HCI luminaries Albrecht Schmidt and Andy Cockburn headline an impressive line-up of speakers at next month’s INTERACT 2017 Conference in Mumbai.

Professor Schmidt will present the opening keynote on “Amplifying Human Abilities: Digital Technologies to Enhance Perception and Cognition, while Cockburn will deliver the closing keynote, entitled: Faster, More Learnable and Preferred: Experiences Using Applied Psychology to Engineer Interactions.

Keynotes Address Critical Issues Enhancing Human Computer Interaction

The Professor for Human Computer Interaction and Cognitive Systems at the University of Stuttgart, Schmidt has been devoted to developing usable systems for the past 15 years. His work in currently focused on developing novel user interfaces to enhance and amplify human cognition, particularly in the context of mobile and ubiquitous computing, including new communication interfaces and user interfaces for cars.

Professor Schmidt believes we are at the beginning of a fundamental transformation as researchers start using digital tools to enhance the perceptual and cognitive abilities of humans.

Last year, Schmidt received a ERC Consolidator Grant to work on the Project “AMPLIFY: Amplifying Human Perception Through Interactive Digital Technologies”. In his keynote, he will discuss how these new ubiquitous computing technologies have the potential for overcoming fundamental limitations in human perception and cognition.

Andy Cockburn is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he directs the Human Computer Interaction Lab.

His closing keynote address will review several research projects he has conducted with students and colleagues which aim to improve interaction by applying human factors lessons from psychology. He will explore four broad categories of human factors: motor coordination, spatial memory, skill acquisition, and biases in subjective experience, using examples from his research to demonstrate that lessons from applied psychology can (and should) be used to improve performance and experience with interactive systems.

INTERACT 2017 will also feature four high profile Invited Speakers:

  • Rama Bijapurkar, Author, Consultant & Strategist, on “Understanding Consumer India and what businesses need to do to serve them better”;
  • Gerrit C. Van Der Veer, Emeritus Professor and Past President of ACM SIGCHI on “Human-Computer Interaction – the Life and Times, and the History”;
  • Devdutt Pattanaik, Mythologist, Author and Illustrator, on “Designing a ‘Mahabharata for Children’ – Challenges”; and  
  • Tom Gross, Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, on “Towards Human-Centred Collaborative Computing”.

For more information, please visit https://www.interact2017.org/ or you can follow INTERACT 2017 on its website, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.