] Joseph Jay Williams www.josephjaywilliams.com Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto Calendar: Send invitations to josephjaywilliams(a)gmail.com Office: Bahen Centre 4238

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DGP HCI Meeting
by Cheng Lu 21 Oct '19

21 Oct '19

Hello all, We will have our bi-weekly HCI group meeting at 12.30pm on Tuesday Oct 22nd in the DGP seminar room. Martin Feick will be giving a talk. Food will be served. * Bio: Martin Feick is a PhD-student at the German Center for Artificial Intelligence in Saarland, Germany. He received a Bachelor and Master of Sciences in software engineering/applied computer science from the Saarland University of Applied Sciences. For his Bachelor's thesis, he spent 6 months in the Interactions Lab at the University of Calgary (Canada) researching Human-Computer Interaction. For his Master's thesis, he conducted research at UCLIC at the University College London (United Kingdom). During his Master's studies, he also worked part-time as an HCI researcher at the Saarland University/Max-Planck Institute for Informatics. His research interests lie in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. Especially, in how we can design and develop novel systems to support object-centered interaction. * Title: How Tangible Objects Facilitate Interaction * Abstract: In recent years we have seen great improvements in Virtual, Augmented and Mixed reality systems. They have the potential to fundamentally change how we interact with one another; however, displayed information and content largely remain virtual. In this talk, I will outline two alternative approaches to enable tangible interaction with these virtual objects, and demonstrate how they facilitate interaction. In particular, I will talk about a robotic system, ReMa which can be controlled through physical proxy objects, as well as the TanGi toolkit that allows the rapid creation of proxy objects for virtual reality.

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[Tux] Starting-up; 1 week away!
by Daniel Wigdor 21 Oct '19

21 Oct '19

[cid:image001.png@01D58508.7D05EAB0] [cid:image002.png@01D58508.7D05EAB0] [cid:image003.png@01D58508.7D05EAB0] Hello Tux! Welcome to the 2019/2020 season! In this message you will find information about all of the following: 1. New Sponsor 2. Editorial Board Addition 3. Change in Format and Location 4. 2019/20 Schedule Note that our first speaker will be joining us next week at the Autodesk space in the MaRS facility. We hope to see you there! As always, Tux-HCI.org<http://tux-hci.org/> has the complete schedule and all the information you need to participate. New Sponsor We are very pleased to announce that Chatham Labs<http://chathamlabs.com/> has joined us as a sponsor. This adds to the generous support provided by Autodesk Research, by Steven Sanders, and by the University of Toronto. Editorial Board Addition We are pleased to announce that Dr. Fraser Anderson<http://fraseranderson.ca/> has agreed to join the Tux editorial board, our all-volunteer crew which works hard to select an exciting slate of speakers for each season. Dr. Anderson boasts a decade of HCI research experience, as well as a wealth of interests that has brought a fresh perspective to the board. Change in Format and Location For 2019/20, we have narrowed our focus to the Sander Series Invited Lectures, and do not presently have any member presentations planned. This will allow us to focus on our external visitors, and ensure that the community has a chance to engage with these important thinkers in HCI. Note also that in February of 2020, we will be moving back to our original Sanders Series space in the auditorium at MaRS to accommodate our fast-growing community! 2019/2020 Schedule We are thrilled to have an exciting lineup of four Sanders Series Invited Lectures, with dates and locations shown below: Date Speaker Location October 29, 2019 Siqi Zhu <https://www.siqizhu.net/>Sidewalk Labs Autodesk Research, MaRS Building November 19, 2019 Michel Beaudouin-Lafon <https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/eintroduction.html>Université Paris-Sud | Institut Universitaire de France Autodesk Research, MaRS Building February 11, 2020 Saleema Amershi<http://saleemaamershi.com/> Microsoft Research Basement Auditorium, MaRS Building March 10, 2020 Justine Cassell<http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/people/justine-cassell> Carnegie-Mellon University Basement Auditorium, MaRS Building We look forward to seeing you at our first Sander Series Invited Lecture next week. Ali, Daniel, Fraser, Tovi [cid:image004.png@01D58508.7D05EAB0] OUR SPONSORS: [cid:image007.jpg@01D587DA.C9FF26E0] Tux is made possible by the support of our sponsors, Steven Sanders, Autodesk, University of Toronto Department of Computer Science, and Chatham Labs. _______________________________________________ tux-announce mailing list tux-announce(a)dgp.toronto.edu https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tux-announce

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Demos/meetings with Sidewalk Lab visitors
by Jiannan Li 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

Hello all, Members of the Sidewalk labs (https://www.sidewalklabs.com), possibly one of Google's most ambitious and transformative projects in Toronto, will be visiting DGP on Wednesday, Oct 30th from 1-3 pm. They'd like to see some demos or just meet with lab members. It will be a great opportunity to show off your work, get some perspectives from industry experts, and possibly expand the impact of your research to our city and beyond. Let me know if you are interested! You can also sign up via https://forms.gle/HTfbYbDXixcm5g6B8 The team members who will be visiting are: Siqi Zhu – Associate Director, Public Realm; Brian Ho – Designer; Samara Trilling – Software Engineer https://www.sidewalklabs.com/team/siqi-zhu/ https://brian-ho.io/ https://www.sidewalklabs.com/team/ <https://www.sidewalklabs.com/team/> Thanks, Jiannan

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[talks] David Ledo talk at 12:30 pm On Tuesday
by Fengyuan Zhu 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

Dear All Hope everyone has a wonderful long-weekend. Please join us on Tuesday, October 15th at 12:30 p.m. for a talk offered by David Ledo at DGP Seminar Room. Lunch will be provided. ABSTRACT The advent of ubiquitous computing brought forth the promise of a variety of interactive artifacts that integrate into our everyday lives. In particular, this has led to a myriad of "smart objects", with computing capabilities such as digital assistant speakers and smart lightbulbs. Yet - people still struggle operating and communicating with these objects. This is largely a design problem, as it is difficult to design and explore interactive behaviours with these objects: how should a smart speaker show that it is currently listening, or that it is retrieving an answer from the cloud? In my work I explore how interaction designers can achieve responsive smart interactive object prototypes by repurposing hardware and software without the need to code. First, designers can repurpose mobile devices (and their rich sensing and output) to replace the need for custom electronics and soldering. Next, designers can use a prototyping tool for creating the physical form around a mobile device by modifying an existing 3D modeling tool. Finally, I show how designers can author rich interactive behaviours on mobile devices by repurposing familiar desktop tools. Through this work it is possible to envision what the future of interaction design might look like, and more broadly helps us reflect on the role of smart objects in our everyday life. BIO David Ledo is a Venezuelan-Canadian PhD Candidate at the University of Calgary working with Lora Oehlberg and Saul Greenberg. With almost ten years of experience in HCI research, his work lies at the intersection of interaction techniques, prototyping tools and ubiquitous computing. David is a Killam and Adobe Research Fellow, and has worked at many top institutions in Canada, the US and Europe, including Autodesk Research and Microsoft Research. David enjoys many things, including graphic design, cats, city life and playing flamenco guitar. Best FY

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DGP HCI Meeting
by Cheng Lu 07 Oct '19

07 Oct '19

Hello all, We will have our bi-weekly HCI group meeting at 12.30pm on Tuesday Oct 8th in the DGP seminar room. Rahul and Dev will be practicing their UIST talk. Food will be served. Rahul’s Talk Title MagicalHands: Mid-Air Hand Gestures for Animating in VR (UIST 2019 Practice) Abstract We explore the use of hand gestures for authoring animations in virtual reality (VR). We first perform a gesture elicitation study to understand user preferences for a spatiotemporal, bare-handed interaction system in VR. Specifically, we focus on creating and editing dynamic, physical phenomena (e.g., particle systems, deformations, coupling), where the mapping from gestures to animation is ambiguous and indirect. We present commonly observed mid-air gestures from the study that cover a wide range of interaction techniques, from direct manipulation to abstract demonstrations. To this end, we extend existing gesture taxonomies to the rich spatiotemporal interaction space of the target domain and distill our findings into a set of guidelines that inform the design of natural user interfaces for VR animation. Finally, based on our guidelines, we develop a proof-of-concept gesture-based VR animation system, MagicalHands. Our results, as well as feedback from user evaluation, suggest that the expressive qualities of hand gestures help users animate more effectively in VR. Dev’s Talk Title: Plane, Ray, and Point: Enabling Precise Spatial Manipulations with Shape Constraints Abstract: We present Plane, Ray, and Point, a set of interaction techniques that utilizes shape constraints to enable quick and precise object alignment and manipulation in virtual reality. Users create the three types of shape constraints, Plane, Ray, and Point, by using symbolic gestures. The shape constraints are used like scaffoldings to limit and guide the movement of virtual objects. The same set of gestures can be performed with the other hand, which allow users to further control the degrees of freedom for precise and constrained manipulation. The combination of shape constraints and bimanual gestures yield a rich set of interaction techniques to support object transformation. An exploratory study conducted with 3D design experts and novice users found the techniques to be useful in 3D scene design workflows and easy to learn and use. Regards, Eric Lu

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Fwd: [Graduate awards] DCS internal awards
by Fanny Chevalier 05 Oct '19

05 Oct '19

Hi all, I strongly encourage you to fill out the (very simple) form, that will allow you to be considered for multiple internal awards at UofT. Very simple procedure. Worth trying. Cheers, Fanny > Begin forwarded message: > > From: Graeme Hirst — Grad Chair <gradchair(a)cs.toronto.edu> > Subject: [Graduate awards] DCS internal awards > Date: 3 October 2019 at 16:59:41 GMT-4 > To: grad-announcements(a)cs.toronto.edu > Cc: supervisors(a)cs.toronto.edu > > Applications are now open for several DCS internal awards. These are typically awards that have been donated to the university by benefactors; each has its own set of conditions. Most are in the range of $2000 to $10,000, with the exact amount depending on the fund balance each year. Details of each are given in the attached PDF document. There is a single application procedure (deadline: 31 October) for all awards. See the attached document for details. > > -- > :::: Graeme Hirst • Professor and Associate Chair, Graduate Studies > :::: University of Toronto • Department of Computer Science >

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