Author: Davide Spano

Summer School AFIRM CHI 2022

Davide Spano
AFIRM CHI 2022 logo

AFIRM CHI2022 summer school (https://afirmchi2022.afihm.org) addresses Ph.D. students in HCI from Italian and French universities, and it will take place in Padova, Italy, from August 22nd to August 26th. It aims at improving participants’ ability to effectively present their HCI projects to scholars, stakeholders and funding agencies. All activities are in English. This event follows a series of successful doctoral meetups organized by the French Association for Human-Computer Interaction AFIHM.

The event starts with one remote session of preparatory work to set the challenges and the needed resources and then continues physically at the summer school’s site. The program alternates workshops, teamwork and presentations on the following topics:

  • how to quickly outline a project idea as a team using the visual thinking technique;
  • how to create professionally-looking illustrations for presentations and papers using free dedicated software;
  • what points to emphasize in a grant application and pitch;
  • how to meet reviewer’s and funder’s expectations.

The activities will focus on a case study, the distributed UNESCO touristic site is known as “Padova Urbs Picta”, and include a visit to the site itself.

To help bring this program to life, the following instructors will take turns: Wendy Mackay (Inria), Sylvain Malacria (Inria), Jacopo Sacquegno (Visualteams), Elisa De Rosa and consultants from UNIPD international office.

Survey on Courses and Research Groups in HCI – 2022 edition

Davide Spano

We are glad to announce that we presented the updated data on HCI courses in Italy at AVI 2022. In addition, we updated the information on the Italian research groups in HCI.

The results and the collected data are available for an interactive exploration through a dedicated public repository on GitHub, allowing the community to use the results for their own research and analysis.

We now support also the interactive browsing of the data through the following dedicated pages:

We shifted towards a new data collection model, where updates or new course or group descriptions may be proposed by sending a pull-request to the repository. Once accepted, both the list and the overviews will automatically update.

The survey is a joint work between the University of Salerno and the University of Cagliari, coordinated by Giuliana Vitiello (Extended Committee delegate for the Education) and Davide Spano (Extended Committee delegate for the Research).

ACM Creativity and Cognition 2022

Davide Spano
The 14th ACM conference on Creativity & Cognition, 20-23, June 2022

C&C2022 invites you in-person to a week of art, science, and networking at a five-day conference in Venice, Italy on 20-23, June 2022.


Creativity involves the generation, exploration, and interpretation of novel and valuable ideas, and spans a wide variety of fields, including the humanities, social sciences, engineering, art, design, choreography, computer science, psychology, and education. C&C 2022 invites contributions in typical research formats – papers, posters, demos, workshops and tutorials – and in more sensory, experiential forms – pictorials and artworks. See the call for participation for more details.

Since 1993, this conference series brings together artists, scientists, designers, educators, and researchers to more deeply understand how people engage individually and socially in creative processes and how computation and other technology can affect creative outcomes.

The conference will explore the themes of creativity, craft and design that are strongly connected to Venice. After our virtual conference in 2021, which opened up Venice to the world, in 2022 the world will come to Venice to discover, engage with and learn about creativity, craft and design, including how craft and design is reshaping the Venetian region.

The conference is hosting eight one-day workshops, which will take place on the 20th June. The workshops cover a range of themes related to creativity, design, AI and craft. These eight workshops are:

  • W1: Venetian Drawing Conversations
  • W2: Augmenting Personal Creativity with Artificial Intelligence
  • W3: Casual Creators
  • W4: Virtual and in-person co-design workshops: from alternative to complementary approaches
  • W5: Leading Teams To Victory: Where Creative Theory Meets Practice
  • W6: Designing Morphing Artifacts for Creative STEM Explorations
  • W7: Here and there, now and then: Creativity, design and instruction for hybrid environments
  • W8: Making AI: Advancing creative approaches to the design of AI systems through the craft of making them

Full details about these workshops are available at https://cc.acm.org/2022/cc22-workshops/.

Conference details, including how to register, is at https://cc.acm.org/2022/

AVI 2022 – 30th Anniversary

Davide Spano

Since 1992, AVI has been a biennial appointment for a vast international community of experts with a broad range of backgrounds. Throughout three decades, the Conference has attracted leading researchers of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from all over the world, offering a forum to present and disseminate new technological results, paradigms, and visions for HCI and user interfaces.

Because of advanced technology and new possibilities for user interaction, AVI has broadened the topics it covers, still keeping its primary focus on the conception, design, implementation, and evaluation of novel visual interfaces.

While rooted in Italy, AVI is an actual international conference concerning the nationality of participants, authors of papers, and program committee members. The mixture of carefully selected research contributions paired with cordial Italian hospitality creates a unique conference atmosphere, which has made AVI an internationally recognized brand.

AVI 2022 is under the patronage of Sapienza Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Informatica, Italy.

Further information:

Luigi De Russis joins the SIGCHI Executive Committee

Davide Spano

We are proud to announce that Luigi De Russis, one of the SIGCHI Italy Extended Board members, has joined the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee. The Executive Committee runs the ACM SIGCHI and includes the elected and appointed officers and the Past President.

He will serve as Adjunct Chair for Community Support, focusing on creatively and effectively tailoring SIGCHI funding and support mechanisms to community needs.

Congratulations to Luigi from the whole SIGCHI-Italy group.

Fabio Paternò elected to the SIGCHI Academy

Davide Spano
Fabio Paternò

We are happy to announce that Fabio Paternò, one of the founders of SIGCHI-Italy, is among the seven SIGCHI Academy awardees in 2021.

The SIGCHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction. The criteria for election to the SIGCHI Academy are:

  • Cumulative contributions to the field.
  • Impact on the field through development of new research directions and/or innovations.
  • Influence on the work of others.
  • Reasonably active participant in the ACM SIGCHI community.

The SIGCHI-Italy community congratulates Fabio for this outstanding achievement, which an important acknowledgement for the Italian research in Human-Computer Interaction.

More information is available in the ACM website

2021 SIGCHI Awards
Awards

Interact 2021

Davide Spano

August 30 – September 3, 2021, Bari, Italy

INTERACT is the International Conference promoted by the IFIP Technical Committee 13 on Human–Computer Interaction. INTERACT is held every two years.
The theme of INTERACT 2021 “Sense, Feel, Design” highlights the new challenges of interaction design. Technology is today more and more widespread, pervasive and blended in the world we live in. On one side, devices that sense humans’ activities have the potential to provide an enriched interaction. On the other side, the user experience can be further enhanced by exploiting multisensorial technologies. Not only the traditional human senses of vision and hearing, but also senses of touch, smell, and taste, as well as emotions are to be taken into account when designing for future interactions.

INTERACT 2021 represents the right venue to debate such new challenges. Another hot topic of this edition is Human-AI Interaction, focusing on the design of human-centered intelligent systems.

Conference proceedings are published in Springer LNCS series and are available in the Springer Digital Library.

COVID 19 information. The aim is to run the conference in Bari. The venue is Hotel Villa Romanazzi Carducci; it is immersed in a park with a lot of space and green along various pathways. There are gardens that frame a modern structure, making it a great place welcome conference participants, taking all precautions to ensure participants’ health safety. The evolution of the pandemic will be carefully monitored and those who cannot travel due to COVID-19 will be allowed to present and participate remotely in the conference.

IFIP – International Federation for Information Processing

IFIP is the leading multinational, apolitical organization in Information & Communications Technologies and Sciences, recognized by United Nations and other world bodies. It represents IT Societies from 56 countries/regions, covering five continents with a total membership of over half a million, and links more than 3500 scientists from Academia & Industry. Over 100 Working Groups and 10 Technical Committees.

IFIP aims to develop the science and technology of human–computer interaction (HCI) by encouraging empirical research, promoting the use of knowledge and methods from the human sciences in design and evaluation of computer systems; promoting better understanding of the relationship between formal design methods and system usability and acceptability; developing guidelines, models and methods by which designers may provide better human-oriented computer systems; and, cooperating with other groups, inside and outside IFIP, to promote user-orientation and humanization in system design.

Useful links

CHItaly 2021

Davide Spano

27-29 JUNE 2021, BOLZANO, ITALY

CHItaly 2021 logo

The theme for the 14th Edition of the Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter was defined in summer 2019 as “Frontiers of HCI”. At that time, we were thinking about disciplinary and national boundaries. Little did we know of the many frontiers this hybrid conference would have to overcome to create a safe space for HCI related discussions. To overcome this challenge, CHItaly combines physical and digital events while providing synchronous and asynchronous spaces for dialogue.

So far, CHItaly has physically hosted HCI scholars working in the Mediterranean and other European countries. The aim of CHItaly 2021 is to connect research and geographical areas, so as to explore frontiers and cross-fertilise HCI research in practice. From this perspective, a hybrid conference can become an incredible experimentation space which you are all invited to shape.

To reach its aims, the conference

  1. Solicits contributions from diverse research communities relevant to HCI, such as Science and Technology Studies, Technology Enhanced Learning, Interaction Design and Digital Fabrication, Design and the Arts, besides traditional fields such as computer science, engineering and psychology
  2. opens its physical and digital doors to industry, civic societies and citizens.

The call for contributions for CHItaly2021 and its various tracks is out. For further details and deadlines see: www.chitaly2021.inf.unibz.it

Fabio Paternò named IFIP Fellow

Davide Spano
Fabio Paternò

We are glad to announce that Fabio Paternò, one of the senior members of the SIGCHI-Italy group, has been named in the first cohort of IFIP Fellows, the new higher status of the federation in recognition of his substantial and enduring contributions to the ICT industry.

We congratulate Fabio for this very important achievement!

Fabio Paternò is Research Director and Head of the Laboratory on Human Interfaces in Information Systems at the Institute of Science and Technology (ISTI-CNR) in Pisa, Italy. He was recognized for his numerous contributions to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and also to connected fields such as Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. He has published over 250 papers in refereed international conferences or journals and his book, “Model-based Design and Evaluation of Interactive Applications” had a huge impact on the HCI community. Italy’s National Representative to IFIP TC 13 (Human Computer interaction) since 1996, Paterno also chaired IIFIP WG 2.7/13/4 (User Interface Engineering) and is a member of IFIP WG 13.2 and 13.3. He was awarded an IFIP Silver Core in 2013.

More information is available in the following websites:

IUI 2020 in Cagliari

Davide Spano
IUI 2020 logo

ACM IUI 2020 is the 25th annual premier international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces and it will be held in Cagliari at the THotel from the 17th to 20th of March 2020.

ACM IUI is where the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the Artificial
Intelligence (AI) communities meet, with contributions from related fields such as psychology, behavioral science, cognitive science, computer graphics, design, the arts, and more. Our focus is to improve the interaction between humans and digital technology, by leveraging both HCI approaches and state-of-the art AI techniques from machine learning, natural language processing, data mining, knowledge representation and reasoning.

In addition to the 65 papers, the conference program will include three keynote presentations by Keynote Brad A Myers (IUI4EUD: Intelligent User Interfaces for End-User Development), Margaret Burnett (Explaining AI: Fairly? Well?) and Ana Paiva (Humans and Robots Together: engineering sociality and collaboration), 49 posters and demos, 8 workshops and 2 tutorials. The technical program will be complemented by social events to facilitate informal discussions and networking among the conference attendees and invited guests.

For more information, please visit the conference website http://iui.acm.org/2020/