Title: User Experience: a step towards Natural User Interfaces.

Abstract: The road to natural interfaces is still long and we are now witnessing an artificial naturality. These interfaces are natural, in the sense they employ hand gestures, but they are also artificial, because the system designer imposes the set of gestures. In this lecture we will explore together the benefits and issues of Natural User Interfaces.

Speaker biography: Alessio Malizia is a Professor of UX Design at the University of Hertfordshire and a distinguished speaker of the ACM (the international Association for Computer Machinery); he lives in London but is a “global soul” and has been living in Italy, Spain and US. He is the son of a blacksmith, but thereafter all pretensions of manual skills end. Prof. Malizia began his career as a bearded computer scientist at Sapienza – University of Rome and then, after an industrial experience in IBM and Silicon Graphics, moved on with a career in research. He was visiting researcher at the Xerox PARC where he was appreciated for his skills in neural networks (Multilayer Perceptrons) and as peanut butter and chocolate biscuits eater. He worked as Senior Lecturer at Brunel University London and as Associate Professor (and Spanish tapas aficionado) at the University Carlos III of Madrid. Prof Malizia’s research and teaching interests focus on Human-Centred Systems.

He is interested in the design of Ubiquitous Interactive Systems with a special focus on the End-User Development community. He is particularly interested in systems where the physical and digital become seamlessly intertwined producing a new hybrid landscape and the study of problems arising from designing such complex hybrid environments involving collaboration of various disciplines and stakeholders. In his role at the School of Creative Arts at University of Hertfordshire, he is keen to develop novel approaches and attract funding for improving methods to design almost invisible interfaces embedded in a physical environment naturally exploited by users’ innate interaction modalities.

SACHI Seminar – Large scale studies of habit changing interface design

Speaker: Matjaž Kljun

Abstract:

Various technologies can be used in persuading people to change their habits, behaviours or attitudes. Such technologies are defined as persuasive and they are used in a variety of fields such as marketing, public health and education.

We are daily exposed to persuasion through different visualizations and triggers on all our devices. For example, a social networking application tries to persuade us in opening the app with a push notification and once the app is opened other hooks are placed so we spend more time in it. However, such applications are usually installed by us and we are inclined in using them. But could we persuade highly busy professionals in completing a training course or just about everybody to read terms of service? We will discuss these issues through large-scale studies that have been in done in the wild.

Speaker biography:  Matjaž Kljun is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies at University of Primorska and is co-directing the HICUP lab (Humans Interacting with Computers at University of Primorska) and a research associate at the Faculty of Information studies, Slovenia. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Lancaster University, UK. His research interests span across various fields related to Human-Computer Interaction, Personal Information Management and the use of technologies in teaching and learning.

SACHI Seminar – The Missing Interface: Micro Gestures on Objects for Augmented Reality Interaction

Speaker: Klen Čopič Pucihar

Abstract:

Augmented reality technology can introduce digital elements to arbitrary objects. However, these objects were never designed to incorporate the digital component, hence do not provide the necessary interface. To overcome this limitation, AR Interaction systems add sensors to objects, use additional handheld hardware or perform hand and body tracking. These methods are not optimal for direct interaction with physical objects  because they:

• require modification of existing objects,
• require the the user to hold the controller in their hand,
• are based on synthesis of captured RGB or RGB-D data streams imposing the following limitations: (i) gestures need to be performed within the view of the camera; (ii) the gestures include reasonable large hand or finger movements (e.g. pinching the fingers, blooming gesture of opening the palm; (iii) the hand performing gesture is not occluded (e.g. cannot detect gestures if performed whilst grasping an object).

In this talk Klen will look at alternative methods which try to overcome such limitations and make inconspicuous, precise and flexible object oriented interaction possible for both augmented and mediated reality applications.

Speaker Biography

Klen Čopič Pucihar is assistant professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies at University of Primorska. Klen’s research vision is to look for new ways in which one could augmented, modify and mediate rich sources of visual, auditory and tactile stimuli that fabricate our everyday life experiences. The goal is to augment human abilities with new ways of using computational resources. This is important because the interface presents itself as the bottleneck between us humans and the benefit ever increasing computational resources could have on our everyday life. This makes the interfaces the core challenge for the future and the essence of Klen’s research which is currently mainly concentrated on augmented reality, mobile computing and human-computer interaction focusing on different perceptual issues that arise whilst interacting with various computer systems which lead to innovative user interface designs. Klen’s work was published as high ranked scientific publications and won him best poster award at ISMAR 2014.