new blog, new job, new year ⚡️

Every blog needs to start somewhere! While I’m here, I will use this opportunity to reflect back on 2023 and some of the great research and teaching opportunities I had this year.

phd defense

I defended my PhD in January of this year! It was awesome and I had a great time discussing my work with my examiners, Prof. Alexander Jensenius from University of Oslo and Dr. George Fazekas from QMUL. My PhD thesis can be found here. 🎓

new job(s)

postdoc @ KCL 🫀

I started the year in January with a new postdoc, moving from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken to the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King’s College London. I worked as part of the research team on the COSMOS (Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures) ERC Advanced Grant, led by Prof. Elaine Chew. I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Design Analytics and Music Physiology, focusing on human perception of musical stimuli.

lecturer @ LUL 👩🏼‍💻

Recently, in November, I left KCL and joined the Institute for Digital Techhnologies at Loughborough University London as a Lecturer. I am enjoying this new position so much already, particularly working with my students in the course I’m teaching - Digital Application Design - and introducing them to computer programming in Python. I’m looking forward to supervising projects and getting set up with my own grants and research work in the new year.

As before, I remain an Affiliate Researcher in the Sensorimotor Interaction Group (senSInt) at the MPI in Saarbrücken, led by Dr. Paul Strohmeier, where I’m lucky to be able to continue my research work in interaction networks with my colleagues there. 💜

research

A summary of some amazing work I got to collaborate on and publish this year. All of these papers can be found here or are linked in-line:

conferences

ACM Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI), Warsaw, PL

• Ran a workshop on designing for meaningful interaction with the incomparable Dr. Alice Haynes, Dr. Sophie Skach, and Charlotte Nordmoen.
• Presented a paper from from my PhD work with Prof. Andrew McPherson, examining vocalists’ perceptions of their bodies and how existing sensory associations can be disrupted or strengthened with technology.
• Had a fun time taking the train from Saarbrücken to Warsaw and back!

Augmented Humans International Conference (AHs), Glasgow, Scotland, UK

• My colleague Nihar Sabnis from the MPI presented a paper and demo of senSInt’s work on designing haptic insoles for tactile augmented reality.

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), Hamburg, DE

• Participated in the Body X Materials Workshop, discussing working with the physiological materiality in my position paper about Body Lutherie.
• Presented a paper, also from my PhD work, on using metaphors from vocal pedagogy to reach mutual understanding about subjective experiences in design/HCI.
• My colleagues Nihar and Paul from the MPI presented two papers about senSInt’s work on designing tactile symbols and Haptic Servos, our platform for rendering vibrotactile feedback.
• Our paper Haptic Servos: Self-Contained Vibrotactile Rendering System for Creating or Augmenting Material Experiences received an Honorable Mention for Best Paper! 🏆

New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Mexico City, MX

• Remotely a workshop with my colleagues Andrew and Eevee Zayas-Garin on methodologies for querying subjective experiences in musical interaction.

Computing in Cardiology (CinC), Atlanta, GA, USA

• My colleague Dr. Mateusz Soliński presented two papers about methodological findings from the work of the COSMOS team on analysing music listeners’ and performers’ heart rate variability using triangle simplex plots and pairwise cardiac responses with Time Delay Stability (TDS) analysis.

Springer volume: Creating Digitally

I published my first book chapter, one I worked on with Prof. Nick Bryan-Kinns, in Creating Digitally. Shifting Boundaries: Arts and Technologies—Contemporary Applications and Concepts, part of the Springer Intelligent Systems Reference Library (Vol. 241). We discuss a framework and guide to evaluating experiences with Media and Arts Techhnology.

IEEE featured article

An article I co-authored in 2021 was featured in the December installment of Computer’s Spotlight on Transactions series, highlighting the work published in IEEE Computer Society journals. The article discusses our work, originally published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, in individual listener agreement of subjective expression and features in music for music emotion recognition.

what next!?

I’m looking forward to a bunch of stuff for 2024, namely:

• Being co-paper chair for the 2024 NIME Conference in Utrecht, NL with Dr. Astrid Bin
• Working on a collaborative projects module with students at LUL
• TEI 2024 in Cork, IE, where I will present a full paper, a work-in-progress paper, and an arts track submission that have all been accepted (!) - stay tuned for more on that, I am so excited! 🍀
• Hopefully being able to do my first bit of PhD supervision at LUL 🤞🏻