The TC13 Open Symposium on HCI is part of a series of annual events organised by the Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction. The Symposium is a scientific event that is meant to create synergy between researchers, students and industrialists to meet and discuss hot topics on HCI with the IFIP TC13 representatives. The 2024 TC13 Open Symposium on HCI took place on 2 September 2024 in Milan, Italy, hosted by the Università degli Studi di Milano in association with the Università degli Studi di Brescia in Italy.
The scientific program included talks on safety and security, HCI Education, accessibility, disability and aging, human-work interaction design and end-user involvement in development, followed by a panel discussion.
Tilo Mentler from Trier University of Applied Sciences (Germany) addressed the varied focus of safety and security research in general and when the human factor aspect is also covered.
Cesar Collazos from the Universidad del Cauca-Colombia (Columbia) talked about the shortage of facilities and skills to teach HCI in IberoAmerican countries and how a group of enthusiastic HCI researchers/practitioners came together 2016 to address the issue and started a network specially focused on HCI education in a Latin American context.
The session on accessibility, disability and aging started with a talk by Fabio Paternò, CNR-ISTI, HIIS Laboratory (Italy) addressing large scale automatic web accessibility validation with examples from the Italian experience. This was followed by a talk by Dragan Ahmetovic, University of Milan (Italy) on accessible content creation of STEM documents and visualizations for people with visual impairments. Helen Petrie, University of York (UK), concluded the session by looking at the use of newer technologies, such as robots and drones, for older people living independently.
The first part of the afternoon was dedicated to topics related to human-work interaction design. Elodie Bouzekri, McGill Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Canada), presented the results of a systematic review conducted by a group from WG13.6 members on the topic of post-pandemic sustainable human-work interaction designs and several aspects of sustainability (economic, ethical, social, and environmental). This was followed with a talk by Stefano Valtolina, University of Milan (Italy) on the use of conversational agents in optimising human productivity and enriching user experiences.
Torkil Clemmensen, Copenhagen Business School (Denmark) continued the session with a talk on hybrid work physicalisations, addressing how people take information from physical artifacts in hybrid workplaces. Alessandro Pollini, Uninettuno University and BSD Design (Italy) concluded the session with and industrial focus. His talk reported on research into developing a mixed reality training kit for supporting contextual, site-specific, and on-the-job training of industrial operators, implementing aspects such as worker centricity, authoring of mixed reality training materials, and context intelligent training.
The final session of the day addressed topic related to end-user involvement in development. Davide Spano, University of Cagliari (Italy), presented a rule-based approach for enabling end-users and novice developers to define interactive behaviours in immersive eXtended Reality (XR) experiences. Marta Kristin Lárusdóttir, Reykjavik University (Iceland) concluded the day’s presentations with experiences on using the KokemUX process to help software development teams to structure their activities and focus on users’ needs.
Details on these talks and the co-authors of the various talks can be found on the IFIP TC13 Website: https://ifip-tc13.org/events/tc13-open-symposium-series/tc13-open-symposium-2024-milan-italy-2-september-2024/
(Photo Caption: Speakers and discussion coordinators of the 2024 IFIP TC13 Open Symposium; Photo supplied.)