How can we augment human capabilities by enabling people to create and shape their own user experiences?

Day after day people's perspectives and relationships are shaped and mediated by all manner of physical and virtual tools, e.g. user interfaces, computers, door fobs, visual representations, etc. Yet often these tools are technology centric, rather than human centric, intrusive rather than ubiquitous, and needlessly complex to use and learn. These tools are frequently designed along the lines of a "one size fits all" approach that rarely, if ever, adapts to individual capabilities, talents, and potential.

Yet imagine if every tool you used was refined to enhance your specific abilities and cognitive capabilities? For example a user interface that transforms how information is represented based on an individual's background, e.g. present the information as graphs and charts for artists, tables of numbers for accountants, ranges of sounds for musicians, or whatever multimodal mixture works best for each individual.

As part of my PhD I am developing methods for automatically adapting and creating visual representations. The representations are automatically adapted based on individual psychophysical differences in low-level vision. This is useful because it may improve people's performance at certain core tasks when using information visualisations, i.e. visual search.

 
Publications - Peer Reviewed

• Bennett, M. and Quigley, A. "Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences", AVI 2008 Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Napoli, Italy, May, 2008 [ paper pdf | poster pdf ]


• (Awarded Best Poster) Bennett, M. "Understanding Distance & How Humans See Interfaces & Designs", VGV 2008 Irish Graduate Student Symposium on Vision, Graphics and Visualisation, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, June, 2008 [ poster pdf ]


• Bisht, M., Swords, D., Quigley, A., Gaudin, B. and Bennett, M. "Context-Coded Memories: Who, What, Where, When, Why", at workshop MeMos 2007: Supporting Human Memory with Interactive Systems at the British HCI International Conference (HCI 2007), Lancaster University, UK, 4th Sept 2007 [ paper pdf ]


• Bennett, M. and Quigley, A. "A Method for the Automatic Analysis of Colour Category Pixel Shifts During Dichromatic Vision", in 2nd International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 2, pages 457-466, Springer Verlag, Lake Tahoe Nevada, USA, 6th-8th November 2006 [ paper pdf ]


• Bennett, M., O'Modhrain, S., and Quigley, A. "Here Or There Is Where? Haptic Egocentric Interaction with Topographic Torch", presented at workshop on The Next Generation of Human-Computer Interaction at CHI 2006, Montréal, Canada, April 2006 [ paper pdf ]


• Bennett, M. "A Framework for the Rapid Prototyping of Zoomable User Interfaces", Masters Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland, 2005 [ thesis pdf ]


• Bennett, M., and Cummins, F., "ORRIL: A Simple Building Blocks Approach to Zoomable User Interfaces", in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Visualization, pages 639-644, London, July 2004 [ paper pdf ]


• Brucker-Cohen, J., Bennett, M., Agamanolis, S., Cummins, F., and Doyle, L. "Bumplist: Developing Beneficial Email List Structures", CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria, 24th-29th April 2004 (poster) [ pdf ]

 
Publications - In Progress

• (in progress) Bennett, M. "Individual Psychophysical Differences In Vision Applied to Information Visualisations & Interface Designs"

 
Publications - Non-peer Reviewed

• Bennett, M., Quigley, A. and Gaudin, B. "Information Visualisation in the Systems Research Group", in Proceedings of iHCI07 - The First Irish Human-Computer Interaction Conference, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, 2nd May 2007 [ slides pdf ]


• (Awarded Best Poster) Gaudin, B., Bennett, M., Sheehan, B., and Quigley, A. "From Migrations to Population Concentration (Large Scale Census Data Visualization)", CASCON 2006 Dublin Symposium, IBM Centre for Advanced Studies, Dublin, Ireland, 17th October 2006 [ poster pdf ]


• Bennett, M. "Automatically Evaluating The Impact Of Colour Blindness On Information Visualisations", CASCON 2006 Dublin Symposium, IBM Centre for Advanced Studies, Dublin, Ireland, 17th October 2006 [ poster pdf ]

 
Software Artifacts

• Gestural Hearing
• Nutmeg
• Media Dive
• wayV (download: here)
• GAC
• Goofy