On sept 22, 2015, the Interaccion 2015 International Conference of HCI came to the Universitat Politecnica of Catalonia on Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona, Spain).
Interacción 2015 intl Conferences
Overview
More than 150 professionals, researchers and students come to that series of Conferences, known to be in the top of the Spanish HCI Conferences with the sponsoring of SCHI, the ACM and the AIPO organizations. These series of Conferences shows the work of 105 publications of 22 differents countries.
Opening Conference Interacción 2015
The initials topics of the Conferences were:
- Natural User Interfaces
- Methodologies and Models
- enGendering technology
- Child computer interaction
- Interface design
- Interaction devices
- Interaction with people with disabilities
- Games
- Usability and user experience
- Software-architecture and interaction
- Accesibilitty
- Semantic web
Plenary conferences
The Plenary lecture was given by Panos Markopoulos, titled “Interaction Design for Rehabilitation”. Panos’s work is related to the design of interactive technologies to support people change their behaviour in relation to health related applications. As Panos states in the lecture, there is an increasing demand of rehabilitation and the related technologies that can improve the quality of the rehabilitation. There are new sophisticated ways to apply that new technologies (such as tele-rehabilitation), and both the academic and the industry actors may pay attention on how that improvements should be applied to ensure the quality of the rehabilitation and the health of the patients.
The second plenary conference was titled ‘Including Gender in the Interaction’ given by Els Rommes. Els discussed in that lecture the inclusion of the gender in education, design, production and use of technologies. She pointed out the main advantages and disadvantages when designing taking into account the gender and also, pointed out various technologies that could be relevant.
The last plenary lecture, titled ‘Towards Intracellular Computer‐Human Interaction:a microelectronic perspective’ by José Antonio Plaza. His research interests include embedding chips into human liven cells which is the center of that lecture. This lecture presents the past and future of his research group on micro and nano chips and its relationship to human cells and human organs.
The final discussion titled ‘Reflexions about the HCI‘ by José Antoni Macias and Marina Talavera exposes.The final discussion summarizes what are the challenges for the future in fields as ‘user interfaces’ and ‘user experience’. The authors theorized on how the technology impacts on the society and how the the academic and the professional world should face the necessities of technology that society demands.
An special mention is essential for the special lecture on ‘Developing augmented reality applications for tablets and smartphones‘ by Antonio Manuel Baena. Antonio have a long experience designing interactive spaces and experiences for Museums (Guggenheim, Alhambra, Ciudad de las artes y las Ciencias..). His experience on augmented reality on mobile devices drives this interesting tutorial for tablets and smartphones.
Conferences
The conferences were classified under the following topics: Natural User Interface, Methodologies and Models, Child computer interaction, Interface design and Interaction devices. I was unable to attend to all the conferences due the schedule. Those I’ve been attended were related to interface design, interaction devices and usability & user experience. I recommend to check the Proceedings in order to locate the interesting topics for each reader.
Here are the articles I recommend by topic:
Vibrotractile Vest and the Humming Wall: “I like the hand down my spine” [Morrison,2015].
An interesting report of a work that is being used outdoors and its open to everybody at Aalborg (Denmark). It is a ‘system’ that allow the participants to experience differents sensations when interacting with the ‘Humming wall’ throught a ‘vibrotactile vest’. This vest transform into sensations the interactions the wall receive from the people. It is an interesting work on how interactive interfaces can be designed to provoke unusual skin sensations on people.
CamScan, an application to identify everyday objects for users with vision impairments [Capa-Arnao, 2015]
On this lecture, The authors present their work on image recognition for blinded or people with vision impairments. Their proposal is the use of smartphones in order to help that kind of patients to recognize everyday objects with the embedded camera of the mobile device.
An ontology driven-approach to Model & support mobility and geolocalization based campus interactions [Khemaja, 2015]
The authors present their work on classifying and modelling all the entities related to mobility and context recognition. This work was done in order to offer an ontology for services in an university campus that will provide contextual information for students and staff based on geolocalization.
Model for Analysis of Serious Games for Literacy in Deaf Children from a User Experience Approach [Cano, 2015]
The authors, from their own experience, created a model on how a serious game should be developed in order to contain all the relevant aspects that are needed in the process of learning of a deaf children. From my point of view, this is an interesting lecture because the starting and ending point are based on the experience and not only on theory, which in HCI is a key point.
This lecture is the result of a spectacular work on sound signal process, their recognition and their isolation. When working with people with reduced hearing abilities, the need to focus on specific sounds on their daily life is very important. The solution developed for mobile devices uses the embedded hardware on modern smartphones to process the sound signal and help diseased people to focus on the selected sound played on the smartphone almost in real time.
Towards Intelligent and Implicit Assistance for People with Dementia: Support for Orientation and Navigation [Ly, 2015]
This is another fantastic lecture about how technology help diseased people. The lecture presents a guidance system for people with dementia. These people have special necessities of guidance especially on indoors environments. The use of mobile devices for these people is not recommended because the required skills needed for their use. The use of sound and visual signals with an intelligent tracking system creates an application that help people with dementia in their daily life in nursing homes or specialized care facilities.
This in an intelligent lecture that exposes an initial approach to which are the problems that women working in technology have faced, and also, give some advices and solutions on facilitate and promote women’s presence in technological careers.
Juegos Serios Tangibles con Objetos Reales como Herramienta de Apoyo para Trabajar con Niños que Requieren Necesidades Especiales [Durango, 2015]
On this lecture, the authors tried to explain their work developing a serious game and their later experience using the new software on an Special Education Center for children with learning problems. The solution is very interesting for both the results and the methodology applied.
The authors proposed and executed some experiments about ‘web search’ in order to study the effect of adding the new snippets of meta-information, which modern web-crawlers enable on their sites. The results try to compare the effects of displaying results with plain and rich snippets and how it affects to the searching.
An Agile Information-Architecture-Driven Approach for the Development of User-Centered Interactive Software [Rojas, 2015]
The article and the lecture presents an Scrum powered framework, called Scrum UIA. That framework fill the gap between the typical User Centered and the Information Architecture developments. The aims of the framework is to obtain usable software increments in an agile way.
La delgada línea roja entre la usabilidad y la experiencia de usuario [Puerta-Cruz, 2015]. On this little lecture, the authors tried to explain the differences between these topics: they are very similar and the literature tends to confuse. The meaning is the key to understand the problems of the Human-Computer Interaction.