Mike Bennett
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Note
I finished my job as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Stanford University and then joined a startup in Silicon Valley. The papers and research below are no longer on-going but if you have questions about the research please feel free to email me.

Research
Much of my computational modeling research (applied to Human-Computer Interaction / Vision Science) is focused on creating physiologically and psychologically valid computational models of visual displays, human vision and how people "see" visual designs, user interfaces and information visualizations. As part of the research I developed algorithms for measuring design effectiveness and enabling design adaptions based on individual physiological differences. Particularly focused on individual psychophysical differences in low-level vision, e.g. model and simulate an individual person's eyesight then use the simulation to automatically compare a range of potential information visualizations and make a decision about which is best for that specific person.

With the algorithms and techniques I developed, predictions can be made about how easy or hard a visual design or information visualization is to see. Then the predictions can be used to improve and adapt the display of complex visualizations and designs to suit individual differences in eye function. Demonstrated in my publications are automatic evaluations of text and font styles, network graph designs and layouts, and the pseudocoloring of scientific visualizations (see "Designing For An Individual's Eyes: Human-Computer Interaction, Vision, And Individual Differences" download).


Publications - Peer Reviewed
  • Bennett, M., McCarthy, K., O'Modhrain, S. and Smyth, B.
    SimpleFlow: Enhancing Gestural Interaction With Gesture Prediction, Abbreviation And Autocompletion
    INTERACT 2011 - 13th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 591-608, Lisbon, Portugal, 2011. [ paper pdf ] (27.6% acceptance)

  • Bennett, M. and Quigley, A.
    Creating Personalized Digital Human Models Of Perception For Visual Analytics
    UMAP 2011 - 19th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 25-37, Girona, Spain, 2011. [ paper pdf ] (20% acceptance)

  • Phelan, O., McCarthy, K., Bennett, M. and Smyth, B.
    On Using the Real-time Web for News Recommendation and Discovery
    WWW 2011 - 20th International World Wide Web Conference, pp. 103-104, Hyderabad, India, 2011. [ poster pdf ]

  • Bennett, M.
    Design Perception: Individual Bodies, Individual Eyes, Individual Perceptions
    CHI 2011 Workshop - Workshop on Dynamic Accessibility at Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Vancouver, Canada, 2011. [ paper pdf | talk slides ]

  • Phelan, O., McCarthy, K., Bennett, M., and Smyth, B.
    Terms of a Feather: Content-based News Discovery and Recommendation using Twitter
    ECIR 2011 - 33rd European Conference on Information Retrieval, pp. 448-459, Dublin, Ireland, 2011. [ paper pdf ] (20% acceptance)

  • Hannon, J., Bennett, M., and Smyth, B.
    Recommending Twitter Users to Follow using Content and Collaborative Filtering Approaches
    RECSYS 2010 - 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. 199-206, Barcelona, Spain, September, 2010. [ paper pdf ] (19.4% acceptance)

  • Bennett, M.
    Designing For An Individual's Eyes: Human-Computer Interaction, Vision And Individual Differences
    PhD Thesis, College of Engineering, Mathematical & Physical Sciences, University College Dublin, Ireland, 2009 [ thesis pdf ]

  • Lado Insua, G., Bennett, M., Nixon, P. and Coyle, L.
    Meaning Makers: User Generated Ambient Presence
    International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence. pp. 47-52, Vol. 1, No. 2, April-June 2009. [ article pdf ]

  • Lado Insua, G., Bennett, M., Nixon, P. and Coyle, L.
    User Generated Ambient Presence
    Proc. of 2nd Workshop on Ambient Information Systems. Colocated at Ubicomp 2008, Seoul, South Korea, September 21, 2008, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073 [ paper pdf ]

  • Bennett, M. and Quigley, A.
    Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences
    ACM AVI 2008 Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, pp. 380-383, Napoli, Italy, May, 2008 [ paper pdf | poster pdf ]

  • Bennett, M. Awarded Best Poster
    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, pp. 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, pp. 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
    In CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1538, Vienna, Austria, April 2004 [ poster pdf ]
 
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

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

  • 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

 
Software Artifacts
  • wayV (download: here) Included In Most Linux Distributions

  • Gestural Hearing

  • Nutmeg

  • Media Dive

  • GAC

  • Goofy