Proceedings of the 15th Irish Human Computer Interaction Symposium

The Irish HCI Symposium is a showcase of work by researchers based in Ireland (North and South, including Northern Ireland), as well as Irish researchers based internationally, that have published in leading international HCI venues over the past year (2021-2022). Examples of venues include CHI, BHCI, CSCW, ECSCW, PDC, DIS, MobileHCI, NordiCHI, TOCHI, IwC and other highly ranked international HCI conferences and journals. The aim of the symposium is to give the authors of such work the opportunity to share their leading research with a local audience.

Before the main event an evening keynote talk was held and a visiting talk by Dr Simon Leigh from ORCHA / University of Warwick, ‘Can we measure the 'quality' of health apps?’. Fifty people attended.

For the main symposium day we had 75 registrants and 15 from Ulster University, making 90 delegates. Attendees were researchers and academics from a range of universities including Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, Dublin City University, Munster Technological University, Dundalk Institute of Technology, University of Galway, Swansea University and Ulster University. We also had a range of professional designers and software developers from commercial companies, including Instil, Chroma Lighting and Cumulus Neuroscience. Six staff from HSC in Northern Ireland also attended having professional backgrounds in medical and digital health innovation.

Three keynotes were delivered during the main event:

1. Prof. Harold Thimblebey: How HCI can see and solve problems of healthcare,
2. Prof. Lui Ciolfi: Digitally Entangled Worklives Beyond the Pandemic
3. Dr Benjamin Cowan: Hey Google- why am I speaking like this? The need for theory in understanding our interactions with speech interfaces.

The keynotes were interspersed with themed sessions on Digital Health, Digital Mental Health and Interactive Technologies. A rapid-fire and poster session was held for late breaking work within the HCI discipline. We had an encouraging uptake from PhD students. A poster session was also held during the day.

This was the first time that the Irish HCI symposium was held in Northern Ireland, which will aid the growing presence and impact of HCI research in the province. Given the interdisciplinary nature of HCI, it was organised by two schools at Ulster University, namely, the Belfast School of Art and the School of Computing, which widens the interdisciplinary networks within Ulster University.