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.
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.
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)
I have supervised the following MSc students: