Human-centred Interaction Technologies

Human-centred Interaction Technologies – Prof. dr. ir. A. Nijholt

Masters involved: Human Media Interaction, Computer Science, Psychology, Communication Studies, Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society

Contributing Institutes: CTIT

The subject of the Graduate Programme Human-IT is the interaction between humans and ICT. It considers both the interaction of humans with the system and the interaction between humans through the technology. The rapidly grown availability and use of ICT in all aspects of the personal, organisational and societal life sphere during work, learning or free time, calls for a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach of the subject, in which computer science and other engineering disciplines team up with social sciences and the humanities. This is fully reflected in this Graduate Programme. The Graduate Programme considers the technological, psychological, sociological and philosophical dimensions of human-media interaction.

The core research concerns the design of intelligent interactive systems that improve the quality of the user experience as part of a human-centred development process. Besides the technological perspective this will thus involve considering the human in the loop. Therefore, also the assumptions underlying design and development (as they relate to ethical considerations for instance), the acceptance and use and the impact and implications of the technology on the direct interaction of humans with the system and the impact on a societal level are considered.

The technical and engineering programmes involved in the Graduate Programme have an interest in building more and more involved computational models of users and user context for interpreting signals and processes that are considered meaningful for humans and for artificial intelligent interactive systems in some particular practice. A considerable research effort is spent attempting to interpret a user’s state of mind (by interpreting natural language text and speech, body language or brain signals, for instance) and acting upon this appropriately. To build such computational models, systems also resort more and more to the analysis of gigantic repositories of user interactions, such as user clicks logs, query logs, etc.

From the psychological and communicative perspective, the Graduate Programme brings challenging questions to the fore about how meaning (embodied in the interface, content, actions, etc) is created, transferred and adapted in ICT-mediated environments, including questions of causal relations between technological or representational design decisions on the one hand and effects and affective impact on the other hand. From a cognitive-ergonomic point of view it is

important to understand the neuro-cognitive possibilities and limitations of humans as they interact with conspecifics and technology. A firm grasp on cognitive strength and weaknesses of humans will allow for the design of interactive systems that act when humans cannot and efficiently support humans in areas where they already excel.