Talk by Peter Eades

Muireann attended a talk by Peter Eades, University of Sydney, HxI Initiative and NICTA, in the ERB last week. The title of the talk was "Humans Interacting with Information, Machines, Systems, and Humans".

In this talk some technologies that support humans in their interactions with information, machines, systems, and other humans were discussed. The talk began with Information Visualization, that is, the art and science of mapping abstract data into visual forms. These visual forms enable humans to understand large data sets (such as social networks, and biological networks). Professor Eades gave some interesting new and old examples, which show the successes and failures of computer-based Information Visualization, including metro maps from around the world.
The 'Braccetto' project, which investigates how distributed teams of humans can collaborate over a shared visual workspace was also described. The 'Braccetto' project is developing "mixed presence groupware", that is, tools to enable partially co-located and partially remote teams to collaborate. The talk on the Braccetto project, which began in 2006, was interesting. The idea of a CTW (Configurable Tele-presence Workstation) is being explored. When collaborating, there are two screens and both teams can observe a vertical one, while running an application on the horizontal one. This system is also touch-screen.

Finally the 'HxI Initiative' was described briefly. This is a major initiative of the Australian Government that aims to increase Australia's research output in HxI.
Here's a presentation on the same topic that was available on the web.