Immersive technology (XR) designed for always-on interaction will forever change the way we communicate, collaborate, and connect with one another. XR technologies are rapidly advancing in terms of form factor and capabilities, but there is a present-future gap between how we use XR now and the rich social and interpersonal contexts where XR will be used in the future. My work takes a quantitative approach to engineering immersive experiences by applying social signal processing to modelling behaviour in XR and understanding how we experience immersive realities together. The future of XR is social, but we need principled approaches to build experiences that allow us to meaningfully connect across the XR continuum.
Julie Williamson is a Senior Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Glasgow in the internationally recognised Glasgow Interactive Systems (GIST) research group. Her research focuses on how we connect in immersive environments by applying social signal processing to modelling behaviour in XR and understanding how we experience immersive realities together. She completed her PhD in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow in January 2012.
At CHI 2003, I was presenting a paper on mobile visualization called Halo. To my surprise, a good friend gave me some tough love about the work—she was simply not impressed. What had I done wrong--and what was I continuing to do wrong? In the years that followed, I kept our discussion in mind, as my academic career took me from industry research at Xerox PARC and Microsoft Research to academia and more recently to the start-up world. Here is me my attempt to zoom out, condense my experiences into some sort of “10 things I wish I had known” about the different phases of academic life, the differences between academia and industry research, science, and engineering.
Patrick Baudisch is an engineer and professor in Computer Science at Hasso Plattner Institute at Potsdam University and chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab. His current research focuses on software/hardware systems for personal fabrication, and in particular laser cutting. Previously, Patrick Baudisch worked as a research scientist at Microsoft Research and at Xerox PARC. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He was inducted into the CHI Academy in 2013 and has been an ACM distinguished scientist. Several of Patrick's PhD former student are now faculty, including Pedro Lopes (Chicago), Christian Holz (ETH Zurich), Lung-Pan Cheng (NTU), Stefanie Mueller (MIT), Alex Ion (CMU), and Thijs Roumen (Cornell). In 2023, Patrick incorporated kyub, a start-up focussed on democratizing laser cutting.
At the Human-AI Interaction group at the University of British Columbia, we investigate how to support Human-AI collaboration via AI artifacts that can understand relevant properties of their users (e.g., states, skills, needs) and personalize the interaction accordingly in a manner that preserves transparency, user control and trust. In this talk, I will illustrate examples of our research in AI-drive personalization spanning areas such as User Adaptive Visualizations, intelligent Tutoring Systems, and Personalized Explainable AI.
Cristina Conati is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She received a M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Milan, as well as a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. Cristina has been researching human-centered and AI-driven personalization for over 25 years, with contributions in the areas of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, User Modeling, Affective Computing, Information Visualization and Explainable AI.
Cristina's research has received 10 Best Paper Awards from a variety of venues, as well as the Test of Time Time Award 2022 from the educational data mining society. She is a Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of AI) and of AAIA ( Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association ), an ACM Distinguished Member, and an associate editor for UMUAI (Journal od User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction), ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. She served as President of AAAC, (Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing), as well as Program or Conference Chair for several international conferences, including UMAP, ACM IUI, and AI in Education.