2022 Irish Human Computer Interaction (iHCI) Symposium

Keynote Talk: How HCI can see and solve problems of healthcare

Prof Harold Thimbleby is See Change Fellow in Digital Health, based at Swansea University, Wales. He is Expert Advisor on IT to the Royal College of Physicians, a member of the World Health Organization’s Patient Safety Network, and an advisor to the Clinical Human Factors Group, and to the UK Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

Despite being a computer scientist, he has been made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians, and of the Royal Society of Arts; he’s also a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He has been a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award Holder and a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow, and he is 28th Gresham Professor of Geometry.

Harold's most recent book is Fix IT: See and Solve The Problems of Digital Healthcare was published by OUP in 2021: "This is an extraordinary book: a potent and engaging compendium of revelatory stories, bold insights, wise advice, and fresh thinking.” — Daniel Jackson, Professor of Computer Science, MIT.

Harold thinks HCI remains the biggest fixable hole in healthcare.

Keynote Talk (Working Title): “Digitally Entangled Worklives Beyond the Pandemic”

Luigina Ciolfi is Professor of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Applied Psychology at University College Cork, Ireland. An experienced scholar in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), she researches the understanding, practicing and designing of digital interactive systems from a socio-technical perspective, with particular interest in collaborative and participatory practices.

She was previously Professor of Human-Centred Computing at Sheffield Hallam University (UK) and Lecturer and Senior Researcher at the University of Limerick (Ireland). She has authored over 100 refereed publications and has been an invited speaker in fifteen countries. She has held numerous scientific expert roles for research agencies and funding bodies nationally and internationally.

Service highlights include: General Co-Chair, ACM CSCW 2021; General Chair, ECSCW 2017; CHI Subcommittee Chair, 2018-2019; Papers Co-Chair, CSCW 2015; Associate Editor, The CSCW Journal.  Professor Ciolfi is an ACM Senior Member and ACM Distinguished Speaker, Steering Committee member of EUSSET – The European Society for Socially-Embedded Technologies, and Member of the British Psychological Society.

Hey Google- why am I speaking like this? The need for theory in understanding our interactions with speech interfaces.

Dr Benjamin R Cowan is Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Information & Communication Studies in Ireland. He completed his undergraduate studies in Psychology & Business Studies (2006) as well as his PhD in Usability Engineering (2011) at the University of Edinburgh.

His research lies at the juncture between psychology, human-computer interaction and communication systems in investigating how design impacts aspects of user behaviour in social, collaborative and communicative technology interactions. Dr Cowan is the co-founder and co-director of the HCI@UCD group, one of the largest Human-Computer Interaction groups in Europe.

He is also Co-Principal investigator in the SFI funded ADAPT Centre, a world leading €90+ million Research Centre on AI driven content technologies, where he leads the Interaction and Control research strand. Dr Cowan is also the co-founder of ACM SIGCHI International Conferences Series on Conversational User Interfaces (ACM CUI). He has also been involved in the ACM CHI conference, having acted as Associate Chair (AC-2017-2018; 2021) and Subcommittee Chair (SC- 2022; 2023) of theUnderstanding People: Theory, Concepts, Methods Subcommittee.