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Paul Vickers

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Publication statistics

Pub. period:2002-2009
Pub. count:8
Number of co-authors:6

Co-authors

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

James L. Alty:4
Fausto J. Sainz de ..:1
Susan Heaford:1

Productive colleagues

Paul Vickers's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

James L. Alty:35
Fausto J. Sainz de..:1
Susan Heaford:1

Calendar

May 20

CTS 2013 - The 2013 Intl. Conf. on Collaboration Techn. and Systems

May 22

Knowing (by) Designing 2013

May 27

13th Intl. Conf. on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

May 18

“ It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. ”

-- Steve Jobs, 1998

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Paul Vickers

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Personal Homepage:
http://www.paulvickers.com

Current place of employment:
Northumbria University

Paul Vickers holds a BSc degree in Computer studies from Liverpool Polytechnic and a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Loughborough University. He is currently Reader in Human-Computer Interaction in at Northumbria University where he has been since 2001. Between 1989 and 2001 Vickers taught at Liverpool John Moores University, and before that worked in a software development team at Digital Equipment Co. Ltd. Paul Vickers is a UK Chartered Engineer and a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and is also a registered practitioner in the UK's Higher Education Academy. His research is centred in the human-computer interaction (HCI) and auditory visualisation fields with a particular focus on the use of music as a medium for external representations. Vickers has presented at and been on the organising committees for a number of international conferences and has been interviewed by international media about his work on auditory representations of programs. A keen musician, Paul Vickers is very interested in bringing together the technologists, engineers, musicians, composers, sound artists, audio engineers, and programmers to build well-motivated and well-designed tools for exploring the use of sound as a communication medium.

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Publications by Paul Vickers (bibliography)

2009

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Vickers, Paul, Banwell, Linda, Heaford, Susan and Salces, Fausto J. Sainz de (2009): Painting the ideal home: using art to express visions of technologically supported independent living for older people in north-east England. In Universal Access in the Information Society, 8 (1) pp. 33-47.

“This paper describes the investigation of the development of future technological products to support older people in everyday living through the agency of a community art group. Recent research has identified a number of challenges facing designers seeking to use traditional participatory design approaches to gather technology requirements data from older people. Here, a project is described that sought to get a group of older people to think creatively about their needs and desires for technological support through the medium of paint. The artistic expression technique described in this article allowed the identification of issues that had also been found by previous research that used a range of different techniques. This indicates that the approach shows promise, as it allows information to be gathered in an environment that is comfortable and familiar using methods already known by the participants and which they find enjoyable. It provides a complement (or possible alternative) to standard protocols and has the potential benefit of extracting even richer information as the primary task for participants is enjoyable in its own right and is not associated with an interrogative process. Furthermore, it is argued that some of the key risks of traditional approaches are lessened or removed by the naturalistic setting of this approach.”

2006

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Vickers, Paul (2006): Lemma 4: Haptic Input + Auditory Display = Musical Instrument?. In: McGookin, David K. and Brewster, Stephen A. (eds.) HAID 2006 - Haptic and Audio Interaction Design - First International Workshop August 31 - September 1, 2006, Glasgow, UK. pp. 56-67.

2004

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Buranatrived, Jiraporn and Vickers, Paul (2004): A Study of Application and Device Effects Between a WAP Phone and a Palm PDA. In: Brewster, Stephen A. and Dunlop, Mark D. (eds.) Mobile Human-Computer Interaction - Mobile HCI 2004 - 6th International Symposium September 13-16, 2004, Glasgow, UK. pp. 192-203.

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0002, Mark Nicholson and Vickers, Paul (2004): Pen-Based Gestures: An Approach to Reducing Screen Clutter in Mobile Computing. In: Brewster, Stephen A. and Dunlop, Mark D. (eds.) Mobile Human-Computer Interaction - Mobile HCI 2004 - 6th International Symposium September 13-16, 2004, Glasgow, UK. pp. 320-324.

2003

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Vickers, Paul and Alty, James L. (2003): Siren songs and swan songs debugging with music. In Communications of the ACM, 46 (7) pp. 86-93.

2002

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Vickers, Paul and Alty, James L. (2002): Using music to communicate computing information. In Interacting with Computers, 14 (5) pp. 435-456.

“The audio channel remains little used in most computing applications, often its use being relegated to providing trivial sound effects whose novelty value soon wears off. Nevertheless, in principle sound offers much to the process of human-computer interaction as for most people the notion of auditory imagery is easily accepted. In this paper we explore how sound, specifically musical sound, can be used to communicate computing information. The findings of two studies are presented. The first investigated how pitch intervals and musical phrases of complex (non-sinusoidal) tones can be recognised. The second study aimed to demonstrate that musical structures could communicate information about high-level programming language structures and program run-time behaviour. Both studies showed that music could successfully be used as a communication medium and that listeners did not need to be musically trained to benefit from the audio signals. Finally, recommendations for further work are made.”

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Vickers, Paul and Alty, James L. (2002): Musical program auralisation: a structured approach to motif design. In Interacting with Computers, 14 (5) pp. 457-485.

“In an earlier paper, Vickers and Alty (2002) showed that musically untrained users could make use of musical cues to understand computing information. Using a technique known as musical program auralisation, they showed that music could communicate run-time and structural information about Pascal programs. This paper describes how a set of hierarchically related auralisation motifs was designed and constructed within a formal musical framework. These auralisations were then evaluated in an experiment to determine how well they could be interpreted by computer science students. The results showed that the musical motifs were generally understood by the subjects and that any prior musical training of the subjects did not affect their ability to interpret the musical signals. Based on the results of the experiment and study of some cognitive aspects of music perception, a set of organising principles for musical program auralisation is proposed. Finally, recommendations for further study are made with particular regard to assessing the usefulness of the auralisations in program debugging situations.”

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Vickers, Paul and Alty, James L. (2002): When bugs sing. In Interacting with Computers, 14 (6) pp. 793-819.

“In The Songs of Insects, Pierce (1949) described the striped ground cricket, Nemobius fasciatus-fasciatus, which chirps at a rate proportional to ambient air temperature. Twenty chirps-per-second tell us it is 31.4 {deg}C; 16 chirps and it is 27 {deg}C. This is a natural example of an auditory display, a mechanism for communicating data with sound. By applying auditory display techniques to computer programming we have attempted to give the bugs that live in software programs their own songs. We have developed the CAITLIN musical program auralisation system Vickers and Alty, 2002b) to allow structured musical mappings to be made of the constructs in Pascal programs. Initial experimental evaluation [Interacting with Computers (2002a,b)] showed that subjects could interpret the musical motifs used to represent the various Pascal language constructs. In this paper we describe how the CAITLIN system was used to study the effects of musical program auralisation on debugging tasks performed by novice Pascal programmers. The results of the experiment indicate that a formal musical framework can act as a medium for communicating information about program behaviour, and that the information communicated could be used to assist with the task of locating bugs in faulty programs.”

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User-contributed publications

Here is a list of publications that have been submitted by the author himself/herself or a website visitor:

Vickers, P., & Alty, J. L. (2003). Siren Songs and Swan Songs: Debugging with Music. Communications of the ACM, 46(7), 86-92.

Vickers, P. (2004). External Auditory Representations of Programs: Past, Present, and Future - An Aesthetic Perspective. In S. Barrass & P. Vickers (Eds.), ICAD 2004 - The Tenth Meeting of the International Conference on Auditory Display. Sydney: ICAD.

Nicholson, M., & Vickers, P. (2004). Pen-Based Gestures: An Approach to Reducing Screen Clutter in Mobile Computing. In S. A. Brewster & M. D. Dunlop (Eds.), Mobile Human-Computer Interaction - Mobile HCI 2004 6th International Symposium, Glasgow, UK, September 13-16, Proceedings (Vol. 3160, pp. 320-324): Springer-Verlag.

Buranatrived, J., & Vickers, P. (2004). A Study of Application and Device Effects Between a WAP Phone and a Palm PDA. In S. A. Brewster & M. D. Dunlop (Eds.), Mobile Human-Computer Interaction - Mobile HCI 2004 6th International Symposium, Glasgow, UK, September 13-16, Proceedings (Vol. 3160, pp. 192-203): Springer-Verlag.

Buranatrived, J., & Vickers, P. (2002, 30-31 October). An Investigation of the Impact of Mobile Phone and PDA Interfaces on the Usability of Mobile-Commerce Applications. Paper presented at the IWNA5: 5th IEEE International Workshop on Networked Appliances, Liverpool, UK.

Clement, P., & Vickers, P. (2002, 30-31 October). From Server to PDA: an HCI Perspective on Porting Wireless Roaming Business Applications. Paper presented at the IWNA5: 5th IEEE International Workshop on Networked Appliances, Liverpool, UK.