Albrecht SchmidtComputer Scientist & ProfessorOpening Keynote: Sep 27Amplifying Human Abilities: Digital Technologies to Enhance Perception and Cognition
Matt JonesProfessor in Human-Computer InteractionClosing Keynote: Sep 29Weaving new Mobile UX futures through integrated innovation across 3 Continents, 4 Countries and a diversity of perspectives.
Rama BijapurkarAuthor, Consultant & StrategistInvited Talk 1: Sep 27Understanding Consumer India and what businesses need to do to serve them better
Gerrit C. van der VeerEmeritus Prof., Past President of ACM SIGCHIInvited Talk 2: Sep 28Human-Computer Interaction – the Life and Times, and the History
Devdutt PattanaikMythologist, Author and IllustratorInvited Talk 3: Sep 28Designing a 'Mahabharata for Children' - Challenges
Tom GrossProfessor in Human-Computer InteractionInvited Talk 4: Sep 29Towards Human-Centred Collaborative Computing
Amplifying Human Abilities: Digital Technologies to Enhance Perception and Cognition
Historically, the use and development of tools is strongly linked to human evolution and intelligence. The last 10.000 years show a stunning progress in physical tools that have transformed what people can do and how people live. Currently, we are at the beginning of an even more fundamental transformation: the use of digital tools to amplify the mind.
Digital technologies provide us with entirely new opportunities to enhance the perceptual and cognitive abilities of humans. Many ideas, ranging from mobile access to search engines, to wearable devices for lifelogging and augmented realty application give as first indications of this transition.
In our research we create novel digital technologies that systematically explore how to enhance human cognition and perception. Our experimental approach is to: first, understand the users in their context as well as the potential for enhancement. Second, we create innovative interventions that provide functionality that amplifies human capabilities. And third, we empirically evaluate and quantify the enhancement that is gained by these developments.
It is exciting to see how ultimately these new ubiquitous computing technologies have the potential for overcoming fundamental limitations in human perception and cognition.
Speaker Bio
Albrecht Schmidt is a professor for Human Computer Interaction and Cognitive Systems at the University of Stuttgart. Previously he was a Professor for User Interface Engineering and Pervasive Computing at University of Duisburg-Essen.
In 2006/2007 he had a joined appointment between the University of Bonn and the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) working in the area of Media Informatics. He studied computer science in Ulm, Germany and Manchester, UK and receive in 2003 a PhD from the Lancaster University in the UK.
For the last 15 years Albrecht has been dedicated to creating usable systems. The focus of his current work is on novel user interfaces to enhance and amplify human cognition. He is working on interaction techniques and interactive applications in the context of mobile and ubiquitous computing, including new communication interfaces and user interfaces in the car.
Albrecht has published well over 200 refereed archival publications and his work is widely cited. He is co-founder of the ACM conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI) and initiated the ACM conference on Automotive User Interfaces (auto-ui.org).
In 2014 Albrecht co-chaired the ACM SIGCHI program. He is on the editorial board of ACM ToCHI, edits a forum on interaction technologies in the ACM Interactions magazine, and has a column in the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine.
In 2016 Albrecht Schmidt received a ERC Consolidator Grant to work on the Project “AMPLIFY: Amplifying Human Perception Through Interactive Digital Technologies”.
Weaving new Mobile UX futures through integrated innovation across 3 Continents, 4 Countries and a diversity of perspectives
Andy Cockburn was originally scheduled to give the closing keynote at INTERACT 2017. Unfortunately, Andy has had an accident - he injured his neck while trying to teach his kids how to backflip on a trampoline! He cannot fly to India (he's OK and we wish him a speedy recovery). Our closing keynote will now be given by Matt Jones - as you'll see from his abstract, Matt is often travelling the world and is a regular visitor to Mumbai. We're delighted that he is able to join us for the conference. (Read about Andy's now-cancelled talk)
Mobile and ubiquitous computing researchers have long imagined future worlds for users in developed regions. Steered by such visions, they have innovated devices and services exploring the value of these with and for individuals, groups and communities. Meanwhile, such radical and long-term explorations are uncommon for what have been termed emergent users; users, that is, for whom advanced technologies are just within grasp. Instead, a driving assumption is, perhaps, that today’s high-end mobile technologies will "trickle down" to these user groups in due course.
For the past three years, our team of researchers and partner organisations have started to explore how to do future envisioning that includes emergent communities. We have carried out intensive, coordinated innovation-prototyping-deploym ent yearly cycles that has seen us work with people from townships in South Africa and informal and slum districts in India and Kenya. These activities have seen the development of a number of novel mobile devices and services that would not have emerged without the insights provided and integrated across these regions.
In this talk, I will explore what mobile technologies might be like if emergent users are directly involved in creating their visions for the future 5–10 years from now; explain and reflect on our methods, highlighting the success and failures; detail some of the platforms and devices we've created; and, argue that such innovation is also vital to re-invigorate mobile design for the "traditional users" (like me) in the rest of the world.
Speaker Bio
Matt Jones is the author of two books and many research articles that have helped shape the field of Mobile HCI and UX (Mobile Interaction Design - with Gary Marsden; and There's Not an App for That - with Simon Robinson and Gary Marsden).
He has spoken at events with both an arts focus (such as the Hay Book Festiva 2017l) and the sciences (such as this the British Science Festival 2016). He has worked both with academic research groups and industrial partners across the world. His work combines a passion for invention with a commitment to working alongside non-traditional users of mobile technology.
He is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award Holder (for his work on interactions for resource constrained communities); was awarded an IBM Faculty Award (for work with the Spoken Web); and leads two major UK programmes focussed on human values and computational science (the Research Council UK funded Digital Economy CHERISH Centre; and the Welsh Government/ EU funded Computational Foundry). He has enjoyed being part of the HCI community: he co-chaired ACM CHI 2014; ACM Mobile HCI 2017; and is on the steering committee of both of these conference series.
Closing Keynote - Now Cancelled
Faster, More Learnable, and Preferred: Experiences Using Applied Psychology to Engineer Interactions
Research and practice in Human-Computer Interaction has come a long way in the thirty-four years since Card, Moran and Newell published their seminal book 'The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction'. However, the central tenet of their book remains every bit as relevant today as it was in 1983 -- the design of user interfaces can and should be informed by engineering methods that are based on understanding from applied psychology.
This talk will review several research projects that I have conducted with my students and colleagues, which aim to improve interaction by applying human factors lessons from psychology. The review is structured around four broad categories of human factors: motor coordination, spatial memory, skill acquisition, and biases in subjective experience.
Within these categories I will describe interfaces and experiments that demonstrate how interaction can be positively (and negatively) influenced by the factors, across interactive tasks including scrolling, command invocation, text messaging, file navigation, and the experience of assistive interfaces.
A key objective of the talk is to demonstrate, through examples, that lessons from applied psychology can (and should) be used to improve performance and experience with interactive systems.
Speaker Bio
Andy Cockburn is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he directs the Human Computer Interaction Lab.
Andy's research focuses on designing, evaluating and modelling user interfaces, with a focus on understanding and exploiting specific underlying human factors. His contributions include many interface designs that use human spatial memory to support expertise development in basic tasks such as file retrieval, command invocation, window switching, and scrolling.
Dr. Cockburn serves on the Editorial Boards of ACM ToCHI, the Human-Computer Interaction Journal, and Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction. He was papers co-chair for CHI 2014 and 2015. In 2015 he was inducted to the CHI Academy.
Understanding Consumer India and
what businesses need to do to serve them better
People who address Consumer India or People India and develop products for them need to get away from traditional / offer wrong mental models of what emerging market consumers are like or what poor people and uneducated people are like – what their capabilities are, what their priorities are, what their mindsets and life conditions are and so on.
India is a never-before world. Never-Before in human history have we had so many young people with modest incomes and even more modest education, come of age post the birth of the internet and the mobile and digital money, combined with pathetic infrastructure and informal service sector jobs.
The logic of this world of Consumer India is to be listened to, from the inside , in order to serve it better, and build capabilities and products and ideas that can be valuable in other markets too.
Sensible as all this seems, why do companies have trouble doing this? Even champion global companies?
Speaker Bio
Ms. Bijapurkar is a recognised thought leader on market strategy and India’s consumer economy, and is a keen commentator on social and cultural trends in fast-changing India. She has an independent management consulting practice and works with a range of global and domestic companies, across sectors, helping them in the development of their business-market strategy.
She has served as an independent director on the boards of several of India's blue chip companies. Past and present boards include Axis Bank, Crisil, Infosys, Bharat Petroleum, Godrej Consumer Products, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Limited, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited, Redington Gulf FZE, Titan Industries, Janalakshmi Financial Services, National Payments Corporation of India, Nestle India Ltd. etc.
She is also chairperson and co founder of People Research on India's Consumer Economy a newly set up not- for - profit think tank and fact tank, dedicated to providing ‘household and people-level’ data and insights for business strategy and public policy.
Ms. Bijapurkar has a BSc Hons in Physics from Delhi University and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She has previously worked with MODE Services (now TNS India), MARG (now Nielsen India), McKinsey & Co. and also been a full time consultant with Hindustan Unilever Ltd.
Know more about Rama.
Human-Computer Interaction – the Life and Times, and the History
HCI and Interact are here to stay. Many of us are born in a society where social media and smartphones are the common way of living. We take the opportunities for granted, and just develop ideas to broaden the use and to enable ever more innovative application, including cheap facilities for developing regions.
We label our field: Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Usability Engineering – old words that could now be replaced by “Experience Design”. Or should they? We live in the clouds, our friends and family live on Facebook, and our watch is our coach and our physician. But how did this all start, and who were the pioneers to found the science and practice of Affordance Design, Cognitive Engineering and Software Ergonomics? Is it industry that started by inventing interactive systems, or the scientists who build theories and models for the user interface: What were the chickens that produced the egg of HCI?
In this talk you will learn about blue-grass movements in different parts of the world that did result in understanding, theories, prototypes, and approaches. The talk will illustrate how this was discussed and disseminated in communities and at conferences, how this evolved into education and standards, and how this resulted in recognition of our professional field as the base for design of usable, comprehensive, enjoyable, absorbing and un-evitable tools, culminating in a new context of life and society, and new cultures.
Speaker Bio
Gerrit C. van der Veer has been a researcher and teacher in University since 1961. He started in Cognitive Psychology, moved to Cognitive Ergonomics, and into Computer Science, where he specialized in design of interactive systems. He has been developing HCI curricula, and teaching HCI in many European countries including Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Romania, and the Netherlands, as well as in China.
His research concerns user centered design methods, task modeling, individual differences and cultural diversity, mental models, cultural heritage, and visualization.
He is currently supervising PhD Students for several Dutch Universities and in Italy; and teaching courses at the Maritime University of Dalian (China) Sino-European Usability Centre; and at LuXun Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Multimedia and Animation, Shenyang (China).
Gerrit is Past President of ACM SIGCHI, the world leading international society for human-computer interaction, and Co-founder and Past President of the European Association of Cognitive ergonomics.
Designing a 'Mahabharata for Children' - Challenges
Further details will be announced soon.
Speaker Bio
Devdutt Pattanaik writes on relevance of mythology in modern times, especially in areas of management, governance and leadership.
Trained in medicine, he worked for 15 years in the healthcare and pharma industries before he focussed on his passion full time. He is author of 30 books and 600 columns, with bestsellers such as My Gita, Jaya, Sita, Business Sutra and the 7 Secret Series.
He was a speaker at TEDIndia 2009 and spoke on Myths that Mystify, East versus West. His TV shows include Business Sutra on CNBC-TV18 and Devlok on Epic TV. He consults organisations on culture, diversity and leadership and also consults various television channels and filmmakers on storytelling.
Towards Human-Centred Collaborative Computing
Human-centred computing can be seen as approach that departs from a human, social, and cultural understanding in order to make technology useful and usable. Taking this approach his research aims to develop technological concepts, prototypes, and systems based on an understanding of how people interact with and communicate through computing technology.
In this talk he shares general thoughts on the approach and gives specific examples from his work.
Speaker Bio
Tom Gross is full professor and chair of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Bamberg, Germany. His research interests are Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing. In these areas he has numerous publications, and has participated in and coordinated activities in various national and international research projects.
He is a member of the IFIP’s TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction. He has been conference co-chair and organiser of many international conferences (e.g., INTERACT 2015 in Bamberg). He received a PhD from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.