QMUL Centre for Human-Centred Computing News

Ekaterina Ivanova: Using haptic coupling enhances children's handwriting

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

A team including Ekaterina Ivanova from the Centre for Human-Centred Computing have a paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Haptics. It shows that physically linking a child with a more experienced writer through a haptic interface when practicing handwriting leads to improvement in their handwriting skill. Abstract: The acquisition of handwriting is a challenging task for children, requiring consistent exercise throughout primary school. Many children struggle to develop fluent handwriting, which in turn may impact their academic success and affect their self-esteem. The emergence of new technologies supporting handwriting exercise and allowing active interactions with educators, caregivers, and/or peers has led researchers to explore the potential use of these new tools. Studies show that haptic technology and exploiting experts' trajectory feedback may improve students' performance better than one-way instruction. In the present study, we explore the use of bidirectional haptic feedback to support handwriting exercises. Twelve child and caregiver dyads were asked to copy single letters or letter pairs in cursive handwriting while being physically coupled or not. Results show improvement for the less skilled participant in the dyad, especially in handwriting fluency, when physically coupled. Reference S. Buscaglione; C. Provenzale; C. Bonsignori; E. Ivanova; A. Noccaro; L. Sparaci et al (2026). Write together: using haptic coupling to enhance children's handwriting. IEEE Transactions on Haptics, pp1 - 12 IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/TOH.2026.3677687.

Queen Mary Spinout Dragonfly AI Secures £5m to Accelerate Global Growth

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Queen Mary University of London is celebrating the success of its spinout company Dragonfly AI, which has secured £5 million in new investment to fuel its next phase of international expansion and product innovation. Dragonfly AI, co-founded by Dr Hamit Soyel, Chief Scientist and inventor of the underlying technology, has rapidly become a market leader in predictive visual analytics. The technology is rooted in neuroscience research carried out at Queen Mary, where Dr Soyel and colleagues developed a biological algorithm that predicts human attention in real time. Today, the platform is used by major global brands including Nestlé, Coca-Cola and L'Oréal to optimise the performance of their creative content across digital, in‑store, and omnichannel environments. Speaking about the company's continued success, Dr Soyel said: "Marketing teams compete for three things: attention, emotion and memory. Dragonfly AI is built on a biological algorithm we developed at Queen Mary University of London which allows global brands like Nestlé, Coca‑Cola and L'Oréal to optimise their creative performance across digital, in‑store, and omnichannel environments." He added: "Our science‑led approach can predict how people will see, feel, and remember creative content before it goes live. Crucially, because we rely on neuroscience and not training data, we can avoid the biases which plague many generative AI models. It's why we're trusted by some of the most valuable brands." The new £5m investment—led by 24Haymarket with participation from Guinness Ventures, Foresight for Growing Companies, and others—will enable Dragonfly AI to expand globally and further strengthen its product suite.

Zahraa Al-Sahili wins an "honourable mention" award at AACL/IJCNLP 2025

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Zahraa Al-Sahili won an "honourable mention" award at AACL/IJCNLP 2025 held in Mumbai, India. It is one of the top tier of NLP conferences. There were only 10 awards given out across over 200 papers at the conference (not to mention the other 1,000 or so papers submitted that didn't make it into the conference), so it's a great achievement - very well done Zahraa! The paper is about social biases in multimodal foundation models, and looks in particular at multilingual models - surprisingly, things like gender bias often get worse in multilingual models, and biases can spread into gender-neutral languages from others in the training data. Abstract Multilingual vision-language models (VLMs) promise universal image-text retrieval, yet their social biases remain underexplored. We perform the first systematic audit of four public multilingual CLIP variants: M-CLIP, NLLB-CLIP, CAPIVARA-CLIP, and the debiased SigLIP-2, covering ten languages that differ in resource availability and morphological gender marking. Using balanced subsets of FairFace and the PATA stereotype suite in a zero-shot setting, we quantify race and gender bias and measure stereotype amplification. Contrary to the intuition that multilinguality mitigates bias, every model exhibits stronger gender skew than its English-only baseline. CAPIVARA-CLIP shows its largest biases precisely in the low-resource languages it targets, while the shared encoder of NLLB-CLIP and SigLIP-2 transfers English gender stereotypes into gender-neutral languages; loosely coupled encoders largely avoid this leakage. Although SigLIP-2 reduces agency and communion skews, it inherits -- and in caption-sparse contexts (e.g., Xhosa) amplifies -- the English anchor's crime associations. Highly gendered languages consistently magnify all bias types, yet gender-neutral languages remain vulnerable whenever cross-lingual weight sharing imports foreign stereotypes. Aggregated metrics thus mask language-specific hot spots, underscoring the need for fine-grained, language-aware bias evaluation in future multilingual VLM research. Citation Zahraa Al Sahili, Ioannis Patras, and Matthew Purver. 2025. Breaking Language Barriers or Reinforcing Bias? A Study of Gender and Racial Disparities in Multilingual Contrastive Vision Language Models. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 331–352, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.ijcnlp-long.20 Also Available from https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14160

New Scientist video: "How Virtual Nightclubs Are Changing Modern Society".

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 23:00:00 +0100

A New Scientist video about the collaboration between the Human Interaction Lab and Target3D has just been released featuring resaerch by Karl Clarke, Ella Cullen and Pat Healey. "The movie Ready Player One introduced us to the futuristic idea of a fully immersive virtual world where meaningful human interactions transcend borders. Now, VR technology has moved beyond science fiction, becoming embedded into our daily lives. New Scientist reporter, Linda Rodriguez-Mcrobbie took a trip to a virtual nightclub and immersed herself in a subculture where social identity can be as expressive as your imagination. Guided by club organiser and VR researcher Karl Clarke, we explore the technology underpinning these virtual experiences. We see how applications in movie production, military training, rehabilitation, and health are driving innovation, we reveal its use for training AI models and how it is being used to better understand social interaction. And, in groundbreaking new VR research, our team joins an experiment in which every aspect of their social presence is manipulated, with dramatic and profound implications. Ready Player One, it would seem, is much closer than we think."

CHCC PhD student wins Best Paper award at prestigious conference

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 23:00:00 +0100

Nirit Bintamini Ben-Meir, a PhD student in Cognitive Science and Human-Centered Computing at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, has been awarded a Best Paper prize at the ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2025 conference for their innovative research on domestic plant care. See the full news story at: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/eecs/news-and-events/news/items/eecs-phd-student-wins-best-paper-award-at-prestigious-conference.html