Publications

System and user strategies to repair conversational breakdowns of spoken dialogue systems : a scoping review

Alghamdi Essam, Halvey Martin, Nicol Emma

ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2024 (CUI '24) 6th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (2024)

https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665558

Fail club : reflections on what happens when research does not go to plan

Willson Rebekah, Nicol Emma, Julien Heidi, Greyson Devon, Given Lisa M

(2024)

Everyday digital traces

Armstrong Andrea, Briggs Jo, Moncur Wendy, Carey Daniel Paul, Nicol Emma, Schafer Burkhard

Big Data & Society Vol 10, pp. 1-13 (2023)

https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231213827

(Talking about) Failing better in research : the first rule of failure club is…you don’t talk about failure club

Nicol Emma, Willson Rebekah, Julien Heidi, Greyson Devon, Given Lisa M

Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology Vol 60, pp. 817-820 (2023)

https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.868

What the Dickens : post-mortem privacy and intergenerational trust

Schafer Burkhard, Briggs Jo, Moncur Wendy, Nicol Emma, Azzopardi Leif

Computer Law and Security Review Vol 49 (2023)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2023.105800

The SIPA2 STUDY : exploring the pharmaceutical care needs of older people with sensory impairment (OPwSI)

Watson Mags, Lennon Marilyn, Macaden Leah, Smith Annetta, Jacob Sabrina Anne, Welsh Tomas, Fuzesi Peter, Nicol Emma, Broadfoot Kirsten, Cooper Lesley, Kamalakannan Sureshkumar

Nordic Social Pharmacy Conference 2023 (2023)

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Teaching

I am programme leader for MSc Information Management and Deputy Director of PGT (Student Experience) at CIS.

I lead modules on a number of CIS's PGT programmes:

CS978 Legal, Ethical and Professional Issues for the Information Society
CS800 Health Information Governance
CS955 Information Law

and lead a module on the Graduate Apprenticeship in Information Technology & Software Development:

• CS355 User-centred Design

I supervise MSc dissertations projects across several PGT programmes.

Professional Activities

Contribution of evidence to House of Lords COVID-19 Committee - Living online: the long term impact on wellbeing

Contributor

11/12/2020

12th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (Event)

Editor

2/6/2025

27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Event)

Peer reviewer

9/11/2024

ACM CHIIR 2025 (Event)

Peer reviewer

1/10/2024

The 2024 European Symposium on Usable Security (Event)

Peer reviewer

30/9/2024

The 2024 European Symposium on Usable Security (Event)

Peer reviewer

30/9/2024

More professional activities

Projects

Empirical investigation & user-centred development of touch-screen text entry methods older adults

Dunlop, Mark (Principal Investigator) Komninos, Andreas (Researcher) Nicol, Emma (Researcher)

"Mobile technologies now have a considerable impact on work and social lives, for example it is estimated that over 25% of emails are now opened on mobiles. As the older working population rises, due to both aging population demographics and increasing retirement age, an increasing number of digital economy workers will require to use mobile technologies for work into their mid/late 60s.

The proposed European Accessibility Act aims to require goods and services that are seen as critical for the citizen to participate in society to be accessible to disabled and older people - this is likely to cover information and communication technologies including mobile phones. Age UK encourage the UK Government to support the act and state that the EU must ensure that the scope of the act is broad enough to cover the needs of older people.

Text entry is core to mobile interaction such as email, social networking, instant messaging and interacting with services such as web or map searching and thus it is increasingly important to people's participation in work and society. The majority of smartphones now do not have any physical keyboard but rely on on-screen touch keyboards. These have been shown to be slower and more error-prone than traditional mini-physical keyboards, but are popular as they permit full screen services and larger reading area.

While there have been numerous studies into text entry usage on touchscreens, there has been very little work studying the effects of aging on text entry, and none on modern touchscreen phones where reduced visual acuity, reduced motor control and reduced working memory are all likely to have an impact. Currently industry is focussed on targeting the current main market of younger users with any devices designed for older users being extremely simplified phones rather than powerful smartphones people are becoming accustomed to. Our initial studies have also shown that older users have considerable trouble with modern smartphones but may be willing to adopt new keyboard layouts and technologies to compensate for this.

In this project we will conduct a detailed investigation into text entry for older adults. We will build on our initial results and current prototype keyboards to conduct participatory design sessions with older users to identify key design criteria for older adult text entry. We will quantitatively measure touchscreen tapping times for different age groups and develop accidental tap filters to reduce errors. We will formally evaluate keyboards based on our findings to assess our hypothesis that older people can successfully use appropriately designed touch-screen text entry methods."

01-Sep-2013 - 30-Nov-2015

Developing a theory of information resilience with constituency case workers

Nicol, Emma (Principal Investigator) Ruthven, Ian (Co-investigator)

01-Oct-2023 - 30-Sep-2026

More projects