GTM participates in ACM CHI, the premier conference on Human-Computer Interaction

The scottish city of Glasgow held this year edition of ACM CHI on which latest advances on multiple areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) were presented. This conference is the perfect context for participants to exchange ideas both in their research topic and other areas creating bridges between disciplines.

In this edition we have seen the definition of new interfaces to interact with technology.  From discrete interfaces such as Chew It  that seek to allow a hands free interaction with an intra-oral interface to haptic interfaces to interact with virtual enviroments such as TORC controller presented by Microsoft.

We have also seen the latest advances on Materials and Fabrication that can allow objects change their shape after being produced or even integrate behavior and function already in the fabrication process. In that topic we highlight the work presented by Morphing Matter and the proposal on MetaMaterial Mechanism by Hasso Plattner Institut.

Another hot topic in the conference has also been the role of Artificial Intelligence in future environments. In this research area, AI systems have been used from recognizing activities and context to support human creative capabilities on multiple areas such as design inspiration or game level design.

In this topic, Gerard Serra  and David Miralles both from the Interaction area of the Grup de Recerca en Tecnologies Mèdia (GTM), presented their first results on human-machine collaboration in the workshop on Design Crowd-powered Creative support Systems. Their approach aims to augment human creative capabilities by integrating artificial intelligent (AI) agents in a design process. More specifically, they presented an environment where both humans and AI agents can use shared design tools to solve specific design tasks.

The interest of future of AI-human collaboration is increasing within years. To help future designers to think about this future scenarios,  we highlight the work presented by Microsoft Research on defining possible Guidelines on Human AI collaboration. 

We must be updated to understand our future interactions with technology. This year edition brought many interesting research topics that envision future relations. A great example of that has been the closing keynote of Ivan Poupyrev, director of Engineering from Google ATAP. We recommend watching his future vision in which technology is embedded in the fabric of everyday objects.

Next stop. Honolulu 2020

Serra, Gerard, and David Miralles. "Coevo: a collaborative design platform with artificial agents." arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.13333 (2019).