Katerina Mania, Ph.D Lecturer (Assist. Prof.) University of Sussex, UK Department of Informatics Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QT Tel: +44 1273 678964 Fax: +44 1273 678399 E-mail: k.mania@sussex.ac.uk

Brief Bio
I am a Lecturer (Assist. Prof.) in the Department of Informatics of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. I completed a B.Sc. in Mathematics at the University of Crete, Greece, an M.Sc. in Advanced Computing (Global Computing and Multimedia) and a Ph.D in Computer Science at the Univeristy of Bristol, UK. My Ph.D thesis was titled 'Fidelity Metrics for Virtual Environment Simulations based on Human Judgements of Spatial Memory Awareness States'  funded by the Hewlett Packard Laboratories External Research Program. Prior to my Ph.D, I was a full-time researcher and consultant at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Bristol, UK working on architectural visualisation, user interfaces and 3D graphics for the web, from 1996 till 1998. I have served as the Chair for the Sketches and Applications (Short Papers/Presentations) Program for the ACM Siggraph 2003 conference. ACM Siggraph is the biggest conference in computer graphics averaging around 30,000 attendees each year; a mind blowing event!

I was on academic study leave from August until December 2003 at NASA Ames Research Centre, USA (Advanced Displays and Spatial Perception Laboratory), working on user latency detection and adaptation in Virtual Environments with Dr Stephen Ellis, Dr Bernard Adelstein and Mr Michael Hill.

NEW: Mania, K., Wooldridge, D., Coxon, M., Robinson, A. (to appear 2006). The Effect of Visual and Interaction Fidelity on Spatial Cognition in Immersive Virtual Environments. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics journal. PDF

Research Areas
Human factors/HCI and Virtual Environments, Fidelity Metrics for Computer Graphics Simulations, 3D User Interfaces, Usability Engineering, Image Quality Metrics, Visual Perception and Computer Graphics Rendering Algorithms, Spatial cognition, Display Technologies, Presence, Visualisation.