Stefano Padilla

• PhD, BEng Hons, MBCS, PgCAP
• Professor (Associate) at Heriot-Watt University

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...

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

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...

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 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...

Stopword removal is a critical stage in many Machine Learning methods but often receives little consideration, it interferes with the model visualizations and disrupts user confidence. Inappropriately chosen or hastily omitted stopwords not only lead to suboptimal performance but also significantly affect the quality of models, thus reducing the wi...

SICSA Research Theme Conference Panel Session - Showcasing SICSA's strengths and collaboration in Sustainability and Resilience.

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...

Autonomous vehicles and robots are increasingly being deployed to remote, dangerous environments in the energy sector, search and rescue and the military. As a result, there is a need for humans to interact with these robots to monitor their tasks, such as inspecting and repairing offshore wind-turbines. Conversational Agents can improve situation...

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.

Computer Games: a quick introduction, overview, design and production. Guess lecture in ICT for SMEs.

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

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.

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...

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....

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...

Many computer science students apply to computer games companies after completing our programmes. However making this transition successfully requires a portfolio of completed games. In order to develop this portfolio, students require focused ‘how-to’ sessions plus technical ‘starter’ support in the form of accessible game design and production el...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Object qualities are difficult to transmit between the real and the digital domain as there is a perceptual gap when representing real objects in the digital world. Our fundamental aim is to be able to communicate qualities between the two domains using naïve physical interactions. We explore in this paper the communication of weight and volume usi...

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...

Online shopping for fashion has seen explosive growth in recent times but the sector still faces the challenge of translating the in-store experience to the online environment. Clothing has been classified as a high-involvement product category that needs to be seen, tried on and touched to be evaluated (Workman, 2010) and the lack of tactile input...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

We are investigating the perceived characteristics of 3D surface texture by using rendered images of synthetic surfaces with precisely defined characteristics. We compute texture features directly from the height data and present observers with animated images that mimic the way in which people rotate surface textures when assessing their character...

We report results from a new methodology for investigating the visually perceived properties of surface textures. Densely sampled two-dimensional 1/f(beta) noise processes are used to model natural looking surfaces, which are rendered using combined point-source and ambient lighting. Surfaces are shown in motion to provide rich cues to their relief...

This thesis reports and discusses results from a new methodology for investigating the visually perceived properties of surfaces; by doing so, it also discovers a measurement or estimator for perceived roughness of 1/Fβ noise surfaces. Advanced computer graphics were used to model natural looking surfaces (1/Fβ noise surfaces). These were generated...