iHCI 2013 Conference Report

The seventh annual Irish Human Computer Interaction (iHCI) Conference took place at Dundalk Institute of Technology, on June 12^th and 13^th 2013. Organised by CASALA, the conference featured presentations from UCD, TCD, Dundalk IT, IADT, UCC, DCU and CIT, as well as international speakers from the UK and Sweden. Since its inaugural event in 2007, iHCI has been first and foremost the venue for the Irish HCI community to meet and discuss their work “at home” and to create national awareness and visibility for a growing field of research in Irish academia and industry.

On its 7^th edition it is clear that iHCI has developed into an established publication forum, showcasing high quality papers submitted by both national and international authors. This year a number of the papers presented will be published by the ACM. They cover traditional topics such as design, mobile HCI and representing data in addition to topics such as personal informatics, HCI in healthcare and accessible design.

Notably, the programme included an industry session, a poster session and a demo session, along with full paper submissions. For the first time at iHCI, we also had a number of invited talks from leading Irish HCI academics, ensuring a full, rich programme.

Highlights of the conference included two keynote presentations. The first from Brian Reaves who is group vice president and global lead at SAP’s Technology and Innovation platform, based in Palo Alto, California. Our second keynote was by Dónal Rice from the Centre of Excellence in Universal Design.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the authors who submitted papers, the programme committee for their reviewing efforts, as well as the organization team and session chairs who have given up their time to make this event a success. We would also like to thank CASALA for their support of the event, as well as SAP for sponsoring a best student paper award, an iPad Mini, which went to Robin Deegan from CIT for his paper titled “Mobile distractions that affect usability but not performance, and vice versa”.

This year’s conference was co-chaired by Dr. Julie Doyle, CASALA, DkIT and Dr. Sonja Hermann, Trinity College Dublin. CASALA and DkIT were delighted to host iHCI 2013 and wish next year’s hosts the very best in organizing the event.