Students interested in HCI and Visualization are welcome to contact me by e-mail to explore the possibility to become my student at the University of Victoria and obtain a PhD or a research MSc. Please, refer in your e-mail to one or more topics of interest. It will also help if you have ideas in mind about example projects to do in those areas and/or specific research questions of interest. All requests that are not completely off-topic (e.g., I am not interested academically in cloud-computing performance) will be answered.

I am particularly interested in working with individuals from underrepresented groups, people with a disability and to achieve gender balance in my group, for fairness reasons but also because I believe that diverse groups are better and more enriching. If you want, you can let me know in your email how becoming part of our group would improve Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

As a student in the growing HCI and Visualization group at the University of Victoria we demand hard work, but you can also expect:

• Personal supervision (one-on-one meetings on a weekly basis).
• Support in becoming a proficient academic writer.
• Support to visit relevant academic conferences.
• Belonging to a dynamic and collaborative group of researchers (academics and students).
• Our personal investment as a community supporting you as you start your career as a socially-responsible researcher.

My topics of interest are:

• Computing for Cognitive Augmentation

1. Interfaces that make complex computing accessible and understandable to the general public.
2. Interfaces that make complex computing more manageable and accessible to domain experts.
3. Interfaces that help people focus attention.
4. Interfaces that help people read better.
5. Intelligible Machine Learning to support human tasks.

• Human-Computer Interaction

1. Input Technologies (multi-point interaction, object spatial manipulation, gestural interfaces, haptics, gaze-contingent displays).
2. Output Technologies and new devices (multi-display environments, gaze-contingent displays).
3. Visual Perception applied to HCI.

• Information Visualization

1. Spatial visual manipulation.
2. Typographyc elements of information visualization (see also FatFonts).
3. Visual Perception applied to HCI.

• Infotypography

1. Representation of information through typographic parameters.
2. Special-purpose fonts and font technologies.

If you have a strong desire to make an impact in any of these areas (or related), please contact me by e-mail at: nacenta at uvic dot ca. If you have your own ideas I’m also happy to hear them! (but make sure that you establish how my expertise is relevant to that idea.