Professor Aaron Quigley will be giving his Inaugural Lecture in School III on Wednesday 31st October at 5:15 p.m.

Billions of people are using interconnected computers and have come to rely on the computational power they afford us, to support their lives, or advance our global economy and society. However, how we interact with this computation is often limited to little “windows of interaction” with mobile and desktop devices which aren’t fully suited to their contexts of use. Consider the surgeon operating, the child learning to write or the pedestrian navigating a city and ask are the current devices and forms of human computer interaction as fluent as they might be? I contend there is a division between the physical world in which we live our lives and the digital space where the power of computation currently resides. Many day to day tasks or even forms of work are poorly supported by access to appropriate digital information. In this talk I will provide an overview of research I’ve been pursuing to bridge this digital-physical divide and my future research plans. This talk will be framed around three interrelated topics. Ubiquitous Computing, Novel Interfaces and Visualisation. Ubiquitous Computing is a model of computing in which computation is everywhere and computer functions are integrated into everything. Everyday objects are sites for sensing, input, processing along with user output. Novel Interfaces, which draw the user interface closer to the physical world, both in terms of input to the system and output from the system. Finally, the use of computer-supported interactive visual representations of data to amplify cognition with visualisation. In this talk I will demonstrate that advances in human computer interaction require insights and research from across the sciences and humanities if we are to bridge this digital-physical divide.