SICSA support for TTW13

SICSA HCI has subsidised two attendees at Tiree Tech Wave.  After an open call, these were awarded to  Fearn Bishop  and Arlene Casey.  Here is a short statement from each of them.

Fearn Bishop

Computer Human Interaction Research Group, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews  –  webpage

I’m excited to attend Tiree Tech Wave both to investigate my research interests in a new context and to gain and share new knowledge with other attendees. I have previously attended other such community driven events and have found great value in the positive atmosphere such an approach creates.

My research interests involve information visualization with children, and I would be interested in looking at how visualization for novice readers could benefit projects on the island. I also have previous experience with Arduino and related microcontrollers (previous projects include an infrared harp and an electronic trombone), including having taught the basics to university and high school students.

I have no specific plan for my time at Tiree Tech Wave, I aim to spend my time learning about what other people are doing, and providing some hopefully helpful input and insight. I want to use the time as space to think about new ideas, and to consider and use the knowledge I have in different contexts.

Arlene Casey

Institute for Language, Cognition and Computations, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh  –  webpage

As a precious attendee at Tech Wave I have benefited from the open, friendly and collaborative environment, receiving invaluable advice and the space and time to talk about my PhD. In particular, this springs TechWave for me will be to focus on developing a project idea that I hope to get funding support for. This will involve bringing a group of PhD students to the next TechWave who would work on the project but more importantly who I hope will benefit as I have from the overall experience.

I was intrigued by the island phone boxes project at the last TechWave. I would like to investigate further potential uses for the phone boxes and explore with community members what these might be. Having lived on an island a project that benefits the community in some small way is very important to me. It would also be great to have a collaborative project that could benefit all those taking part, developing their communication and network skills perhaps joining up with the regulars from Cardiff.

Possible Ideas include:

  • Local history information for tourists provided at the phone points, perhaps via raspberry pi device and tapping into the An Iodhlann database to generate information. Edinburgh University has an experienced dialogue/text generation group and someone who would be interested in participating who has specific experience in working with museum type data to generate text and dialogue.
  • Local weather tidal information for phone boxes near surf beaches
  • Community information point
  • Link-up to the Frasan map to provide tourist information
  • App based Game, collecting information that required visiting the phone boxes to collect points or information.

make, talk and play at the wind-ripping edge of digital technology