Participants
Nicola Bidwell is Head (Cairns) & Deputy Head of School of Maths, Physics & IT at James Cook University, Far North Queensland Australia where, over the past 3 years, she established and lectures the Games Design Programme and a research group in interaction design. Her group explores contexts beyond HCI's focus on the urban-developed world and desigs interactions with mobile devices and simulated-3D environments for rural and often geographically remote contexts. This encompasses tropical and sub-tropical settings and Australian indigenous, and more recently African, cultural contexts. She has applied her in situ methods to design to support the activities of leisure-walkers/tourists, ecologists, geographers and Australian indigenous, South African Xhosa and local and expatriate residents of a Mozambique island. Nic is currently finishing a 6 month sabbatical hosted by the University of Cape Town and will be hosting Australia's premier HCI conference (OZCHI) in Cairns in December 2008. Nic gained double majors in biology and psychology (University of Stirling) and a PhD in the neurophysiology of visual motion processing (Queen Mary College, University of London) before her Masters in IT (University of Queensland). She has post-doc'ed or lectured at Sussex, Cambridge, Australian National, Queensland and Charles Darwin Universities and consulted for Sopheon plc, Department of Trade of Industry/Office of Science & Technology, University of Brighton, Imperial College London and the Committee for VCs & Principals of UK Universities.
Keith Cheverst is a Senior Lecturer with Lancaster University's Computing Department. His research over the last decade has focussed on exploring the obdurate problems associated with the user-centered design of interactive systems (typically these systems would utilise mobile and/or ubicomp technologies) in complex or semi-wild settings and the deployment and longitudinal study of these systems in order to gain insights into issues of adoption and appropriation by users. He currently holds grants from both the EPSRC and Microsoft Research for exploring how the use of situated displays can support notions of community and has published widely in this area.
Matt Jones is a Reader in Computer Science, Swansea University. Matt is helping to set up the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University. He has worked on mobile interaction issues for the past thirteen years and has published a large number of articles in this area including Mobile Interaction Design (Wiley & Sons, 2006) with Gary Marsden. He has had many interactions and collaborations with leading industry partners. www.undofuture.com.
Paula Kotzé is Principal Researcher at the Meraka Institute and Professor Extraordinaire in the School of Computing at the University of South Africa. She has over 28 years experience in research, development and teaching. She is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles and is regular speaker at conferences and other events. She has a multi-disciplinary background in computer science, information systems, industrial psychology and education and holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of York (UK). She is well-recognized on national and international level for her research and development work in the field of computing in its wider context. She specializes in issues related to enterprise engineering within the cross-domain of human factors engineering, software engineering and business engineering. The research projects she and her research collaborators are involved with reflect this diversity. She is currently Vice-President at Large and Vice-President of Education of ACM SIGCHI and Chairperson of IFIP Working Group 13.1.
Mounia Lalmas is a Professor of Information Retrieval at Queen Mary, University of London, which she joined in 1999 as a lecturer. Prior to this, she was a Research Scientist at the University of Dortmund in 1998, a Lecturer from 1995 to 1997 and a Research Fellow from 1997 to 1998 at the University of Glasgow, where she received her PhD in 1996. Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of intelligent access to interactive heterogeneous and complex information repositories, and covering a wide range of domains such as HTML, XML, and MPEG-7. She co-led from 2002 to 2007 the international evaluation initiative for content-oriented XML retrieval (INEX), a large-scale project with over 80 participating organizations worldwide. She is currently the ACM SIGIR vice chair. She will take up a Microsoft Research/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Information Retrieval at the University of Glasgow in September 2008.
Gary Marsden is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. His research is mainly in the field of Mobile Interaction Design, as well as the application of mobile technologies in the developing world. He edits the "Under Development" column in interactions magazine and, with Matt Jones, wrote the book "Mobile Interaction Design"
Stefan is a Professor of Knowledge Media at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, UK. His main interests are multimedia resource discovery including video, image and music search engines and, generally, search and browsing in multimedia digital libraries. His Multimedia and Information Systems group currently leads the content-based search part of the European FP6 Integrated PHAROS project (Platform for searcH of Audiovisual Resources across Online Spaces) and is actively involved in evaluation conferences for multimedia search.
Harold Thimbleby joined Swansea University in 2005, and is in the Future Interaction Technology Lab with Matt Jones, George Buchanan and Parisa Eslambochilar et al. His recent book, Press On (MIT Press 2007), on programming interactive things, won the Association of American Publishers award for best book in Computer and Information Sciences 2007. He is a Royal Society-Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow 2008/9, and was 28th Gresham Professor of Geometry.
He's interested in designing safe and usable user interfaces and in digital story telling - they are user generated content (and other things too).
Marion Walton is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, where she co-ordinates the Interactive media production stream in the Centre for Film and Media Studies. She teaches courses in online media, animation, and game design at the University of Cape Town. She has worked in online and interactive media production since 1997. Her PhD (recently submitted in Computer Science) is entitled "Semiotic machines: Software in discourse" and it develops new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of software as a medium of communication. The study addresses the issues of power and regulation of meaning in proprietary software through close observation and analysis of software users in two different contexts - young children using software in a Cape Town township school and European youth playing an online game, Blizzard Entertainment's blockbuster World of Warcraft. She was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship for a period of study at the University of London, where she was based in the Centre for the Study of Children Youth and Media. She was also a recipient of the Harry Oppenheimer scholarship in African Studies. Her academic publications explore literacy issues in relation to web use in South Africa, and she enjoys building interdisciplinary connections between media studies and computer science, with the aim of deepening contemporary understandings of technology in use. Her current research focuses on social issues and the new meaning-making practices that arise as young people use online and mobile media.
Judy van Biljon started her career as a mathematics teacher, later she lectured at a College for Enrichment Education in Bloemfontein, the Free State University and the University of South Africa(UNISA) where she is currently employed. In 2007 she obtained a PhD entitled 'A model for representing the motivational and cultural factors that influence mobile phone usage variety' from UNISA with Paula Kotze and Gary Marsden as supervisors. The study started out in in the field of Human-Computer Interaction but eventually incorporated models from Sociology and Management Information Systems as well. Current research interests include designing mobile phones for the elderly, technology acceptance and mobile phone design and services for developing country contexts.
