Keynote and Panel Speakers
Jacob Wobbrock
University of Washington, USA
Chris Speed
RMIT, Australia
Jessica Cauchard
TU Wien, Austria
Flora Salim
UNSW,
Australia
Aaron Quigley
CSIRO,
Australia
Jacob Wobbrock is a Professor of Information and, by courtesy, of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), which U.S. News ranked the 7th best global university for 2024-2025. His doctorate is in human-computer interaction (HCI), focusing on mobile and accessible computing. Wobbrock has helped build the UW into one of the world's top two universities for HCI research and education. He was a co-founder of the DUB Group and the MHCI+D degree. He also directs the ACE Lab and is an Associate Director and former founding Co-Director of the CREATE center. Wobbrock's work seeks to scientifically understand people's experiences with interactive technologies, and to improve those experiences by designing, building, and evaluating new techniques and systems, especially for people with disabilities. His specific research topics include text entry, pointing, touch, and gesture; human performance measurement and modeling; HCI research and design methods; virtual reality; mobile HCI; and accessible computing. His work blends interaction design, computer science, and experimental psychology.
Chris Speed FRSE, FRSA is Professor of Design for Regenerative Futures at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, where he collaborates with a wide variety of communities and partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt toward becoming a regenerative society. Chris has an established track record in directing large complex grants and educational programmes with academic, industry and third sector partners, that apply design and data methods to social, environmental and economic challenges.
Jessica Cauchard is a full professor at TU Wien Informatics. Her research is rooted in the fields of Ubiquitous and Human-Centered Computing with a focus on interaction techniques with novel technologies. She founded and is heading the Magic Lab, a research group working on Human-Computer and Human-Robot Interaction projects. She is best known for her work in human-drone interaction and is the first author of the most cited research paper in the field: Drone & me: an exploration into natural human-drone interaction.
Flora Salim is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), the inaugural Cisco Chair of Digital Transport & AI, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, and the Deputy Director (Engagement) of UNSW AI Institute. Her research is on machine learning for time-series and multimodal sensor data and on trustworthy AI. She has received several prestigious fellowships including Humboldt-Bayer Fellowship, Humboldt Fellowship, Victoria Fellowship, and ARC Australian Postdoctoral (Industry) Fellowship.
Professor Aaron Quigley is the Science Director and Deputy Director of CSIRO's Data61, chair of the ACM CHI Steering Committee, ACM Distinguished member and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science in the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney Australia. Until 2023 he was head of school of Computer Science and Engineering and Deputy Dean of Engineering in UNSW. Until 2020, he was the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, director of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), board member for ScotlandIS and the DataLab. Aaron's research interests include AI-HCI, discreet computing, pervasive and ubiquitous computing and information visualisation on which he has delivered over 50 invited talks. Aaron has published over 200 internationally peer-reviewed publications including edited volumes, journal papers, book chapters, conference and workshop papers. He has served as general, TPC, paper and conference chair for ACM CHI, ACM UIST, ACM ITS, ACM MobileHCI, ACM EICS, ACM IUI and Pervasive.
Professor Thad Starner
Georgia
Tech
The Oscar best picture winning movie CODA has helped introduce Deaf culture to many in the hearing community. The capital "D" in Deaf is used when referring to the Deaf culture, whereas small "d" deaf refers to the medical condition. In the Deaf community, sign language is used to communicate, and sign has a rich history in film, the arts, and education. Learning about the Deaf culture in the United States and the importance of American Sign Language in that culture has been key to choosing projects that are useful and usable for the Deaf. This talk will review 30 years of effort in sign language recognition and working with the Deaf community and will feature several upcoming products such as PopSignAI, a smartphone game that helps hearing parents of Deaf infants learn sign language.
Thad Starner is a Georgia Tech Professor and a wearable computing pioneer. In 1990, Starner coined the term "augmented reality" to describe the types of interfaces he envisioned for the future. In 1997, Thad was a founder of the annual ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), now in its 28th year. From 2010-2018 Dr. Starner was a Technical Lead on Google's Glass, which was named a "50 Most Influential Gadget of All Time" by Time Magazine. Professor Starner has been inducted into the CHI Academy in 2017 and AWE's XR Hall of Fame in 2024. He has over 100 issued United States utility patents on wearables, artificial intelligence and interfaces.
Professor Dr. Paul Lukowicz
DFKI Kaiserslautern
Since nearly three decades, Wearable Computing has been pursuing the vision of any time any place context aware personal assistance. No matter what you do and where you are, the system should be able to automatically recognize what you need and autonomously take appropriate action. Countless systems have since then been published demonstrating divers variants of this vision: from memory augmentation for every day conversations through healthy lifestyle assistance, to production/maintenance support. The vast majority of them have two things in common: “any time any place” in reality means “in my constrained lab setting” and “ no matter what you do” means “as long as you do one of the narrowly defined actions I have trained my system to deal with”. The problem is the incompatibility of the established paradigm for AI system development: “supervised training on data representative of every possible situation the system may encounter”, with the diversity and unpredictability of the real world. As a consequence wearable assistants have so far had little impact in the real world. The talk will discuss how the emergence of Generative AI (LLMs, VLLMs and foundational models in general) can solve that problem finally, after 30 years of unfulfilled promises, facilitate the vision of “universal” wearable assistants. At the core of our approach is the notion of foundational models as noisy but extremely comprehensive world models that can be flexibly accessed through dense vector spaces linking various input/sensing modalities.
Prof. Dr. Paul Lukowicz is a Full Professor of AI at the RPTU in Kaiserslautern, Germany and at the same time is Scientific Director at DFKI Kaiserslautern, where he heads the Embedded Intelligence group. Previous positions include Full Professor of Embedded Systems at the University of Passau, Germany, and Full Professor in the Computer Engineering Dept. at the University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology in Innsbruck, Austria. His research focuses on context-aware ubiquitous and wearable systems, quantum computing, and human-AI interaction, including sensing, machine learning, system architectures, large-scale to-edge systems, and applications. Currently Paul Lukowicz is running a wide range of German national and EU projects. He is the Coordinator of the HumanE AI-Net, a large networking project with more than 50 European partners, and acts as Editor for various scientific publications. He has served on more than 50 program committees (including TPC Chair) at high-quality international conferences of all the main conferences within his research area.