Keynote Speakers

Kentaro Toyama

Title: The Three Levels of Inclusive HCI.

Abstract: The past decade has seen incredible interest in applying information and communication technologies for international development, an endeavor often abbreviated "ICT4D." What value is technology to a farmer earning a dollar a day? Can mobile phones be used to improve rural healthcare? How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker?
ICT4D projects seek to answer these kinds of questions, but the excitement has also generated a lot of hype about the power of technology to solve the deep problems of poverty. In this talk, I argue that HCI's interdisciplinarity and attention to end-to-end design is uniquely suited to balancing hype with realistic solutions.
I'll also discuss my own thinking about HCI for development, and how it has gone through three successive phases: HCI for the other; HCI with the other; and HCI by the other.

Bio: Kentaro Toyama is a visiting researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book arguing that increasing human and institutional wisdom should be the primary focus of international development activities. Until 2009, Toyama was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. There, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorest communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. The group’s award-winning research has been seminal in the field of “information and communication technologies for development” (ICT4D). Prior to his time in India, Toyama did computer vision and multimedia research and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Kentaro graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics. More info: www.kentarotoyama.org

Gitte Lindgaard

Title: Preparing for the Worst: Integrated Team Decision Support in Case Disaster Strikes.

Abstract: The management of large-scale threats to public safety such as terrorist attacks involves effective coordination of large professional teams representing many disciplines and agencies. Among others, these include police, fire fighters, emergency medical and veterinary personnel. To generate and verify user requirements for the design of a multi-faceted disaster management decision support system, field simulations offer a rare opportunity for HCI researchers to gain first-hand insight into some of the challenges first-responder teams face. One interesting HCI challenge is to identify emerging technologies suitable for supporting real-time communication between first responders in the immediate danger zone and their event
management team located elsewhere. The challenge lies in the fact that first responders typically wear airtight suits, gasmasks, and oxygen tanks on their back, restricts the possible communication channels immensely. This talk will outline some of the challenges and important HCI lessons learned from our HOTLab team’s involvement with the definition, design, and evaluation of a suite of adverse event-management applications over the past decade.

Bio: Professor Gitte Lindgaard, PhD, was until recently director of Carleton University’s Human Oriented Technology Lab (HOTLab) at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She is currently Professor in neuroaffective design at Swinburne. In an earlier life, she was Principal Scientist and Head of the Human Factors team at the Telstra Research Laboratories in Melbourne while also being the Chair of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Ergonomics Society of Australia for several years. She is Deputy Editor of the international journal Interacting with Computers and Associate editor on several HCI journals. For more information, please go to: http://www2.carleton.ca/fass/research/chairs-and-distinctions/dr-gitte-lindgaard/ or http://www.carleton.ca/~glindgaa


Vanessa Kirby

Title: Keeping UCD alive in an agile world.

Abstract: If 'good enough' is the new 'above and beyond', how do we make sure that we're building the best experiences?
If 'good enough' is the new 'above and beyond', how do we make sure that we're building the best experiences? Having worked with some form of agility for the last 10++ years, across multiple different companies, countries and cultures I will attempt to bring some tales of how themes that constantly emerge and how we can make the rules of agile work. I'll touch on
  • How Culture & lingo are the first things to get right
  • How foolishness and failure are paramount for success
  • A good brain cuddle never goes amiss
  • And following the old adage "Be prepared" will help get you all the badges you need.
Bio:  Vanessa has moved from London to Melbourne to head up the User Experience team for Seek at the end of last year. She specialised in HCI in 1993 and has been banging the UX drum ever since. Her specialities are multi-channel digital strategy, usability, information architecture, accessibility and creative direction. She’s used to be part of huge projects – both client side and agency.
Her first official introduction to Agile was piloting [hard core] Scrum in LexisNexis in 2004/5 – but she firmly believes anyone in UX implicitly works in an agile fashion if they want to be successful – so suspects it has been going on long before someone labelled it.