Mike Chantler

• Professor
• Professor at Heriot-Watt University

We present a comprehensive, in-depth review of ideation assisted by large language models (LLMs), highlighting emerging trends and identifying unaddressed research gaps. In total, we examined 61 studies investigating the application of LLMs in both group and individual ideation processes. From these studies, we derived the Hourglass Ideation Framew...

Searching large digital repositories can be extremely frustrating, as common list-based formats encourage users to adopt a convenience-sampling approach that favours chance discovery and random search, over meaningful exploration. We have designed a methodology that allows users to visually and thematically explore corpora, while developing persona...

The world has seen in 2020 an unprecedented global outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, a new strain of coronavirus, causing the COVID-19 pandemic, and radically changing our lives and work conditions. Many scientists are working tirelessly to find a treatment and a possible vaccine. Furthermore, governments, scientific institutions and companies are acting qui...

In this article, we investigate the importance of phase for texture discrimination and similarity estimation tasks. We first use two psychophysical experiments to investigate the relative importance of phase and magnitude spectra for human texture discrimination and similarity estimation. The results show that phase is more important to humans fo...

Textures are the most important element for simulating real-world scenes and providing realistic and immersive sensations in many applications. Procedural textures can simulate a broad variety of surface textures, which is helpful for the design and development of new sensors. Procedural texture generation is the process of creating textures using...

Estimation of texture similarity is fundamental to many material recognition tasks. This study uses fine-grained human perceptual similarity ground-truth to provide a comprehensive evaluation of 51 texture feature sets. We conduct two types of evaluation and both show that these features do not estimate similarity well when compared against human a...

Collaboration between human supervisors and remote teams of robots is highly challenging, particularly in high-stakes, distant, hazardous locations, such as off-shore energy platforms. In order for these teams of robots to truly be beneficial, they need to be trusted to operate autonomously, performing tasks such as inspection and emergency respons...

Presentation given by M. Chantler at the Pulse of the Machine: People-Driven AI and Data Innovation workshop, during the Business in the Parliament Conference 2018.

Recent successes of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have generated exciting challenges in the area of explainability. For societal, regulatory, and utility reasons, systems that exploit these technologies are increasingly being required to explain their outputs to users. In addition , appropriate and timely explanation...

Presentation talk for published paper: Issues Affecting User Confidence in Explanation Systems

Research materials from a collaborative workshop concerning the following research question: What issues do you think most affect user confidence in explanation systems?

Talk given at the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, presenting our work on using Data-Driven Explanations to study User Confidence in automatically generated Concept Maps.

Automated tools are increasingly being used to generate highly engaging concept maps as an aid to strategic planning and other decision-making tasks. Unless stakeholders can understand the principles of the underlying layout process, however, we have found that they lack confidence and are therefore reluctant to use these maps. In this paper, we pr...

We present the UK Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Hub for Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets (ORCA Hub), a 3.5 year EPSRC funded, multi-site project. The ORCA Hub vision is to use teams of robots and autonomous intelligent systems (AIS) to work on offshore energy platforms to enable cheaper, safer and more efficient working practice...

Data Science is increasingly being accepted as one of the crucial technologies for the wellbeing and prosperity of nations. As Data Science can be the source and enabler of large-scale social and commercial change, finding the research challenges in Data Science is now a critical aspect for most scientific research and businesses. Data Science is a...

Although the importance of the Fourier phase to image perception has been addressed, it is unknown whether this is the case for texture similarity or not. Based on psychophysical experiments, we first show that the phase data is more important to human visual perception of texture similarity than the magnitude data. We further examine the ability o...

In previous work we developed a method for interior designers to receive image-based feedback about a crowd's emotions when viewing their designs. Although the designers clearly desired a service which provided the new style of feedback, we wanted to find out if an internet crowd would enjoy, and become engaged in, giving emotion feedback this way....

Triangulation of qualitative with quantitative data presents challenges. Does triangulation risk putting off reviewers by intimately mixing quantitative with qualitative data and does it add value? We pose these questions for the workshop in the context of a recently completed and published study. We investigated whether and why people giving feedb...

Research into creating visualisations that organise ideas into concise concept maps often focuses on implicit mathematical and statistical theories which are built around algorithmic efficacy or visual complexity. Although there are multiple techniques which attempt to mathematically optimise this multi-dimensional problem, it is still unknown how...

Dong et al. examined the ability of 51 computational feature sets to estimate human perceptual texture similarity, however, none performed well for this task. While it is well-known that the human visual system is extremely adept at exploiting longer-range aperiodic (and periodic) "contour" characteristics in images, none of the investigated featur...

Imagery and language are often seen as serving different aspects of cognition, with cognitive styles theories proposing that people can be visual or verbal thinkers. Most feedback systems, however, only cater to verbal thinkers. To help rectify this, we have developed a novel method of crowd communication which appeals to those more visual people....

Previous work has demonstrated that search for a target in noise is consistent with the predictions of the optimal search strategy, both in the spatial distribution of fixation locations and in the number of fixations observers require to find the target. In this study we describe a challenging visual-search task and compare the number of fixations...

We have developed a method and system that uses mutually agreed problem structuring and self-selection to bring together meeting attendees with complementary interests. The method builds upon previous tools which facilitate structuring and to these we have added method and assistive technology that both facilitates selection, and that records and d...

Academic networking is usually a " same time, same place " activity and its role in forming effective collaborations makes it a prime candidate for enhancement by collocated interaction technology. Our work on research strategy generation has involved us in facilitating many meetings of academic and industry leaders. We have developed successful me...

It has been shown that the spatial information of local image characteristics is important to human perception and computational features. Inspired by these studies, we propose a set of new computational texture features based on the spatial distributions of textons (SDoT). First, gradient magnitude and gradient direction spectra are computed from...

Hyper-parameters play a major role in the learning and inference process of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). In order to begin the LDA latent variables learning process, these hyper-parameters values need to be pre-determined. We propose an extension for LDA that we call 'Latent Dirichlet allocation Gibbs Newton' (LDA-GN), which places non-inform...

Invited presentation of Research Perspectives at Reseacrch Concil seminar, Swindon, 23 October 2014

Making meetings Well Sorted: RCUK wide presentation to Research Council staff, 29 Jan 2015

Introduction to Well Sorted study and Well Connected activity

RCUK wide presentation to Research Council staff, 29 Jan 2015

For this proposal we consulted widely with academics, by conducting a remote survey and card sorting exercise using Well Sorted. Academics in Lancaster, Heriot-Watt, and other universities were asked to respond regarding their reservations about discussing their ideas and engaging with potential collaborators at brokerage events. The following docu...

The joint Digital Personhood and Emoticon Network Meeting took place on the 9th & 10th of September 2015 with presentations from Research Council staff, updates on the Digital Personhood and Emoticon (Empathy and Trust in Communicating Online) projects, and networking sessions. The Digital Personhood projects cover a diverse range of topics, from...

Procedural models are widely used in computer graphics for generating realistic, natural-looking textures. However, these mathematical models are not perceptually meaningful, whereas the users, such as artists and designers, would prefer to make descriptions using intuitive and perceptual characteristics like "repetitive," "directional," "structure...

Computer simulated stimuli can provide a flexible method for creating artificial scenes in the study of visual perception of material surface properties. Previous work based on this approach reported that the properties of surface roughness and glossiness are mutually interdependent and therefore, perception of one affects the perception of the oth...

Cognitive styles theories suggest that we divide into visual and verbal thinkers. In this paper we describe a method designed to encourage visual communication between designers and their audiences. This new visual feedback method is based on enabling fast intuitive selections by the crowd from image banks when responding to an idea. Visual summari...

We compare two methods for diagnosing faults using imprecise dynamic models and imprecise measurements. By imprecise we mean that a parameter or measurement is only known to an interval rather than a point on the real number line. The first uses 'Temporal Band Sequences' (TBS - due to [loi96]) to encode the measurements and parameters - it checks t...

This paper describes a model-based diagnostic system for diagnosing faults in Electrical Transmission Systems. It checks the timing of the operation of network equipment against its Augmented Reactive Models (ARM). These ARM are finite state machine models extended to allow transitions to be conditioned on time intervals specified relative to the p...

We present PaperPilot 1 (bit.ly/paperpilot) a new tool which performs smart collaborator search using research concepts automatically extracted from the CSCW domain, as characterized by 5,516 papers taken from four conferences in the area. PaperPilot infers how a paragraph of text (say an abstract or news article) relates to these research concepts...

The emotional reaction of an audience to a design can be difficult to assess but valuable to know. Moodsource allows intuitive visual communication between crowds and designers. A crowd responds to a design with selections from image banks. Visual summarization reduces the massed image choices down to a few representative images to be consumed at a...

In this paper we present an investigation into visually perceived surface roughness. First we present psychophysical evidence that suggests that there is a simple relationship between perceived roughness and two well known surface parameters: fractal dimension and rms roughness. And that neither are good estimators, on there own, of perceived rough...

HCI is a wide, varied, and complex field that covers a broad spectrum of research. We therefore believe that there is no simple answer to the question 'what to study in HCI?' To shed some light on it, however, we reflect on this question with the aid of data from past HCI conferences, present meta-analyses reports, and possible future research prio...

Social media pervades modern digital society, yet despite its regular use the general level of digital literacy and awareness of online representations of self remain low. We report progress on the RCUK DE funded 'Charting the Digital Lifespan' project, which promotes digital literacy of social media through design of novel technological interventi...

We have applied topic modelling to the full-text British HCI and CHI corpora in order to automatically derive one hundred topics and their trends. We use these to compare the distributions of topics and changing foci of two conferences over the last five years. These data suggest that that, while the two conferences have significant overlap, they m...

In a study of 51 computational features sets Dong et al. [1] showed that none of these managed to estimate texture similarity well and, coincidently, none of these computed higher order statistics (HOS) over large regions (that is larger than 19×19 pixels). Yet it is well-known that the human visual system is extremely adept at extracting long-rang...

The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel method of identifying and visualising research trends in an automated, unbiased way. The output of this we call a 'Trend Map', and in this paper we use it to present an at-a-glance overview of the CHI research area, showing which areas are 'hot', 'cold', and 'stable'. This specimen Trend Map was created...

The majority of work on the perception of gloss has been performed using smooth surfaces (e.g., spheres). Previous studies that have employed more complex surfaces reported that increasing mesoscale roughness increases perceived gloss [Psychol. Sci. 19, 196 (2008), J. Vis. 10(9), 13 (2010), Curr. Biol. 22, 1909 (2012)]. We show that the use of real...

Inspired by studies [4, 23, 40] which compared rankings obtained by search engines and human observers, in this paper we compare texture rankings derived by 51 sets of computational features against perceptual texture rankings obtained from a free-grouping experiment with 30 human observers, using a unify evaluation framework. Experimental results...

The first Digital Personhood Network Meeting took place on the 6th & 7th of March 2014 with keynote presentations from Research Council staff, Professor Chris Hankin and Laura Hood from The Conversation, as well as updates on the five Digital Personhood sandpit projects. The sandpit projects cover a diverse range of Digital Personhood aspects, from...

The first Digital Personhood Network Meeting took place on the 6th & 7th of March 2014 with keynote presentations from Research Council staff, Professor Chris Hankin and Laura Hood from The Conversation, as well as updates on the five Digital Personhood sandpit projects. This document contains the feedback from the impact activities breakout sessi...

In his famous novel, Animal Farm, Orwell coined the phrase 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' [4]. This satirical observation aptly describes many common problems which emerge in group dynamics, such as the problem of mismatched contribution from over and under achievers [1]. Our motivation, therefore, is to develo...

Background / Purpose: A previous study has shown that magnitude roll-off factor (beta) and RMS height (sigma) that related to 1/f(beta) random phase noise surface topology, significantly related to perceived roughness under the assumption of Lambertian reflectance (1). We further employed a glossy reflection model to investigate if surface gloss...

Background / Purpose: Procedural texture is widely used in many research and application fields. Procedural texture models have the advantage that different textures can be efficiently generated by varying a set of input parameters to mathematical models. Identifying perceptual texture features is important for texture generation, browsing and re...

The main objective of image browsers is to empower users to find a desired image with ease, speed and accuracy from a large database. In this paper we present a novel approach at creating an image browsing environment based on human perception with the aim of providing intuitive image navigation. In our approach, similarity judgments form the basic...

Conducting knowledge capture and embedding it into a products’ through lifecycle remains a key issue in engineering industries; particularly with regard to rationale associated knowledge emanating during formal design reviews. Manual, and often interruptive, methods with associated costly overheads, exacerbate the already time consuming process. As...

We have tested 51 sets of texture features for estimating the perceptual similarity between textures. Our results show that these computational features only agree with human judgments at an average rate of 57.76%. In a second experiment we show that the agreement rates, between humans and computational features, increase when humans are not allowe...

Current interactive media presentations of textiles provide an impoverished communication of their 'textile hand', that is their weight, drape, how they feel to touch. These are complex properties experienced through the visual, tactile, auditory and proprioceptive senses and are currently lost when textile materials are presented in interactive vi...

We present a new media based on stop-motion animation and direct interaction for fashion clothing. This media is twice as helpful, more engaging, smaller in size, and better at communicating characteristics of materials compared to a set of images or video. Furthermore in this paper we discuss new work optimizing the outputs in terms of media size...

Topic Modeling (TM) is a rapidly-growing area at the interfaces of text mining, artificial in-telligence and statistical modeling, that is being increasingly deployed to address the 'information overload' associated with extensive text repositories. The goal in TM is typically to infer a rich yet intuitive summary model of a large document collecti...

This paper is an overview of a Kinect-based RGB detection software developed as part of an ongoing 'Smart' (Smart Textiles and Wearable Technology in Pervasive Computing Environments) Costume project. The project involved a multidisciplinary team in the domains of textile design, engineering and computer science. In this work we aimed to establish...

Given increasing levels of smartphone and tablet penetration, and integration of web-based technologies in-store, our research progresses the study of Image Interactivity Technology (IIT) from desktops to touchscreen devices. We evaluate the potential of novel forms of IIT on multi-modal devices for reducing the sensory impoverishment of online bro...

The creative industries like art, fashion, crafts, animation and design to name a few are very important for the wellbeing of the economy. In this paper and demo, we present novel tools that improve the presentation, simulation, creation and marketing of outputs from the creative community. Our aim is to target this non-technical community and impr...

In this paper we present a novel tool that improves on current archiving and simulation of fabrics by bridging the perceptual gap. We built upon recent research in HCI, perception and educational psychology to create a novel gestural interaction system that allows users to digitally share their designs at minimal cost.

The appearance of a surface texture is highly dependent on illumination. This is why current surface texture classifica- tion methods require multiple training images captured un- der a variety of illumination conditions for each class. We show that a single training image per class can be sufficient if the surfaces are of uniform albedo and smooth...

The majority of work on texture analysis in computer vision has concerned texture classification and segmentation, while the problem of measuring and modelling the visual similarity between pairs of textures has been relatively neglected. One likely reason for this is the difficulty in collecting subjective human similarity judgments over a large d...

The amplitude and phase spectra of an image contain important information for perception, and a large body of work has investigated the effects of manipulating these spectra on the recognition or classification of image content. Here, we use a novel means of investigating sensitivity to amplitude and phase spectra properties, testing the ability of...

Over the past 20 years, there have been many studies looking at how highlight disparity affects an observer's perception of glossiness. Most of these studies have used relatively smooth surfaces, and simple lighting models. We are using surfaces which are rougher and more naturalistic than those used before, using a rendering method which takes int...

We have studied how perceived gloss varies with the change of both mesoscale and microscale roughness on 3D surface textures. The mesoscale roughness was changed by varying the roll-off factor (β) of 1/f β fractal noise surfaces. The microscale roughness was changed by varying the microscale roughness parameter α in the microfacet reflection model....

In this paper we describe an innovative browsing system that improves on the navigation of a large set of objects which are either difficult to label or categorize. We use a two-stage process to obtain similarity information from humans, which then becomes the core of the system, this perceptual information is then used to create a resizable self-o...

Periodic patterns and symmetries are striking visual properties that have been used decoratively around the world throughout human history. Periodic patterns can be mathematically classified into one of 17 different Wallpaper groups, and while computational models have been developed which can extract an image’s symmetry group, very little work has...

We describe a new browsing system that improves online navigation of large numbers of objects which are otherwise difficult to label or split into categories. We use a two-stage process to obtain human similarity information which forms the core of the system and is used to create a resizable self-organizing map. This comprises a matrix of image st...

Today's Web users are spoilt by a vast quantity of online content. If they find a website boring or not engaging, they will just press the back button and likely never return again. In this paper, we describe our new online tool (Shoogleit) which aims to increase user engagement and make online pages more sticky. Shoogleit adds interactivity to any...

In this paper we discuss the use of established, design methodologies and conventions to inform digital content creation relating to the capture and communication of people’s sensory perceptions of ‘textile hand’*. We explore the advantages of such methodologies in relation to the creation of interactive digital textile swatches (known as Shoogles,...

In the textile sector, emotions are often associated with both physical touch and manipulation of the product. Thus there is the need to recreate the affective experiences of touching and interacting with fabrics using commonly available internet technology. New digital interactive representations of fabrics simulating handling have been proposed w...

As part of the EPSRC funded 'Digital Sensoria' project a set of digital tools were utilised to better demonstrate the tactile qualities of textiles via the internet. Shoogleit [8], an online utility for the creation of interactive video was one such tool. A Shoogle player for iOS mobile devices was then created (Orzechowski) using an iterative proc...

Tilings and symmetries are striking visual properties that have been used decoratively around the world throughout human history. Tiled patterns can be mathematically classified into 1 of 17 different wallpaper groups, and while computational models have been developed which can extract an image's symmetry group, very little work has been done on h...

Over the last thirty years evaluation of texture analysis algorithms has been dominated by two databases: Brodatz has typically been used to provide single images of approximately 100 texture classes, while CUReT consists of multiple images of 61 physical samples captured under a variety of illumination conditions. While many highly successful appr...

The target of machine learning is a predictive model that performs well on unseen data. Often, such a model has multiple intended uses, related to different points in the tradeoff between (e.g.) sensitivity and specificity. Moreover, when feature selection is required, different fea- ture subsets will suit different target performance characteristi...

Illumination and view dependent texture provide ample information on the appearance of real materials at the cost of enormous data storage requirements. Hence, past research focused mainly on compression and modelling of these data, however, few papers have explicitly addressed the way in which humans perceive these compressed data. We analyzed hum...

We investigate the ability of humans to perceive changes in the appearance of images of surface texture caused by the variation of their higher order statistics. We incrementally randomize their phase spectra while holding their first and second order statistics constant in order to ensure that the change in the appearance is due solely to changes...

The use of illumination and view-dependent texture information is recently the best way to capture the appearance of real-world materials accurately. One example is the Bidirectional Texture Function. The main disadvantage of these data is their massive size. In this article, we employ perceptually-based methods to allow more efficient handling of...

This paper demonstrates significant improvement in the performance of a computer vision system by incorporating the results of an experiment on human visual perception. This system was designed to solve a problem existing in the cork industry: the automatic classification of cork samples according to their quality. This is a difficult problem becau...

The LNL (linear, non-linear, linear) model has previously been successfully applied to the problem of texture segmentation. In this study we investigate the extent to which a simple LNL model can simulate human performance in a search task involving a target on a textured surface. Two different classes of surface are considered: 1/f(beta)-noise and...

Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTF) are commonly thought to provide the most realistic perceptual experience of materials from rendered images. The key to providing efficient compression of BTFs is the decision as to how much of the data should be pre- served. We use psychophysical experiments to show that this deci- sion depends critically upon...

This paper presents a solution to a problem existing in the cork industry: cork stopper/disk classification according to their quality. Cork is a natural and heterogeneous material; therefore, its automatic classification (seven quality classes exist) is very difficult. The solution proposed in this paper combines the extraction of 3D cork features...

We present synthetic surface textures as a novel class of stimuli for use in visual search experiments. Surface textures have certain advantages over both the arrays of abstract discrete items commonly used in search studies and photographs of natural scenes. In this study we investigate how changing the properties of the surface and target influen...