Simon Holland

Simon Holland founded and directs the Music Computing Lab, a research group in the Centre for Research in Computing. He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing and Communications. His research focuses on the interconnected areas of Music Computing, Human Computer Interaction, and Digital Health. He has served as PI or Co-I on ten external research grants, totalling nearly £4.5 million, including Polifonia (EU, € 3,025,435.06), HAPPIE (Innovate UK, £998,538), E-Sense (AHRC , £200,000), the Haptic Bracelets ( Goldcrest, £75,000) with other grants from ERSC, the NATO Science Committee, and other sources. He has published over 100 refereed research articles and co-edited two books on Music and HCI (in 2013 and 2019 respectively). He was co-author of Human Computer Interaction (Preece et al)— for many years the worldwide best seller in HCI. He was a founding member of the editorial Board of the Journal of Music Technology and Education. He was lead organizer of two international workshops on Music and HCI, including at CHI 2016. He has devised numerous human-centred computing techniques and systems including Harmony Space, the Haptic Bracelets, the Haptic Drum Kit, the Audio GPS, and a new and highly expressive form of interaction Direct Combination.

Research Interests

My principal research interests are in Human Computer Interaction, Music Computing, Digital Health, Mobile, Wearable and Whole Body Computing, and Technology Enhanced Learning.

Current Research Projects Include

Using Embodied Cognition to improve Music Interaction Design.
Using whole body movement to understand and control musical harmony.
Exploring computational models of rhythm perception.
Using haptic feedback to help people learn multi-limb rhythms.
Tools for understanding and controlling harmony visually.
Older people and Technological Innovation (EU funded Project)
Older people and Technological inclusion (ESRC Seminar Series)
Designing and testing musical instruments controlled directly by the brain.

Research Grants

External Research Funding

Polifonia

The Polifonia Project 2021-2024 €3,025,435. A digital harmoniser for Musical Heritage Knowledge (€ 484,936 to the OU), EU Horizon 2020. Enrico Daga is Open University PI and Enrico Motta, Paul Mulholland and Simon Holland are Co-Is. The Project involves 10 collaborating partners from Italy, the Netherlands, France and Ireland, and 10 stakeholders including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Stables Theatre in Wavendon. This new project will design, implement and evaluate innovative multimodal haptic and gestural interaction techniques for music, with particular attention to inclusion for diverse disabilities, including profound deafness.
This project is highly synergistic with both the Creative and Performing Arts Digital Inclusion project below and the Happie Haptic authoring pipeline project below.

Creative and Performing Arts Digital Inclusion

Creative and Performing Arts Digital Inclusion £5000 2021. Simon Holland and Paul Mulholland. Grant from the Stables Theatre Milton Keynes for Research into Technologically Mediated Disability Inclusion in the Arts

HAPPIE ( Haptic Authoring Pipeline for the Production of Immersive Experiences)

Happie 2019- 2021, £998,538. Happie ( Haptic Authoring Pipeline for the Production of Immersive Experiences) Audience of the Future – Creative touch, Design prototyping, Innovate UK, Lisa Bowers (PI), Simon Holland and Janet Van der Linden with Generic Robotics Ltd, Sliced Bread Animation and Numerion Software.

Haptic Bracelets

2017-2020 Goldcrest Foundation personal donation £74,358 to fund PhD studentship in Digital Health

Assistive Technologies

2016- 2017 Greater Manchester Academic Health Science Centre Network, Assistive Technologies – Reducing Social Isolation to support recovery, health and wellbeing – With Rachel Stockley and Josie Tetley. Manchester Metropolitan University. £29,997.00, of which £13,673 for OU Intern 4 Months

Haptic Technology for Rehabilitation

2016- 2020 PJ Neurological Care Homes Gift in Kind to assist in development Haptic Technology for Hemiparetic Stroke, Brain Trauma and Self-Managed Rehabilitation. Donation in kind (access to nationwide facilities, physiotherapists, neuropsychologists and clinicians over 5 years — equivalent value estimated at £80,000.

“Older People and Technological inclusion: multidisciplinary perspectives on contemporary realities and aspirations” £14,007 ESRC with C.Holland (HSC), J.Tetley Prof S.Peace (HSC), J.Hughes, Prof C.Bissell (ICT), V.Weights. 2010 – 202.

OPT-In: Older People and Technological Innovations (GRP/09/130C)
€23,000 EU Grundtvig Programme. With Josie Tetley, Verina
Waights, Caroline Holland, Jonathan Hughes (HSC) and Age Concern, in collaboration with University of Maribor, Slovenia; University of Stirling, Scotland; Technical University of Dortmund (Germany), and Verwey-Jonker Instituut (Netherlands). 2009 – 2011.

E-Sense Project ‘Extending our sense and self through designing novel technologies’.
Awarded by AHRC. Starts 1st Sept. 2008. Co-investigator with Prof Yvonne Rogers, Open University and Prof Andrew Clark, University of Edinburgh. £200,000 (FEC). Also Technical Director and Development Manager for this research. 2008 – 2010.

‘Multimedia Interface Design in Education’. £15,000 awarded by NATO Science Committee to run NATO Advanced Study Workshop on Multimedia Interface Design in Education as part of Advanced Educational Technology Programme, September 1989. With Alistair Edwards. 1989 – 1990.

Awards

The Mobile HCI 2011 PyrusMalus Award for Most Influential Paper from Mobile HCI 2001 was awarded in Stockholm to Simon Holland and David Morse for their 2001 paper AudioGPS: Spatial Audio Navigation with a Minimal Attention Interface. This paper has been cited 133 times in fields such as mobile commerce, vehicle navigation, haptic navigation, assistive technology and other areas.

Mobile HCI, the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, supported by ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGMOBILE, was founded in 1998.

Ten years later, in 2008, the conference’s steering committee started the tradition of awarding a prize for the most influential paper published by the conference from ten years ago. This prize is designed to highlight the strength of impact that papers from the conference have on the research community. It is considered the conference’s most prestigious prize, since instead of relying on subjective judgments, the award draws on statistical publication data gathered over ten years. Holland and Morse’s paper is only the third winner of this prestigious award.

Mobile HCI on Wikipedia
Mobile HCI ten-year Awards

Photograph Peter Holland.

Teaching Awards

• 1999 M206 awarded Design Council Millennium Innovation Award.
• 1998 M206 awarded the British Computer Society (BCS) IT Award.
• 1997 M206 won the British Computer Society (BCS) Gold medal.

Publications

2023

  • Canny, Nicholas; Holland, Simon and Mudd, Tom (2023). Proceedings of the CHIME Music and HCI Workshop 2023. In: CHIME One Day Workshop 2023, 4 Dec 2023, The Open University, Milton Keynes, The Open University
  • Holland, Simon; Petre, Marian; Church, Luke and Marasoiu, Mariana eds. (2023). PPIG 2022: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group. Psychology of Programming Interest Group Proceedings. Milton Keynes and Online: PPIG.
  • Lederman, Noam; Holland, Simon and Mulholland, Paul (2023). An agent for creative development in drum kit playing. In: PPIG 2022: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (Holland, Simon; Petre, Marian; Church, Luke and Marasoiu, Mariana eds.), Proceedings of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group, PPIG, Milton Keynes, UK, pp. 88–90.

2022

  • Noam Lederman, Simon Holland and Paul Mulholland, An agent for creative development in drum kit playing. PPIG 2022
  • Tetley, Josephine Wendy; Holland, Simon; Caton, Sue; Donaldson, Glynis; Georgiou, Theodoros; Visi, Federico and Stockley, Rachel Christina (2022). Using rhythm for rehabilitation: the acceptability of a novel haptic cueing device in extended stroke rehabilitation. Journal of Enabling Technologies (Early Access).

2020

  • Lederman, Noam; Holland, Simon and Mulholland, Paul (2020). A principled approach to the development of drum improvisation skills through interaction with a conversational agent. Proceedings of PPIG (Psychology of Programming Interest Group) 30 November – 4 December 2020. http://oro.open.ac.uk/74638
  • Mudd, Tom; Holland, Simon and Mulholland, Paul (2020). The role of nonlinear dynamics in interactions with digital and acoustic musical instruments. Computer Music Journal, 43(4)
  • Georgiou, Theodoros; Islam, Riasat; Holland, Simon; Linden, Janet Van Der; Price, Blaine; Mulholland, Paul and Perry, Allan (2020). Rhythmic Haptic Cueing Using Wearable Devices as Physiotherapy for Huntington’s Disease: Case Study. JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies Journal. DOI: 10.2196/18589 (Impact Factor 3.4)
  • Islam R, Bennasar M, Nicholas K, Button K, Holland S, Mulholland P, Price B, Al-Amri M. (2020) Non-proprietary movement analysis software using wearable inertial measurement units on both healthy participants and those with anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction across a range of complex tasks: validation study. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth doi:10.2196/17872 (Impact Factor 4.31)

More papers available here http://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/sh2.html
Over 10,000 citations of these publications tracked here

Books

  • Preece, J., Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., Benyon, D., Holland, S. and Carey, T. (1994) Human Computer Interaction, Addison Wesley, New York.
  • Edwards, A. and Holland, S. (1992) (Eds) Multi-media Interface Design in Education. (revised 2nd printing, 1994) Springer Verlag, Hiedelberg.

Reviews

  • Camilleri, Professor Lelio, (1987). Letture Critiche. Three page critical review of Harmony Space In BeQuadro, April.
  • Durham, Tony, 1987. “Musician and Machine in perfect Harmony?”. 2 page review, in ‘Computing’, February 26 1987.

Erdos number: 4. Graph route: P. Erdos, M. Klawe, B. Schneiderman, J. Preece.

PhD Topics

Current areas of interest include:

  • Music Computing
  • Music Computing for Children
  • Music Computing and Human Computer Interaction
  • Designing New Interactive Drumming Tools
  • How Well Do Music Computing Tools Work?
  • Whole Body Interaction and Music
  • Tangible Computing for Physics Learning
  • Innovating with Mobile and Pervasive Technology to Help Older People
  • Music and Human Spatial Skills
  • Taking Explanation Seriously
  • Embodied Cognition and the Design of Interactive Tools for Music
  • Haptics and New Tools for Drumming
  • Topics related to the Haptic Ipod ( including use for rehab, with blind users etc)
  • The Web for Physical Objects

I am always happy to discuss proposals in these or loosely related areas.

Teaching

Virtual MPhil in Computing
M801 Research Project and Dissertation
M255 Object-oriented programming with Java 2003 – 2012
M250 Object Oriented Principles in Java
M256 Software development with Java 2005 – present
M878 Object-oriented software development 1998 – 2000
M206 Computing: An object-oriented Approach 1995 – 2005
M868 Object-Oriented Software Technology 1992 – 1996
M867 Human Computer Interaction
COMP 3800 Computing: An Object-Oriented Introduction 1999 – 2000
M205 Fundamentals of Computing

M206 Computing: An Object-Oriented Approach

I played a crucial leading role at the Open University in devising the teaching strategy, learning materials and software tools behind M206, the course which led the Open University’s move to object-oriented programming for undergraduate teaching in the mid- nineties. M206 was a hugely influential course. It won the prestigious British Computing Society IT Award and the Design Council Millennium Innovation Award. In eight presentations, the course attracted 35,000 students in the UK, Singapore, USA and Arab OU.

Human Computer Interaction

I authored six chapters of ‘Human Computer Interaction’, published by Addison Wesley. The book was the worldwide best seller in HCI for many years. This book formed the core of subsequent OU teaching in HCI, and played a major role in establishing the OU’s international reputation in HCI.

Resources

I am a member of the Human Centred Computing Research Group
and an associate member of the The Pervasive Interaction Lab
as well as Director of the Music Computing Lab.

Music Computing links

Other Listings of publications etc

Faculty Listing
Oro Listing
PhD Topics
Technical Reports

Google Scholar Citations
Google Scholar Raw
Oro
DBLP
ACM Guide
ACM DL