iHCI 2010 Conference Report

CLARITY hosted the fourth Irish Computer Interaction (iHCI 2010) conference in DCU last week. The theme of this year’s conference was “Crossing Boundaries”, which reflects the continued growth of the Irish HCI community. Many of the papers featured within this year’s program explored this theme by discussing or confronting the challenge of working in multiple domains and disciplines.
The extremely successful event saw 74 delegates (32 student, 42 full) in attendance across the two-day programme, which included a keynote from Professor Richard Harper (pictured above) of Microsoft Research Cambridge, academic short and full paper presentations, a dedicated student forum offering early stage HCI researchers the opportunity to showcase their work and an industry session organised by the IxDA Dublin and Limerick groups. In total 41 high quality contributions were showcased over the two days: 7 full papers; 8 short; 12 posters; 2 demos; 6 industry talks and 6 student  papers; of which included 8 international contributions
Since its inception in 2007, iHCI has been first and foremost the venue for the Irish HCI community to meet and discuss their work “at home” – something that Ireland had lacked for a very long time – and to create national awareness and visibility for a growing field of research in Irish academia and industry. This years programme also featured a number of interesting contributions from outside Ireland.
CLARITY were delighted to host and be part of the event which is helping to grow the HCI community in Ireland. The feedback and response to the event has been overwhelmingly positive and the event was by all accounts extremely enjoyable, engaging and interesting to all who participated and attended. We at DCU would like to thank the HCI community in Ireland for their tremendous support of the event and to all those to contributed to its organisation and running.
DCU will now hand over to Department of Media Communications at Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) who will host the event in 2011 and we wish them every success for the fifth installment of the annual conference. This year’s conference conference was organised by CLARITY researchers Daragh Byrne, Dr Hyowon Lee and Professor Alan Smeaton and the program chair was Dr Luigina Ciolfi, from the University of Limerick. More information about iHCI 2010 can be found at http://www.clarity-centre.org/iHCI2010/