The first Irish HCI Conference hosted by the IDC
My department organised a great event yesterday – the first Irish Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. About 50 people from different universities, companies and public institutions attended the event, which turned out to be a success! Several research groups from Cork, Dublin, Galway , Limerick and Maynooth presented their current research and projects, and I must say it was very interesting to find what was going on – not only in the other universities, but also in our own!
I found a lot of interesting connections in the presentations of Tim Hall (EMRC), Mark Magennis(NCBI) , Aphra Kerr(NUIM – NIRSA).
Mark Leslie(Martello Media) presented three of their projects, and the “fun palace” designed for the Visitor Centre at the Cliffs of Moher really caught my attention. I’m as mad as everyone else for the horrible impact that building had on the environment, but I’d still like to see what came out!
The ScanCam one of the participants was wearing at his neck raised privacy concerns (taking shots at every change detected in the environment- 5000-7000 pics/day). Our colleague introduced an interesting application that was actually trying to make sense of these images by selecting the less frequent situations out of the huge pile.
I was fascinated by the story around the design of a digital piece of jewelry presented by John Mc’Carthy from UCC. Different interactive artefacts made me think of the wide spectrum of opportunities for augmenting human intelligence made possible by technology: the topographic torch, the touch table, the search of digital archives, or artistic events such as the re-creation of the 1831 riot in the Queen Square in Bristol.
I also had the chance to discover that one of our colleagues in TCD is actually studying meetings and the electronic support for meetings (unlike us, who are focusing on software engineering, he’s looking at the medical domain).
The breaks allowed for a lot of networking, and the gorgeous weather brought us outside, in the nice ambiance of the Kilmurry village.
In the afternoon, we had a group discussion on possible future actions for keeping in touch, creating awareness mechanisms on each other’s work, and becoming more visible in Ireland as a community. The ideas kept buzzing, and we put together a wiki page to keep track of what was said and remains to be put into practice.
A few other people blogged the event: Mike Bennett, Eoin Brazil.
And of course we had a short note (and some comments!) on the IDC blog as well!
Although several people were involved in the organization, my colleague Luigina Ciolfi was the heart and the force behind this event. Kudos, Lui, for all the hard work! I enjoyed every minute, and judging by what I’ve heard, so did most of the participants!
May 03 2007 11:27 am | conference and IDC and iHCI and Ireland and Limerick
Coniecto » The iHCI conference 2009 on 17 Sep 2009 at 11:29 pm #
[…] series of iHCI conferences started two years ago – my colleague Luigina Ciolfi organised the 2007 event, hosted by the Interaction Design Centre at the University of […]
The first edition – Irish HCI 2018 on 02 Oct 2018 at 5:06 pm #
[…] of the event can be found here and […]