ICAD2011 Think Tank

Monday 13h00-17h30, ICAD2011 Conference, Budapest
ICAD2011 again hosted a Student Consortium/Think Tank. This year it was an informal 'question and answer' style consortium of promising graduate students (at a range of stages in their program, both masters and doctoral level) and distinguished research faculty. Think Tanks are opportunities for students to discuss their research, brain-storm problems and techniques, explore opportunities for collaborative projects, and gain invaluable feedback and advice from some of the most experienced researchers in the field. It was free to all students registering for the main conference.

The half-day program was divided into two main sessions. In the first session, participants split into pairs to discuss each other's projects. They then reported a brief summary of their partner's project back to the whole group. This provided an opportunity for all participants to practice succinctly describing the salient features of their own projects as well a practice in quickly summarizing in order to report those features an unfamiliar one. Faculty provided comments on various specific features/issues of each project.

The second session, structured around the process Inputs / Doing It / Outputs provided the opportunity for faculty to provide more general feedback, both in response to the presentations in the first session as well as other consequential ideas and ancillary advice ranging from research methods to appropriate publication organs, to collegiality and employment opportunities.

Faculty

Derek Brock Computer Scientist, Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence Naval Research Laboratory, Washington.
John H Flowers Professor of Psychology, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Matti Gröhn Finnish Institute of Occupational Health Brain and Technology team.
Bruce Walker Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology.
David Worrall Composer/Sonifier, Adjunct Research Fellow, School of Music, Australian National University. Think Tank Coordinator.

Participants

Nick Bearman

School of Environmental Scienes, University of East Anglia, UK.
Evaluating whether sound can be used to represent uncertainty in spatial data. Uncertainty is often not represented in spatial data because of visual saturation (where no more information can be shown on the map) and sound may help solve this.

Ethan Brown

Open-source software developer and statistician.
The R Programming Language as a Unified Environment for Data Sonification.

Carrie Bruce

Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
Facilitating Participation in Adults with Vision Loss through Real-Time Descriptive Exhibit Mediation. Evaluating the effectiveness of descriptive exhibit mediation that conveys visual descriptions and associated facts in real-time at live aquarium exhibits in facilitating participation of adults with vision loss.

Benjamin Davison

Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Evaluating Auditory Graphs with Blind Students in a Classroom. Exploring how to use auditory graphs in a high school classroom at the Georgia Academy for the Blind (GAB), starting with the graphing goals and operations taught in the first math course at GAB for academic-track, visually impaired high school students.

Jose González

Chiba University, Japan.
Auditory Display as an Aid for Prosthetic Hand Manipulation. Upper limb amputees have to rely extensively on visual feedback in order to monitor and manipulate successfully their prosthetic device. In order to enhance motor-sensory performance and awareness in prosthetic applications, auditory perception can be used as a redundant source of both kinematic and somatosensory information because of its high dimensionality, thus, exploring the difficulties people face when using a prosthetic hand and how the usage of auditory information affects their performance.

Philart (Myounghoon) Jeon

Engineering Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
How to effectively regulate drivers' various affective states using adaptive auditory user interfaces?

Martin Morrell

Queen Mary University of London, UK.
User Interaction and Control of Spatial Audio

Vinh Nguyen

Faculty of Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Australia.
Sonifying Human Movement in Architecture: representation in visual and aural media.

R Michael Winters

McGill University, Music Technology, Canada.
Is there a characteristic distribution of events in time which yields naturally pleasant auditory displays? Such a distribution may be rooted in findings of 1/f noise.

Comments and Feedback
General (anonymous) comments from the participants about their experience of the 2011 ThinkTank:

Discussion about perception and fatigue was interesting and insightful. It helped me position my own stance on fatigue and its relation to my research/project.
Helpful advice about learning terminology from other disciplines so that we may answer calls to papers across multi-disciplinary conferences/journals.
In general the Think Tank session worked very well and for me specifically it gave a good overview of the area of sonification and showed how wide an area it covered! It also worked well as an ice breaker session for students who might be a bit unsure of ‘conferences’, if this was their first one.
The 5 minute talks about other students work worked well and the staff feedback was useful. We never really got to look at the questions we were asked to come up with before the session, which was slightly disappointing, although we covered some of the general issues in the discussion session on Inputs / Doing It / Outputs.
I think the student think tank should definitely be run again next year, in a similar format to this one, but possibly extend it a bit to allow for more discussion and the questions (see above) if there are a similar number of people.
I found the ThinkTank to be a fun and helpful networking and learning opportunity, and I received some quite useful feedback on my project. Overall I thought the format was effective. However, I left the session feeling uncertain what to do next-I wished I had a better starting point on entering into the existing auditory display and sonification literature, and I also was hoping for more suggestions on people who I should talk to and whose work I should read.

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