Sarah Faisal

I joined UCLIC as a PhD student in October 2004. I earned my masters degree in Computer Science from Tufts University, which was when I first got interested in HCI. The notion of making technology fit user needs and trying to really understand what users wanted has really appealed to me. Therefore I decided to take my education further and pursue a career in HCI. My supervisors are Dr. Paul Cairns, who has recently moved to the University of York, and Prof. Ann Blandford.

Research interests

My PhD revolves around the field of Information Visualization (InfoVis). InfoVis are interactive visual externalizations of data. Users interact with them in order to gain insight and knowledge of the represented domain. Users' experiences when interacting with InfoVis tools is analogous to people's experiences in interacting with the grammars in a text, where the correctness of the grammatical syntax does not necessarily reflect the intended meanings. As a result InfoVis tools are more than merely interfaces, they are instruments. Through my PhD research I generated a holistic understanding of what constitutes users' InfoVis  experiences. From this understanding design and evaluation guidelines were extracted. 

The scientific domain which I am interested in is the Literature Knowledge Domain (LKD). Such a domain includes data such as authors and papers within an academic context, where information such as citations, publications is revealed through visual coding. As a result I have developed an InfoVis to reflects such information. This tool was used as the basis of the studies conducted as part of my PhD. 

In addition to InfoVis my general interests revolve around the areas of:  Direct Manipulation, Tangible User Interfaces, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality, all within an HCI context.

Publications

Faisal, Cairns, & Craft, "InfoViz Experience Enhancement Through Mediated Interaction", ICMI'05 Workshop on Multimodal Interaction for the Visualisation and Exploration of Scientific Data, Trento, Italy, September, 2005. (pdf)

Faisal, Cairns, Blandford, "Developing User Requirements for Visualizations of Literature Knowledge Domains,"  Tenth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV'06), pp. 264-269, London, UK, July, 2006 (paper)

Faisal, Cairns, & Blandford, "Subjective Information Visualizations", In Proc. Workshop on Combining Visualisation and Interaction to facilitate Scientific Exploration and Discovery, held in conjunction with the British HCI, London, UK, September 2006. (pdf)

Faisal,  Cairns, & Blandford,  "Challenges of Evaluating the Information Visualization Experience" Poster In Proc. of the British HCI Conference, v2, pp.41, Lancaster, UK, September, 2007. (paper)

Faisal, Cairns, Blandford, "Building for Users not for Experts: Designing a Visualization of the Literature Domain" 11th International Conference Information Visualization (IV '07), pp. 707-712, Zurich, Switzerland, July, 2007. (paper)

Faisal, Craft, Cairns, Blandford, "Internalization, Qualitative Methods, and Evaluation" CHI workshop on BEyond time errors: novel evaLuation methods for Information Visualization (BELIV'08), pp. 45-52, Florence, Italy, April, 2008. (pdf)

 

Supervisions

I have supervised the following MSc students:

Contact details

UCL Interaction Centre
MPEB 8th floor
University College London
Gower Street
 London WC1E 6BT, UK
 

Tel. +44 (0)20 7679 0695
Fax. +44 (0)20 7679 0699
 
Email: s.faisal@cs.ucl.ac.uk