Michel Beaudouin-Lafon

Towards Unified Principles of Interaction

Even though today’s computers are used for many different types of tasks, they still rely on user interfaces designed for office workers in the 1980s.
HCI researchers have produced a slew of innovative interaction styles, from gestural interaction to mixed reality and tangible interfaces, but they have not replaced traditional GUIs. I argue that we must devise fundamental principles of interaction that unify, rather than separate, interaction styles in order to support the diversity of uses and users. I describe recent work on my ERC advanced grant, ONE, which explores how the concepts of information substrates and interaction instruments create digital environments that users can appropriate and (re)combine at will.

Short bio

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon is Professor of Computer Science, Classe Exceptionnelle, at Université Paris-Sud and a senior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked in human-computer interaction for over 30 years and was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2006. His research interests include fundamental aspects of interaction, novel interaction techniques, computer-supported cooperative work and engineering of interactive systems. He has published over 170 papers and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. His current research is conducted in the Ex Situ group, a joint lab between Université Paris-Sud, CNRS and Inria, where he heads the 22M€ Digiscope project and is the laureate of an ERC Advanced Grant. Michel was director of LRI, the laboratory for computer science joint between Université Paris-Sud and CNRS (280 faculty, staff, and Ph.D. students), and now heads the Human-Centered Computing lab at LRI.
Michel participates in many program committees and in the evaluation of many research institutions and research proposals at the French, European and international. He currently sits on the Scientific Committee of CNRS for Computer Science. He founded and co-directed two international masters in HCI, and is co-director of the graduate school in computer science. He founded AFIHM, the Francophone association for human-computer interaction, and was its first president. Michel has also been active in ACM and SIGCHI for over 20 years, including as Technical Program Co-chair for CHI 2013 in Paris (3500 participants). He sits on the editorial boards of ACM Books and ACM TOCHI, has served on the ACM Council and the ACM Publications Board, and on several award and nominating committees of ACM and SIGCHI. He is currently serving on EUACM, the new European policy office of ACM. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2015.

Marianna Obrist

Mastering the Senses in HCI: Towards Multisensory Interfaces

With the proliferation of sensory technologies that do not only stimulate the sense of vision and hearing, but also our sense of touch, smell, and taste, we are confronted with the challenge of understanding and mastering those ‘new’ senses in HCI. Only by addressing this challenge systematically from a technical and perceptual perspective we can meaningfully design multisensory interfaces and enrich human-technology interactions. We particularly investigate experiences and emotions related to tactile, gustatory, and olfactory stimulation facilitated by the use of novel technologies (e.g., mid-air haptic devices, olfactory devices), but also through developing our own prototypes. Within this talk, I will present examples from our research efforts at the Sussex Computer Human Interaction Lab.

Short bio

Marianna Obrist is a Reader (equivalent to Associate Professor) at the Department of Informatics, School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex, UK. Marianna is leading the Sussex Computer Human Interaction Lab (SCHI ‘sky’ Lab), a research group dedicated to the investigation of multisensory experiences. The interdisciplinary SCHI Lab team explores tactile, gustatory, and olfactory experiences as novel interaction modalities. This research is mainly supported by a five-year grant from the European Research Council. Before joining Sussex, Marianna was a Marie Curie Fellow at Newcastle University and prior to this an Assistant Professor for Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Salzburg, Austria. More details on her current work can be found at: http://www.multi-sensory.info