EICS

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 6th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems -- EICS'14 held in Rome (17-20 June 2014). EICS is an international conference devoted to all aspects of engineering usable and effective interactive computing systems. EICS focuses on tools, techniques and methods for analysis, design and development of interactive systems.

The conference brings together people who study or practice the engineering of interactive systems, drawing from the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Software Engineering, Requirements Engineering, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), Ubiquitous & Pervasive Systems, and Cognitive Engineering.

We hope that you will find this year program interesting and thought provoking. The symposium will provide you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world. We believe that with this sixth EICS edition, by increasing the diversity of paper presentations, posters, workshops, tutorials, demonstrations and doctoral presentations, we obtained an exciting and interactive program, which stimulates fruitful discussion in the relevant research fields.

The work presented here describes recent innovations in the area of engineering of interactive computer systems. There are papers on model-based approaches and tools for analysis and engineering of interactive systems, adaptive systems, tangible user interfaces, development frameworks for multi-device and multiuser environments including public display systems, as well as languages and tools for designing and developing multimodal systems, approaches for engineering collaborative environments, and analytical methods for safety-critical systems.

Since its beginning EICS has witnessed a growing number of submissions. This year the program contains 16 full papers carefully chosen from a total of 88 submissions (18% acceptance rate). There are also 18 late breaking papers (6 of them are presented as posters) as well as a number of doctoral reports and demonstration descriptions. The competition was strong and the selection difficult. The published material originates from 17 countries from various parts of the world including North and South America, Canada and New Zealand.

Our keynote speakers, Yvonne Rogers and Krzysztof Gajos, provide interesting novel perspectives on key topics for the engineering community in the coming years -- user experience and adaptation in ubiquitous systems -- which should provide further useful content for interesting discussions on the future of user interface software and technologies.