Events

Here you will find information about the interesting happenings that we as a research group are hosting or involved with.

Past Events

Sacred Heart Visit

7 February 2006

We had 27 young ladies from Sacred Heart visit us with their careers advisor early in 2006. We entertained them with demonstrations of usability testing, poor signage, and the stroop effect.

Matt's Book Published

December 2005

Matt Jones and Gary Marsden's book was finally published after a long wait and many conversations. Strictly they are not HCI group members, but we're pretty proud anyway (especially now that we have actually got a copy of the book to read).

Matt Jones Moves to Wales

May 2005

Matt has followed family obligations and moved back to Wales. He is helping establish the Future Interaction Technology Laboratory at the University of Swansea, though he is continuing to take an interest in his Waikato students. All the best, Matt.

APCHI-CHINZ 2004

30 June - 2 July 2004

We were the hosts of the combined Asia Pacific Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, and SIG-CHI NZ symposium. We had Susan Dray and Don Norman as keynote speakers, and many interesting and interested delegates. Delegates came from all over the world, and from industry and academic fields. One of the most common comments was "I have never seen so many people having a good time at a conference". Below are some pictures from the conference — from the left, Don and Susan, the doctoral consortium students, people looking at a demonstration, and mixing and mingling over wine.

Honours student conference

5 September 2003

The honours student conference was held on Friday the 5th of September, and presentations were given by Matthew Berkers, Tzu-Chian Cheng, Rachel Goldthorpe, Willam Niu, Annelies Polley, and Tony Voyle about their honours work. All the students gave excellent presentations, and showed they had done an enormous amount of work. Willam was awarded "Best Presentation" for his talk about his "Smart House" project, which included a lively demonstration with flashing lights, a cellphone and a radio.

High School Students' Visit

26 August 2003

We often have high school students come and visit to find out about computer science and computer science research. In the picture to the right Matt and Jack are showing a group of students an interesting piece of HCI work — Jack's "Turning the Pages" interface.

Peter Thomas Visit

25-26 August

We were very fortunate to have Peter Thomas visit us. Professor Thomas gave us a very interesting talk on information appliances, and how to design them, and spent the rest of his time meeting with members of the HCI group, and having lunch with the PhD students while giving them pointers on how to do a PhD. Scott Jenson coincidentally visited again at the same time, and to the right is a picture of Peter and Scott at lunch after Peter's talk.

Scholarship Celebration Party

16 July 2003

At the beginning of July, Jason Catchpole and Dana McKay were awarded University of Waikato PhD scholarships. To celebrate Randy (Sally Jo's husband and a gourmet cook) cooked us all a delicious lunch and Bill screened minority report as the cheesecake brownies were passed around. To the right you can see Randy dishing up gumbo — yummy!

CHINZ 2003

July 1-4 2003 2003

AT the beginning of July, in the coldest weather all year, Dave, Masood, Bill, Dana and Jason all flew (at separate times) down to Dunedin. Despite the weather, we all made it in time, and Dave and Masood gave talks on the work they had been doing recently. To the right you can see Dave and Masood during those talks. The conference organisers had also allowed us plenty of time to explore Dunedin, and had an interesting social programme. Before the conference dinner, we toured the Speights brewery, famous for it's appearance in the Speights advertisement (there is a picture to the right. On Friday afternoon after the close of the conference, Dave, Bill and Jason went to the museum, and Dave acquired photographic evidence of Bill test-driving a penny-farthing. All in all, despite the weather, it was an interesting conference and a good time was had by all.

Mobile Interaction Workshop

May 29 2003

Matt Jones and Gary Marsden (a visiting researcher from the University of Cape Town) gave a workshop in Wellington in association with MediaLab and the New Zealand Wireless Data Forum. During this workshop they presented four case studies and had participants work on some case studies (including photo browsing and mobile searching). To find out more about the workshop see the website

Stephen Brewster Visit

May 26-27 2003

Stephen, an expert in haptic and audio interaction, came to visit us for two days in late May. While he was here he gave a well attended and interesting seminar on audio feedback from and haptic control of a mobile device (including an amusing discussion on nodding backwards). He also spoke with graduate and honours students in the HCI group, and visited the WICeD group. More about Stephen's work can be found on his home page

Ben Shneiderman and Jenny Preece Visit

February 2003

Ben and Jenny were visiting the group for the better part of February 2003. They are both professors in HCI at the University of Maryland. While they were here they met with researchers and students, and gave departmental seminars (as well as getting in a bit of sightseeing). Ben is also gave a public lecture about his new book, Leonardo's Laptop.

One of the things Ben and Jenny did while they were here was meet with the researchers, both students and staff, within the department and discuss their work with them. There was a lunch held with research students, where five students presented their work, and Ben and Jenny offered advice on how to do research, not just in HCI, but in computer science in general. Our visitors also moved around the department informally, speaking with people at their work. To the right is a picture of Ben and Tony discussing the work of Andrew Golightly (a student of Tony's).

Ben's first seminar was in the morning of 11 February 2003, when he discussed information visualisation interfaces. He described his experiences in the development of interfaces for a variety of purposes, including genome information analysis and stock market evaluation, and showed demos of the tools he has been involved in developing. His message for how to deal with large amounts of information was "Overview, Zoom&Filter, Details-on-Demand" To the right, pictures of Ben during the seminar.

Jenny's first seminar was in the afternoon on the 11th February 2003. She spoke to us about her work regarding online communities; how to build them, how to make them strong, and what kinds needs they meet. Jenny and one of her PhD students have discovered that communities with a strong and narrow focus, and which are self-regulating are the strongest communities. To the right a picture of Jenny during the seminar.

The largest event of the visit was Ben's public lecture on "Leonardo's Laptop". This was held in the Academy of Performing Arts on the evening of Thursday February 27, and was attended by over 100 people, both from within the university, and members of the general public. Ben spoke not only about computing, but about the work of Leonardo da Vinci, and actually donned medieval garb to do so. To the right you can see Ben during the talk.

After the talk "Leonardo's Laptop" was on sale and being signed by Ben, to the right you can see the book signing table and Ben's signature in progress.

Also after the lecture was a reception with food, wine and displays of the research going on in the department. This reception was a great success, and ended about 9pm. To the right you can see a shot of the reception, and David Bainbridge and Ben looking at some work on the LIDS display available during the reception.

Scott Jenson's Visit

03 February 2003

Scott Jenson, who helped design the Apple Newton and lead interaction design at Symbian, among other things, came to visit at the beginning of February. Scott gave a seminar challenging the traditional view of mobile Web use and outlining a model where people use personal technologies to build relationships, share and work within small communities. In the afternoon, Scott ran a design workshop bringing together HCI methods and commercial constraint insights. Participants worked together in small teams to design a microwave interface. Scott has recently written a book, The Simplicity Shift, on innovative design tactics in a corporate world.