This year's ASSETS Conference hosted its fourth Microsoft Student Research Competition (SRC) event. The SRC allows students from diverse ACM areas to present their work and get recognised for achievement. The competition had both Undergraduate and Graduate categories, with the following students winning in their respective categories.

Undergraduate Category

1. Sensation Augmentation to Relieve Pressure Sore Formation in Wheelchair Users
   Raphael Rush, Queen's University, Canada
2. Designing AAC Interfaces for Commercial Brain-Computer Interaction Gaming Hardware
   Stephen Steward, The University of Delaware, USA

Graduate Category

1. iSET: Enabling in Situ and Post Hoc Video Labeling
   Mish Madsen, MIT, USA; Abdelrahman Mahmoud, American University in Cairo, Egypt; Youssef Kashef, American University in Cairo, Egypt
2. Defining Virtualization Based System Abstractions for an Indoor Assistive Living for Elderly Care
   Nova Ahmed, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
3. MGuider: Mobile Guiding and Tracking System in Public Transit System for Individuals with Cognitive Impairments
   Wei-Hsun Chen, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan

Labels: ASSETS, Awards, Student Research Competition

The 2009 SIGACCESS Best Paper Award has been awarded Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Daisuke Sato and Chieko Asakawa from IBM Research, Yamato, Japan for their paper:

Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement: Challenges and Possibilities

Collaborative accessibility improvement has great potential to make the Web more adaptive in a timely manner by inviting users into the improvement process. The Social Accessibility Project is an experimental service for a new needs-driven improvement model based on collaborative metadata authoring technologies. In 10 months, about 18,000 pieces of metadata were created for 2,930 webpages through collaboration. We encountered many challenges as we sought to create a new mainstream approach. The productivity of the volunteer activities exceeded our expectation, but we found large and important problems in the screen reader users' lack of awareness of their own accessibility problems. In this paper, we first introduce examples, analyze some statistics from the pilot service and then discuss our findings and challenges. Three future directions including site-wide authoring are considered.

Full Paper Available from the ACM Digital Library

Labels: Awards, Best Paper

The 2009 SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award has been awarded to Anna C. Cavender from the University of Washington, USA, for her contribution to the paper “ClassInFocus: Enabling Improved Visual Attention Strategies for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students”. This was written in conjunction with Jeffrey P. Bigham from the University of Rochester, New York, USA and Richard E. Ladner from the University of Washington, USA.

ClassInFocus: Enabling Improved Visual Attention Strategies for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students

Deaf and hard of hearing students must juggle their visual attention in current classroom settings. Managing many visual sources of information (instructor, interpreter or captions, slides or whiteboard, classmates, and personal notes) can be a challenge. ClassInFocus automatically notifies students of classroom changes, such as slide changes or new speakers, helping them employ more beneficial observing strategies. A user study of notification techniques shows that students who liked the notifications were more likely to visually utilize them to improve performance.

Full Paper Available from the ACM Digital Library

Labels: Awards, Best Student Paper

Edinburgh University, UK, 13-16 April 2010

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and British Computer Society (BCS) are delighted to invite you to the joint ACM-BCS 2010 “Visions of Computer Science” conference, to be held at the Informatics Forum, Edinburgh University, between April 13-16 2010. This flagship event aims to energise the computing community and bring it together around some positive and inspiring visions of our discipline and follows the highly successful "Visions of Computer Science" conference in 2008.

Topics

The proceedings will be published on the BCS electronic proceedings series and the ACM Digital Library. Some of the best papers will appear in The Computer Journal, the archival research publication of the BCS. Submissions are being solicited in all areas of research covering the broad field of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). They include but are not limited to:

• Computer Architectures and Digital Systems
• Theoretical Computer Science: Algorithms and Complexity
• Logic and Semantics
• Non-standard Models of Computation
• Programming Methods and Languages
• Software Engineering, and System Design Tools
• Quantitative Evaluation of Algorithms, Systems, and Networks
• Artificial Intelligence, Agents, and Machine Learning
• Computer Networks
• Distributed and Pervasive Systems
• Grid Computing and eScience
• Digital Economy
• Databases, Information Retrieval and Data Mining, Web based Computation
• Human Computer Interaction
• Robotics and Computer Vision
• Bioinformatics, Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Chemistry
• Medical Applications

Call for Papers

Submissions are being solicited in all areas of research covering the broad field of Computer Science and Engineering. The relevant dates for authors are:

submission:

18 December 2009

notification:

19 February 2010

camera-ready:

5 March 2010

The strict limit for submissions is 12 A4-pages in 10pt two-column style including figures and references. Authors may include a clearly marked appendix, which referees may or may not take into account. For more information see:
http://www.bcs.org/visions2010/.

Labels: Call For Papers, Conferences, Visions of Computer Science

Co-Located with the Nineteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010), in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 26-27 April 2010.

Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?

A revolution in the information society is now starting, based on the use of mobile phones in developing countries. The hyper-growth of mobile phone penetration is deeply changing the lives of people in most of the world; their ways of communicating, working, learning, and structuring their societies. The promising next step is obviously to access the Web. The Web has already touched the lives of over a billion people and now is the time for the next billions.

However, this expansion faces unprecedented accessibility challenges. Even the word “accessibility” needs a new definition for people in the developing regions. How can someone who is illiterate or barely literate access the Web? In some cases, a language may not even have a written form. The affordability of the technology is also a challenge, while access is constrained by low computational power, limited bandwidth, compact keyboards, tiny screens, and even by the lack of electric power. All of these constraints compound the problems of access and inclusion.

The desire for access in developing regions and the resourcefulness of the people who want inclusion unite the communities of people in developing regions and the communities of disabled people in the developed world. Will complex and highly graphical interfaces exclude developing regions from access? What problems exist, what are the newly appearing problems, and what solutions are required? How do the adoption patterns for Web accessibility and inclusion vary across cultures? What effect will the Web in the developing regions have on accessibility in the developed regions and vice versa?

Note that while the commonalities between Web Accessibility and Developing Regions are this years theme, please don’t be deterred if this somewhat unique area is not yours. We would like to see all quality work on Web Accessibility regardless of the particular field within accessibility. The overriding reason for a paper being accepted is its high quality in relation to the broad area of Web Accessibility. In this case topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

• Inclusion and Citizen Empowerment in Developing Regions;
• Inclusion and Literacy in Developing Regions;
• Enhancing Education in Developing Regions;
• Accessibility Problems in Developing Regions;
• Web Based Employment in Developing Regions;
• Web Based Health Care in Developing Regions;
• Evaluation and Validation tools and techniques;
• User Experimentation looking at Social Networking and Freedom of Expression;
• User Agents for Developing Regions and User Agent Guidelines;
• Web Authoring Guidelines;
• Design and best practice to support Web accessibility;
• Technological advances to support Web accessibility;
• End user tools;
• Accessibility guidelines, best practice, evaluation techniques, and tools;
• Psychology of end user experiences and scenarios;
• Innovative techniques to support accessibility;
• Universally accessible graphical design approaches;
• Design Perspectives;
• Adapting existing Web content; and
• Accessible graphic formats and tools for their creation.

Web Accessibility Challenge

Sponsored by Microsoft since 2008, the “Web Accessibility Challenge” is organised to give an opportunity to researchers and developers of advanced Web accessibility technologies for showcasing their technologies to technical leaders in this area not only from academia and industry but also from end-users. More details:
http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/challenge.shtml.

Submission

We will accept position and technical papers, and short communications. Position papers should only be submitted as a communication of (up to 4-pages) whereas technical papers should be in full paper format (up to 10-pages). Accepted papers and communications will appear in the Conference proceedings contained on the Conference CD, and will also be accessible to the general public via the ACM Digital Library website. The official language of the Conference is English. Submission details are available at:
http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/index.shtml.

Important Dates

Technical and Communication Papers:

Submission: 01 February 2010 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

Web Accessibility Challenge:

Submission: 19 February 2010 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

More details:

http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/dates.shtml

Labels: Call For Papers, Conferences, W4A

Creating web forms that are accessible to people with disabilities requires understanding of the labelling features of HTML markup and how browsers interpret labelling markup for assistive technologies like screen readers. The course will start by using simulations to help participants understand the issues people with disabilities face when using the web. Participants will learn the basics of labelling form controls, how to indicate required controls and provide feedback on invalid responses in a way that is usable by people with disabilities. Examples of more complex labelling of form controls for dates, phone numbers, validation codes and high density surveys will be included in the course. Participants will learn CSS techniques to layout form controls without using tables and how to highlight the active form control using CSS pseudo elements. The last part of the course will provide a preview of the form labelling capabilities of the new Accessibility Rich Internet Applications! (ARIA) specifications which provide new capabilities to label form controls and provide accessible feedback on form validation as required by the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.

Who Should Participate in the Course?

This course is designed for web developers interested in learning about the disability access issues faced by people with disabilities in using the web and how web forms can be designed to be accessible to people with disabilities. Participants should be familiar with HTML coding and the form elements. Knowledge of basic CSS techniques and javascripting will be helpful, but not a required part of the course.

Dates and Registration

Dates:

October 27th to December 1st (5 weeks)

Location:

On-line, mostly synchronous and some asynchronous activities

Cost:

$175 (NOTE: $25 discount to WOW members, educators, and government employees)

More information at:

http://formsonline.cita.illinois.edu/

Instructor:

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., University of Illinois

Registration link:

http://www.webprotraining.org/AccessibleForms.html

Labels: Online Course, Web Accessibility, Web Forms

The Information Systems Department at UMBC invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant Professor level in the area of human-centered computing (HCC) starting August 2010. Outstanding candidates in other areas will also be considered.

Candidates must have an earned PhD in Information Systems or a related field no later than August 2010. Applicants engaged in interdisciplinary research addressing accessibility (broadly defined to include issues associated with disabilities, age, culture, and other relevant topics), human-information interaction, or social computing are of primary interest. Ideal candidates will be engaged in research that spans two or more of these areas with preference given to those who can collaborate with current faculty. Candidates should have a strong potential for excellence in research, the ability to develop and sustain an externally funded research program, and the ability to contribute to our graduate and undergraduate teaching mission.

The Department offers undergraduate degrees in Information Systems and Business Technology Administration as well as both the MS and PhD in Information Systems. In addition, the Department offers an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing, and was ranked 8th in the nation in 2007 for scholarly productivity by Academic Analytics. Consistent with the UMBC vision, the Department has excellent technical support and teaching facilities as well as outstanding laboratory space and state of the art technology. UMBC’s Technology Center, Research Park, and Center for Entrepreneurship are major indicators of active research and outreach. Further details on our research, academic programs, and faculty can be found at http://www.is.umbc.edu/. Under-represented groups including women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

Applications will not be reviewed until the following materials are received: a cover letter, a one-page statement of teaching interests, a one-page statement of research interests, one or more sample research papers, and a curriculum vitae. Applicants should also arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent to the department as soon as possible. Electronic submission of materials as PDF documents is preferred. Electronic copies should be sent to bmorris@umbc.edu. Copies can also be sent to: Dr. Andrew Sears, Chair of Faculty Search Committee, Information Systems Department, UMBC, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250-5398. For inquiries, please contact Barbara Morris at (410) 455-3795 or bmorris@umbc.edu.

Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. This position is subject to the availability of funds.

UMBC is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and welcomes applications from minorities, women and individuals with disabilities.

Labels: Academic Position, Information Systems Department, UMBC