Human Interfaces In Information Systems Laboratory

The activities of our laboratory aim to address fundamental questions on the interaction between people and technologies. The underlying reason for this interest is the need to provide the highest number of people with satisfying access to applications for the largest number of purposes and in the broadest number of contexts. Our research activity is in methods and tools to support user interface designers, software developers, and end-users in obtaining systems that can be accessed from different contexts of use in such a way to improve usability, accessibility, and user experience. For this purpose, we design and evaluate solutions that take into account the available devices and objects, the users (in terms of tasks, abilities, cognitive and emotional state), the surrounding environments, and the social relations, and aim to allow users to improve their experience.

The main goal is to propose new solutions in basic and applied research in the field of human-computer interaction, specifically in user interface software and technologies, mainly under the aegis of national and international programmes and private sector R&D contracts. One of the first groups in Italy in the HCI area, we have become internationally well known, as demonstrated by participation in numerous European projects and in the programme committees of the most important HCI conferences, and publications in the main HCI and software engineering journals and conferences.

The main research topics concern: Interactive intelligent environments, End-User Development, Methods and tools to evaluate usability, accessibility, and user experience, Human-robot interaction, Intelligent interfaces, Human-centered artificial intelligence, Multimodal user interfaces, Accessibility, Emotion-based user interfaces, Ambient-assisted living and Models for HCI. Such work has led to the development of several tools and applications, some of which are publicly available.