Over 2,200 academics, scientists, researchers, and practitioners in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from 63 countries gathered in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, from July 22 to 27, 2005, to share their recent findings in all areas of HCI during the HCI International 2005 Conference. This is one of the most important international and scientific conferences in the area of HCI.
Through over 250 parallel sessions, 270 poster presentations and 22 tutorials, participants presented their major findings in Cognitive Ergonomics, Usability and Internationalization, Virtual Reality, Universal Access, Augmented Cognition, Management of Information, Online Communities and Social Computing, and Health Aspects of Work with Computers. The Proceedings have been published on CD-ROM by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, and are structured in 11 volumes and a "Posters" section.
Dr. Gerald M. Edelman, Nobel laureate, was the keynote speaker and outlined prevalent views of higher brain functions and information processing. He discussed Neural Darwinism and neural correlates of consciousness, and presented supporting evidence on the neural correlates of consciousness obtained from MEG studies of human subjects.
It is obviously impossible to summarize the content of such a huge conference in a few sentences. However, the hottest topics at this year's conference seemed to be, in my opinion, Virtual Reality, Universal Access/Multimodal Design, and Augmented Cognition. A keyword search within the Conference proceedings on each of the first two topics (Virtual Reality and Universal Access) resulted in over 400 papers, and more than 200 papers were found on the topic of Augmented Cognition. Another particularity of this year's conference was the important presence of United States military research institutions, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Many contributions from DARPA indicated the importance of HCI in military projects and equipment design. A variety of equipment designs based on the findings of these research projects, from simulation equipment to sophisticated vehicles (DaimlerChrysler), was displayed during the Exhibition.
In software application design, numerous contributions reported a variety of findings, from design to implementation, design patterns, accessibility issues, and so on. Referring to these studies, which constitute a vast intellectual resource for every professional in the field of HCI, could save practitioners a lot of time in designing and evaluating enterprise software applications.
HCI International 2005 hosted an extensive and impressive Exhibition of over 60 booths representing a variety of enterprises, among them major companies such as Boeing, Sandia National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, DaimlerChrysler Corporation and Oracle Corporation.
HCI International 2007 Conference will be held in Beijing, P.R. China, 22-27 July 2007.
