CAKES 2009

Why is it called 'CAKES'?

Maybe it stands for Computing's Advanced Knowledge Extension Seminars... Maybe it's because we bribe people to attend with a selection of free cakes and drinks? You decide.

CAKES is the group that brings students from Lancaster University Computing Department together for presentations, discussions and social events.

Next 2009 Event

Upcoming Talks

• Time:
  Thursday 20/08/2009, 14:00-15:00
• Location:
  InfoLab, C60b/c
• Dominik Schmidt: "A Comparison of Direct and Indirect Multi-touch Input for Large Surfaces"
  Summary:
  Multi-touch input on interactive surfaces has matured as a device for bimanual interaction and invoked widespread research interest. We contribute empirical work on direct versus indirect use multi-touch input, comparing direct input on a tabletop display with an indirect condition where the table is used as input surface to a separate, vertically arranged display surface. Users perform significantly better in the direct condition; however our experiments show that this is primarily the case for pointing with comparatively little difference for dragging tasks. We observe that an indirect input arrangement impacts strongly on the users' fluidity and comfort of ‘hovering’ movement over the surface, and suggest investigation of techniques that allow users to rest their hands on the surface as default position for interaction.
• Ming Ki Chong: "Exploring the Use of Discrete Gestures for Authentication"
  Summary:
  Research in user authentication has been a growing field in HCI. Previous studies have shown that peoples' graphical memory can be used to increase password memorability. On the other hand, with the increasing number of devices with built-in motion sensors, kinesthetic memory (or muscle memory) can also be exploited for authentication. This paper presents a novel knowledge-based authentication scheme, called gesture password, which uses discrete gestures as password elements. The research presents a study of multiple password retention using PINs and gesture passwords. The study reports that although participants could use kinesthetic memory to remember gesture passwords, retention of PINs is far superior to retention of gesture passwords.

Past Talks

Haitham Rashwan: "On Improving Security of GPT Cryptosystems"

• Time:
  Thursday 25/06/2009, 15:00-16:00
• Location:
  InfoLab, C60a
• Summary:
  The public key cryptosystem based on rank error correcting codes (the GPT cryptosystem) was proposed in 1991. Use of rank codes in cryptographic applications is advantageous since it is practically impossible to utilize combinatoric decoding. This enabled using public keys of a smaller size. Several attacks against this system were published, including Gibson’s attacks and more recently Overbeck’s attacks. A few modifications were proposed withstanding Gibson’s attack but at least one of them was broken by the stronger attacks by Overbeck. In this presentation, we present a tool to prevent Overbeck’s attacks.
• Video:
  • Low Quality (~200MB)
  • High Quality (~1GB)

Panagiotis Papadimitriou: "A Network Virtualization Architecture for a Future Internet"

• Time:
  Thursday 18/06/2009, 14:00-15:00
• Location:
  InfoLab, C60a
• Summary:
  The tussle between reliability and functionality of the Internet is firmly biased on the side of reliability. New enabling technologies fail to achieve traction across the majority of ISPs. In essence, the greatest challenge is not in finding solutions and improvements to the Internet's problems, but in how to actually deploy those solutions and re-balance the tussle between reliability and functionality. Network virtualization provides a promising approach to enable the coexistence of innovation and reliability. We describe a network virtualization architecture as a technology for enabling Internet innovation. This architecture is motivated from both business and technical perspectives and comprises four main players. In order to gain insight about its viability, we evaluate some of its components based on experimental results from a prototype implementation.
• Video:
  • Low Quality (~200MB)
  • High Quality (~1GB)

Fahim Kawsar: "My Mirror Blogs for Me - Enabling End-Users to Fabricate Personalized Smart Objects."

• Time:
  Wednesday, 20/05/2009, 14:00-15:00
• Location:
  InfoLab, C60b/c
• Summary:
  The relation between humans and everyday objects is long standing. Historically, everyday objects have established purposes and have played vital roles in our everyday lives. The recent progression of computing technologies affords us to rethink the roles of these everyday objects and in fact poses us with interesting research and design opportunities to instrument them in a way that dramatically enhances their well established features. Who envisaged before that we can interact with our furniture for personalized information services or with our clothes and shoes to exchange emotion!
  However, till now smart objects are pretty much lab concepts and hardly embraced the mainstream users. In this talk, I will show how intuitive interaction tools and supporting infrastructure can bring end-users into the loop and enable them to re-innovate their house hold-objects with new affordances in a DIY fashion.
• Biography:
  Fahim recently joined the Embedded Interactive Systems (EIS) Lab here at Lancaster University as a Post-Doc researcher and is working with Hans Gellersen and Gerd Kortuem. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Distributed Computing Lab (DCL) of Waseda University under the supervision of Tatsuo Nakajima and is working on human-centered approaches to build software systems for intelligent environments.

Presentations and Discussions

Past Events

Talks are held throughout the year and announced at least one week before. Typically, presentations by students and researchers are made on projects close to completion, or material about to be presented at conferences and workshops. Periodically, guests speakers from outside the university may also present material. Where no presentations are available, discussions will be offered.

This is a good opportunity to practise your demonstration and gain valuable feedback from a friendly group of your peers.

Social Events

Cakes is also responsible for organising the Computing Department's social events. We hope to get people together once (or more!) each term so that people can get to know each other in a setting outside of work.

Other talks in the department

The department provides a number of reading groups, but no one seems to know who runs what. If anyone wishs to contribute information, please let us know.

Help needed!

The Cakes team is the group of volunteers (normally students from the Computing Department) responsible for organising all of the above. You can help by:

• volunteering for and suggesting presentations, discussions and socials (the department may pay some expenses for external speakers);
• volunteering to help organise the away day, and provide any ideas on where to go;
• providing any comments;
• attending the events.

This is for you run by you, so your assistance is crucial to its success!