Keynotes

The promise and pitfalls of Generative AI: A Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Perspective

By Elizabeth Churchill

Abstract

Generative AI is a rapidly developing field with the potential to revolutionize the way HCI and Interaction Design professionals create user experiences. We are already seeing innovations in design tooling and prototype evaluation methods. Explorations in areas such as adaptive personalization, multimodal translation, and accessibility are showing great promise. In this talk, I will discuss the ways in which the focus and practice of HCI and IxD could change, and also consider how we keep focused on the fundamental principles of universal usability, learnability, and utility. I will consider the costs as well as the benefits of generative AI, and invite discussion of where we need to engage technically and ethically.

Bio

Dr Elizabeth Churchill is a Senior Director of UX at Google. Elizabeth has built UX and Research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC, and FujiXerox. She Co-Chairs Google's UX Leadership Council (UXLC), and was a co-founder of Google's UXR Steering Committee which she co-chaired for 2 years before joining the UXLC.

Elizabeth holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex and the University of Stockholm. She is a member of the Association for Computer Machinery’s (ACM) CHI Academy, is an ACM Fellow, Distinguished Scientist, and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She served as the ACM’s Executive Vice President for 2 years, from 2018-2020, and was ACM’s Secretary Treasurer from 2016-2018. Elizabeth has published over 200 articles in peer reviewed journals, in conferences, and in magazines. She has also co-edited 5 books on various topics and has co-authored 2 books (Foundations for Designing User Centered Systems, and Designing with Data). She has over 50 patents already granted or pending.

Elizabeth is a visiting professor at Imperial College's Dyson School of Design Engineering in London and is an advisory board member for the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California and also for the Flickr Foundation (flickr.org). She recently took up a position as Co-Editor in Chief of ACM's Interactions magazine. In 2016, she received a Citris-Banatao Institute Award Athena Award for Women in Technology for her Executive Leadership. She has been named one of the top women leaders in UX over the last several years. In 2023, she received ACM SIGCHI’s Lifetime Service Award.

Augmented Reality, Digital Twins and Situated Visualization

By Dieter Schmalstieg

Abstract

One proven benefit of mobile devices comes from giving access to online information that helps in a particular situation, be it bicycle maps or cooking recipes. However, information must be retrieved manually via a touch screen. With augmented reality (AR), the information can be visually embedded into our immediate environment. Compared to conventional devices such as smartphones, AR makes the visual information available instantly and continuously. To deliver on this promise, AR needs a digital twin, meaning a model of the environment which is spatially registered to the world. Creating such a model is non-trivial, but, again, AR can help. This talk describes a philosophy of creating digital twin models inspired by the success of the world wide web. It reports on several experiments and prototypes of building digital twins from scene understanding and using digital twins in situated visualizations.

Bio

Starting in 2023, Dieter Schmalstieg is Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the Visualization Institute VISUS of the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Previously, he was head of the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision at Graz University of Technology, Austria. His current research interests are augmented reality, virtual reality, computer graphics, visualization and human-computer interaction. He received Dipl.-Ing. (1993), Dr. techn. (1997) and Habilitation (2001) from Vienna University of Technology. He is author and co-author of over 400 peer-reviewed scientific publications with over 25,000 citations and over twenty best paper awards and nominations. His current and previous organizational roles include associate editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, associate editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, member of the steering committee of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, chair of the EUROGRAPHICS working group on Virtual Environments, key researcher of the K-Plus Competence Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization in Vienna and key researcher of the Know-Center in Graz. In 2002, he received the START career award presented by the Austrian Science Fund. In 2008, he founded the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Handheld Augmented Reality. In 2012, he received the IEEE Virtual Reality technical achievement award, and, in 2020, the IEEE ISMAR Career Impact Award. He was elected as Fellow of IEEE, as a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy.