Mobile HCI 2002 will feature two keynote speakers:

	Brad A. Myers ("Mobile Devices for Control")
	Luca Passani (" Building Usable Wireless Applications for Mobile Phones")

Furthermore, a representative of the European Commission will present and discuss their future initiatives in the area of mobile devices and human-computer interaction.

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Mobile Devices for Control 
by Brad A. Myers 
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
bam@cs.cmu.edu/~bam
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam

Abstract
With today's and tomorrow's wireless technologies, such as IEEE 802.11, BlueTooth, RF-Lite, and G3, mobile devices will frequently be in close, interactive communication. Many environments, including offices, meeting rooms, automobiles, and classrooms, already contain many computers and computerized appliances, and the smart homes of the future will have ubiquitous embedded computation. When the user enters one of these environments carrying a mobile device, how will that device interact with the immediate environment? We are exploring, as part of the Pebbles research project, the many ways that mobile devices such as Palm Personal Organizers or Pocket PC / Windows CE devices, can serve as a useful adjunct to the "fixed" computers in the
user's vicinity. This brings up many interesting research questions, such as how to provide a user interface that spans multiple devices which might be in use at the same time? How will users and the system decide which functions should be presented in what manner on what device? Can the user's mobile device be effectively used as a "Personal Universal Controller" to provide an easy-to-use and familiar interface to all of the complex appliances available to the user? Can communicating mobile devices enhance the effectiveness of meetings and classroom lectures? This talk will provide our preliminary observations on these issues, and will include demonstrations of some of our systems that we are using to investigate them.
For more information, see http://www.pebbles.hcii.cmu.edu

About the Speaker
Brad A. Myers is a Senior Research Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the principal investigator for the User Interface Software Project, the Demonstrational Interfaces Project and the Natural Programming Project. He is the author or editor of over 200 publications, including three books, and he is on the editorial board of five journals. He has consulted for over 40 companies on user interface design and implementation. Myers received a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto where he developed the Peridot UIMS. He received the MS and BSc degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during which time he was a
research intern at Xerox PARC. From 1980 until 1983, he worked at PERQ Systems Corporation. His research interests include user interfaces, hand-held computers, programming languages for kids, User Interface Development Systems, Programming by Example, Visual Programming, interaction techniques, window management, and
programming environments. He belongs to SIGCHI, ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and Computer Professonals for Social Responsibility.

 

Building Usable Wireless Applications for Mobile Phones
by Luca Passani 
Tools Development Manager
Openwave Systems
http://www.openwave.com/

Abstract
The majority of the population in Europe and other GSM areas owns a personal WAP-enabled mobile phone. The potential is great for everyone. 

- End-users can access new services while they are mobile. Since mobile phones are personal. Those services can be tailored for each user's needs.

- Wireless Developers and Content Providers can build and maintain new services.

- Network Operators can get new revenue streams because of increased airtime.

Tapping that potential, though, is not easy, as the low-adoption of WAP in GSM areas demonstrates. The main issue here is usability: how can we turn a device originally designed to make phone calls into a network client that's pleasent to use? The answer is not simple. Providing a compelling user-experience requires that applications are customized for specific devices or classes of devices. The problem is made harder by the wildly different implementations of the WAP browsers around.

This keynote provides an overview of:

- the different interaction models in existing phones

- negative impact of bad usability on user-adoption

- how those differences should be tackled by application developers to increase usability.

The talk will include some demonstrations.

About the Speaker
Luca Passani is Tools Development Manager for Openwave Systems, where he has led the OUI project. Luca has a Master in Computer Science from the University of Pisa and several years of experience in web-development in Scandinavia. Over the past few years Luca has been working almonst exclusively with WAP. He is the author of several technical articles about WAP and WAP-related programming techniques. Luca is also one of the authors behind "Professional WAP" by Wrox Press.