Invited speakers

We are proud to announce our INTERACT 2007 keynote speakers:

Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland

Human Values for Shaping the Made World

Interface design principles have been effective in shaping new desktop applications, web-based resources, and mobile devices. Usability and sociability promote successful online communities and social network services. The contributions of human-computer interaction researchers have been effective in raising the quality of design of many products and services. As our influence grows, we can play an even more profound role in guaranteeing that enduring human values are embedded in the next generation of technology. This talk identifies which goals are realistic, such as universality, responsibility, trust, empathy, and privacy, and how we might ensure that they become part of future services and systems.

Short Bio

BEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and Member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM ) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. 2005) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . He is a technical advisor for the HiveGroup, Groxis, and EasyUse. With S Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). His books include Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), which won the IEEE Distinguished Literary Contribution award in 2004.

Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza, Departamento de Informática, PUC-Rio

Getting your message across to your users

Most models, theories and perspectives in human-computer interaction focus on users communicating with systems. The very name of our discipline illustrates how pervasive is the idea that users and systems are the only relevant parties involved in the process we want to design or investigate. For over a decade, the Semiotic Engineering Research Group (SERG) has elaborated an alternative account of HCI. In it, what we traditionally call human-computer interaction is characterized as a particular instance of a more general process of computer-mediated human communication.

Semiotic Engineering views HCI as a case of designer-to-user metacommunication, or communication about how to communicate (with/through the system), when and what for. The designer's metacommunication message in conveyed by means of a wide range of communicative exchanges between the users and the system. The system represents designers at interaction time, and each turn of communicative exchange adds a significant piece of knowledge and experience to what eventually becomes the user's interpretation of the designer's message. Thus the metacommunication process is achieved.

In this talk I will provide various examples of designer-to-user metacommunication, and discuss some of the main implications of bringing designers onto the stage where human-computer interaction takes place. I will place a special emphasis on how this alternative perspective encourages designers to express certain values, beliefs and expectations regarding the interactive artifacts they produce, compared with what is enabled and encouraged by more traditional views of HCI. Given the theme of INTERACT 2007, I will illustrate the differences with systems that clearly demand, and encode, an attitude of social responsibility from their designers and developers.

I will wrap up the talk with some final considerations about the cultural roots of Semiotic Engineering, and a conjecture that HCI theories developed outside North America and Europe will reflect their proponents' concern and engagement with remarkably different social and cultural backgrounds. Perhaps, our international community's investment in encouraging the development of such theories will foster progress of our discipline in some innovative directions.

Short Bio

Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza graduated as a Translator and Conference Interpreter from PUC-Rio, where she also obtained an M.A. in Portuguese and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics. In 1988 she joined the Informatics Department at PUC-Rio, where she started the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) area.

Clarisse was the first Brazilian Representative in IFIP's TC13 (the Technical Committee for Human-Computer Interaction). She created the Brazilian Computing Society's Special Interest Group in HCI and coordinated the first of a now successful series of Brazilian Conferences on Human Factors in Computing (the IHC series). In 1996 she founded SERG (the Semiotic Engineering Research Group), which she headed till 2003. Among the 13 M.Sc. and 16 Ph.D. students that she has (co-)supervised, more than a half are faculty in various Brazilian universities, and nearly one third work in the industry.

Along with Alfredo Sánchez (UDLA - Mexico), Clarisse was General Co-Chair of CLIHC2003 - the first Latin American Conference on HCI (Rio de Janeiro, August 17 to 20, 2003). She is also the author of The semiotic engineering of human-computer interaction, published by The MIT Press in 2005. The book presents a full-blown semiotic theory of HCI that was completely and independently developed by SERG, in Brazil.

Wendy Kellogg, IBM

Perspectives on Social Computing

Social computing has emerged as a broad area of research in HCI and CSCW, encompassing systems that mediate social information across collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, cohorts, populations, and markets. Such systems are likely to support and make visible social attributes such as identity, reputation, trust, accountability, presence, social roles, expertise, knowledge, and ownership. Social computing is transforming organizations and societies by creating a pervasive technical infrastructure that includes people, organizations, their relationships and activities as fundamental system components, enabling identity, behavior, social relationships, and experience to be used as resources. In this talk, I argue for a broad definition of social computing, selectively review emerging applications, and discuss current research within and beyond IBM that is driving and is driven by the emerging vision of social computing.

Short Bio

Wendy A. Kellogg is one of the founders of the field of social computing, forming the first research group focusing on Social Computing in 1998: the Social Computing Group at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center. Topics addressed by the group have included social translucence (a conceptual framework pioneered by Erickson and Kellogg), computer-mediated communication, social proxies, the design of social software, knowledge management, awareness systems, enhanced audio conferencing, collaboration and human productivity in high performance computing, social and task visualizations, and most recently, serious games, virtual worlds for business use, and "Enterprise 2.0."

Kellogg's work in human-computer interaction (HCI) over more than two decades has spanned areas including theory, evaluation methods, design, and development. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Oregon. She is author and editor of publications in the fields of HCI and CSCW, and currently serves on the editorial board of ACM’s Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Wendy chaired CHI 2005 Technical Papers, DIS 2000’s Technical Program, and the CSCW 2000 and CHI’94 conferences. She chaired Workshops for CHI 2004 and has served numerous times as an associate chair for CHI, CSCW, ECSCW, and DIS. She served on the National Academy of Science’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and in 2002 was elected ACM Fellow "for contributions to social computing and human-computer interaction."