Openning Keynote

Crafting interactive experiences with non-programmers

Chris Greenhalgh, University of Nottingham, UK
https://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszcmg/

Summary: The Mixed Reality Lab has a long history of creating public interactive experiences in collaboration with creative practitioners. Looking across four such experiences, this keynote explores the role of code (i.e., bespoke software) in making them possible, the practicalities of non-programmers “authoring” key parts of the experience, the relationship between coding and knowledge production, and the changing nature of technical responsibilities. As well as being personally and inherently satisfying, the practical realization of novel interactive systems manifests new creative “materials”, which open the door to new experiences and understandings of people and the world.

Chris Greenhalgh is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, where he is a co-leader of the Mixed Reality Laboratory and a member of Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute. He gained a first class BA (with distinction) in Electrical and Information Sciences from Cambridge University in 1991. He then worked in the data communications group at the GEC Hirst Research Centre for two years before moving to Nottingham, where he gained a PhD for his work with large scale collaborative virtual environments in 1997. His thesis was a winner of the 1998 BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertations in Computer Science competition. He has been a member of academic staff in the School of Computer Science since 1996. He has served as Senior Tutor and Director of Taught Programmes for the School, and contributed to the University's adoption and use of Moodle, an open-source virtual learning environment.

Mid-Keynote

Speeding Up the Engineering of Interactive Systems with Generative AI

Albrecht Schmidt, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
https://www.um.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/personen/professoren/schmidt/index.html

Summary: This keynote discusses the opportunities and challenges of using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) as tools for developing interactive systems. We will look at different stages in the development lifecycle of interactive systems and assess the value of AI support. We explore how GenAI and LLMs can potentially speed-up the ideation, requirements elicitation, architecture development, prototyping, implementation, and testing of interactive systems. The talk will outline emerging practices, such as the use of prompts for code and system generation, to facilitate prototyping and accelerate implementation. We will outline fundamental challenges and suggest emerging research directions, and pose research questions. What will software development tools look like in the future? How can we efficiently use AI to develop interactive systems without compromising quality? We also speculate about the implications of these developments for researchers, practitioners, and society. We believe that it will massively accelerate the digital transformation. Interactive AI-based tools for systems and software development will become a major research direction.

Albrecht Schmidt is professor for Human-Centered Ubiquitous Media in the computer science department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. He studied computer science in Ulm and Manchester and received a PhD from Lancaster University, UK, in 2003. He held several prior academic positions at different universities, including Stuttgart, Cambridge, Duisburg-Essen, and Bonn and also worked as a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) and at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. In his research, he investigates the inherent complexity of human-computer interaction in ubiquitous computing environments, particularly in view of increasing computer intelligence and system autonomy. Albrecht has actively contributed to the scientific discourse in human-computer interaction through the development, deployment, and study of functional prototypes of interactive systems and interface technologies in different real world domains. His early experimental work addressed the use of diverse sensors to recognize situations and interactions, influencing our understanding of context-awareness and situated computing. He proposed the concept of implicit human-computer interaction. Over the years, he worked on automotive user interfaces, tangible interaction, interactive public display systems, interaction with large high-resolution screens, and physiological interfaces. Most recently, he focuses on how information technology can provide cognitive and perceptual support to amplify the human mind. To investigate this further, he received in 2016 a ERC grant. Albrecht has co-chaired several SIGCHI conferences; he is in the editorial board of ACM TOCHI, edits a forum in ACM interactions, a column of human augmentation in IEEE Pervasive, and formerly edited a column on interaction technologies in IEEE Computer. The ACM conferences on tangible and embedded interaction in 2007 and on automotive user interfaces in 2010 were co-founded by him. In 2018, Albrecht was induced into the ACM SIGCH Academy and in 2020, he was elected into Leopoldina, the Germany academy of natural science.

Closing Keynote

Ethical design for wellbeing and affective health

Corina Sas, School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, UK
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/scc/about-us/people/corina-sas

Summary: Emotional wellbeing and mental health are topics of much social significance, which are also reflected in the growing HCI work aimed to support them. Research in this area covers a broad space from affective computing to affective interaction approach, and the ethical design of wellbeing and mental health technologies has become much needed. This talk will provide design exemplars of technologies for wellbeing and mental health, with an emphasis on the importance of supporting emotional awareness and regulation. The talk will also highlight the value of existing research for articulating novel design implications for ethical wellbeing and mental health technologies.

Corina Sas is Professor in Human-Computer Interaction with the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, UK. Her research focuses on designing and evaluating technologies for wellbeing, mental health, memory support, creative and reflective thinking in design, as well as novel tools for designing such technologies. Her work explores and integrates wearable bio sensors, mobile and lifelogging technologies with the aim to shape the interaction design and user experience.
Corina served as General co-Chair of the 14th and 15th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference 2021, 2022, and of the British HCI Conference in 2007. She has also extensively served as Associate Chair for CHI and DIS, and has been Subcommittee Co-Chair for DIS. She published over 200 papers, and her work received extensive media coverage as well as 5 Best Paper and Honourable Mention Awards. She has been investigator on grants totalling over £15 million and is part of the Editorial Boards of the ACM Transactions in Human-Computer Interaction, and Taylor & Francis Human Computer Interaction journals.

Workshops at EICS 2023

The following workshops are co-located with EICS 2023 and occur on Tuesday, June 27th 2023:

• Disab2023 – Engineering Interactive Computing Systems for People with Disabilities more info...
  Organisers: Engineering Interactive Computing Systems for People with Disabilities (Disab2023)
• Engineering Interactive Systems Embedding AI Technologies (EIS-embedding-AI) more info...
  Organisers: Alan J, Dix, Sven Mayer, Philippe Palanque, Emanuele Panizzi, Davide Spano
• *** CANCELLED *** ViBRANT – Workshop on Video-Based Respectful Assistive Novel Technologies
  Organisers: Irene Ballester, Caterina Maidhof, Wiktor Mucha