CENA (Centre d'Etudes de la Navigation Aérienne) is a research centre of the French Ministry of Transports, specialized in air traffic management. Its mission is to provide better understanding of the phenomena associated to air traffic control and to propose innovations for improving the capacity and safety of the air traffic system. For that purpose, CENA has three different types of involvement in research domains:

	it carries out its own research in domains that are unique to air traffic management: mathematical models of traffic, models of workload, concepts and tools for new organisations of air traffic management.
	in more general scientifical or technological domains, it serves as a gateway between the air traffic management community and research communities: it exports problems and imports solutions. This applies to computer science, optimisation techniques, human factors, etc.
	for some of those domains which are identified as strategic for the evolution of air traffic, CENA has its own research group. This applies for instance to economics and to human-computer interaction (HCI).

CENA's research group in HCI was born from the software engineering problem of programming graphical user interfaces. That work, first focused on graphical toolkits and visual programming environments, widened with the introduction of new interaction modalities: gesture recognition, multimodal user interfaces, animated displays, augmented reality, etc. CENA has been involved in several networks and projects, national and european, around those topics. Interestingly, as the results of that research were more and more applied to air traffic control, it appeared that some issues in designing future air traffic control systems exhibit interesting similarities with the problem of programming user interfaces. The classical industrial problem of transferring specifications and the problem of adapting user interfaces to local needs without reprogramming are such issues. The more exotic problem of defining an operationnal language for "programming" the trajectory of aircraft in complex airspace is also such an issue.

For those reasons, CENA can play a dual role in this network. As a representative of an application domain, it can provide other laboratories with 'real' problems and help validate solutions or directions. And as a research centre which deals with problems of its own, it can bring its own insight in the problem of end-user programming.