Keynote: Mackay
Wendy E. Mackay
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Wednesday 4th September HCI - Opening and Keynote Address
9:30 - 11:00
Computer technology continues to change and with it, our understanding of the scope of the design of interactive systems. Although standard desktop computers are still a primary focus of HCI, we now attempt to design systems that "disappear" into the environment or that augment physical objects within that environment. The latter make clear that users interact with computers "in situ" or within a context. Design techniques that attempt to abstract use, without considering the user's context, often result in systems that are theoretically elegant but practically unusable. Unfortunately, current attempts to measure "context" are limited to crude environmental sensors, such as motion detectors and GPS. This talk will explore different ways of interpreting context, from the perspective of the user, not the just system, to create usable systems that are both memorable and invisible. About the Speaker Wendy E. Mackay received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Management of Technological Innovation. Initially trained as an Experimental Psychologist, Wendy moved to Digital Equipment Corporation, where she was first a programmer and then a manager, ultimately programming or responsible for over 30 multimedia software products, a pre-Hypercard multimedia authoring language and the computer industry's first multimedia system (IVIS).
Wendy Mackay has managed research and development groups in multimedia at Digital, MIT and Xerox PARC's European research lab in Cambridge, England. Formerly Professor Associé at the University of Paris-Sud in France, and a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University in Denmark, she is currently a senior research scientist at INRIA in France. She is on the editorial board of French and English journals and has published over 70 articles in the area of Human-Computer Interaction. Her current research involves augmented reality and multimedia, with an emphasis on video- based participatory design.
