Next-Generation Interactive Public Displays

The City and County of Swansea Council are embarking on a major redevelopment of Swansea Central as part of the recent City Deal investment programme. The Council, and their partner RivingtonHark, are interested in a wide range of digital public engagements throughout the space.The proposed research will explore physical and digital ways to provide interactive experiences throughout this new space (and potentially the wider city beyond). As such, it directly relates to the Digital Economy challenge contextof the CDT.IntendedImpactThe proposed project will deliver impact both in research and for the Council. Research outputs will naturally include publications, but there will be further impacts from the public engagement and co-creation work that will be a core part ofthe project. Citizens of There will also be tangible outputs from the work, such as the physical installations that will be created. While the project will naturally involve creating prototypes in various stages of fidelity/readiness, a key aim from the Council side is to deliver legacy outputs -that is, deployments (e.g., installations) that outlive the research project and have long-lastingimpact. To support this, all of the outputs (e.g., designs, source code, construction diagrams etc) will be shared with the Council, and ideally made open-source where possible.ScientificPhDProposalInteraction with public displays is a research topic with a long history, and significant interest (e.g., [1]). However, the majority of existing research concerns interactions with a single installation. This PhD project will explore a range of public space engagements that can be automatically composed and connected to provide an interactive and personalised experience when interactions are spread over a whole location (whether building/locality scale or perhaps even city-centre scale). The term "displays" is also interpreted loosely -forexample, one output of this research might be components that enable the user to build up an interactive digital journey that involves systems such as speech appliances, screens, non-digital elements and perhaps even interactive robots that can be used in different ways throughout their journey around the city.As outlined above, the City and County of Swansea Council are currently embarking on a major redevelopment of Swansea Central. The redevelopment project includes a 3,500 capacity arena, park and residential/office/retail space, all of which are available to be used as test locations for the research deployments that will take place over the course of the project.
The project has three key aims:
To develop, implement and evaluate a series of interactive public "displays" using a range of different modalities (i.e., not just visual) in different places
To explore ways of providing connected and coherent digital interactions spread throughout a space that, if possible, build on multiple engagement points where appropriate (rather than, e.g., gamifying by instrumenting the user.
To be grounded in community engagement and co-creation, ultimately aiming to create a legacy interactive and interconnected system that outlives the duration of the PhD

The Centre will nurture 55 new PhD researchers who will be highly sought after in technology companies and application sectors where data and intelligence based systems are being developed and deployed. We expect that our graduates will be nationally in demand for two reasons: firstly, their training occurs in a vibrant and unique environment exposing them to challenging domains and contexts (that provide stretch, ambition and adventure to their projects and capabilities); and, secondly, because of the particular emphasis the Centre will put on people-first approaches. As one of the Google AI leads, Fei-Fei Li, recently put it, "We also want to make technology that makes humans' lives better, our world safer, our lives more productive and better. All this requires a layer of human-level communication and collaboration" [1]. We also expect substantial and attractive opportunities for the CDT's graduates to establish their careers in the Internet Coast region (Swansea Bay City Deal) and Wales. This demand will dovetail well with the lifetime of the Centre and provide momentum for its continuation after the initial EPSRC investment.

With the skills being honed in the Centre, the UK will gain a important competitive advantage which will be a strong talent based-pull, drawing in industrial investment to the UK as the recognition of and demand for human-centred interactions and collaborations with data and intelligence multiplies. Further, those graduates who wish to develop their careers in the academy will be a distinct and needed complement to the likely increased UK community of researchers in AI and big data, bringing both an ability to lead insights and innovation in core computer science (e.g., in HCI or formal methods) allied to talents to shape and challenge their research agenda through a lens that is human-centred and that involves cross-disciplinarity and co-creation.

The PhD training will be the responsibility of a team which includes research leaders in the application of big data and AI in important UK growth sectors - from health and well being to smart manufacturing - that will help the nation achieve a positive and productive economy. Our graduates will tackle impactful challenges during their training and be ready to contribute to nationally important areas from the moment they begin the next steps of their careers. Impact will be further embedded in the training programme with cohorts involved in projects that directly involve communities and stakeholders within our rich innovation ecology in Swansea and the Bay region who will co-create research and participate in deployments, trials and evaluations.

The Centre will also impact by providing evidence of and methods for integrating human-centred approaches within areas of computational science and engineering that have yet to fully exploit their value: for example, while process modelling and verification might seem much removed from the human interface, we will adapt and apply methods from human-computer interaction, one of our Centre's strengths, to develop research questions, prototyping apparatus and evaluations for such specialisms. These valuable new methodologies, embodied in our graduates, will impact on the processes adopted by a wide range of organisations we engage with and who our graduates join.

Finally, as our work is fully focused on putting the human first in big data and intelligent systems contexts, we expect to make a positive contribution to society's understandings of and involvement with these keystone technologies. We hope to reassure, encourage and empower our fellow citizens, and those globally, that in a world of "smart" technology, the most important ingredient is the human experience in all its smartness, glory, despair, joy and even mundanity.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609060/put-humans-at-the-center-of-ai/