UL IDC to host first Irish HCI meeting

The Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick will host a 1-Day Workshop on the topic of Human-Computer Interaction in Ireland (iHCI07) to be held at on May 2nd, 2007.
The purpose of this Workshop, which we hope will become an annual event, is to promote networking and collaboration among academics and practitioners in the broad area of people interacting with technology, and as such, the topic includes such areas as: usability studies, interface design and evaluation, accessibility issues, cognitive ergonomics, human factors in computer systems, computer supported cooperative work, human computer interaction, multimedia and interaction design.

Our intent with this initial meeting is to bring together researchers, practitioners and teachers interested in the field, to document past and current activities, and to setup a database of information in this area on an all-Ireland basis. To this end, this first Workshop will focus on brief presentations from all the participating groups.

We envisage that this Workshop will help provide a better profile for individuals and groups involved in the HCI area in Ireland, as currently, despite the size of our software industry, we have not yet developed as significant an impact as one might expect, given the importance of our topic.

New Shared Worlds Journal Publications to Appear

The forthcoming May issue of IEEE Computer will feature a research paper by the IDC Shared Worlds team documenting the Shannon Portal: "The Shannon Portal Installation: Interaction Design for Public Places".
Another Shared Worlds paper by Luigina Ciolfi discussing the Shannon Airport installation from the point of view of affective computing will appear in the forthcoming issue of CoDesign, and will be presented at the Affective Communication in Design conference in Leeds in June.
And more are on the way!

The IDC to be privatized - becomes independent research institute

A group of private benefactors (who would like to be anonymous) have donated an undisclosed amount to buy the entire Interaction Design Centre, its staff, faculty and students from UL, to become a fully privatized international research institute. It is believed that the amount of funding involved is at least forty-two million Euro.

One of our major discoveries that attracted the investors was a new form of computing that eventually will enable the development of computers capable of infinite improbability states. While computers up until now are based on logical gates switching between ones or zeroes (true or false), our new technology will most often use the state of “maybe”. To continue our groundbreaking work in Human-Centred Computing, it is envisaged that the emergence of femto-technology will enable us to create a pain-free diode, which is believed to be at the core of the development of humanoid robotics. Further more, the new institute’s President claims that we have a new framework for understanding the socio-technical reality that will be the foundation of the approaches to software development and communication technologies. In a comment, a spokesperson said that:

“We all know that things like email-spam and pornography has been central to the popularity of the World-Wide Web. It is now time to re-frame our thinking and look at a fundamental change in global perspectives. For example, if for each spam-message the spammer had to make a donation to a charity, or, if porn-sites changed their approach on narrative structure so that users could be enriched with an educational experience in for example anatomy and philosophy as well as looking at more evolutionary trends.”

The working title for the project is The Institute for Life, the Universe and Everything (ILUE)