Human-Centered Computing
Following is the description of HCC from the current announcement of the NSF Division of Information and Intelligent Systems.
Human-Centered Computing (HCC) research encompasses a rich panoply of diverse themes in Computer Science and IT, all of which are united by the common thread that human beings, whether as individuals, teams, organizations or societies, assume participatory and integral roles throughout all stages of IT development and use. People design new technologies; people, in teams and organizations, at school and at home, use them; people anticipate and enjoy their benefits; and they learn about the outcomes of use (whether anticipated or not) and translate that knowledge into the next generation of systems. At the same time, new information technologies and human societies co-evolve, transforming each other in the process. As a consequence, the design of IT must be sensitive to human values and preferences.
HCC will support projects that investigate the use of IT in highly distributed and rapidly changing environments at various levels of granularity to achieve both immediate and long-term goals. It will support bold approaches to improving education, for example, through the integration of research and education in scientific collaboratories, which require new methods for giving the user a realistic experience of doing science and the opportunity to work collaboratively with other students, teachers, and scientists at multiple locations. Human-centered technology will enable all people to take advantage of the full benefits of computing, will empower people with disabilities, young children, seniors, and members of other traditionally under-represented groups to participate fully in the Information Society, and will foster independent aging in the community while maintaining social relationships and autonomy.
Projects that are supported will, amongst other things, deepen our understanding of the globalization of communications and commerce, expanded value chains and clusters, outsourcing in all its forms, the transformation of knowledge and knowledge generation, and the role of IT in innovation and competition. The study of online interactions that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries, through new community-oriented applications in such areas as Internet voting and other electronic forms of citizenship, collaborative electronic publishing, Blogs, online multi-player games, computer-mediated arts and culture, virtual participatory theater, and ensemble music-making at-a-distance are encouraged. Inquires into the effect of IT on government-citizen interactions and digital democracy and IT-enabled community creation and development are also encouraged.
HCC researchers will explore unprecedented human-computer and human-human interactions through systems that are aware of their social surroundings, systems that understand concepts such as location in human terms, realistic immersive and multi-sensory technologies, and direct brain-computer interfaces. HCC research will transform the human-computer interaction experience, so that the computer is no longer a distraction or worse yet an obstacle, but rather a tool that empowers the user at work, in school, at home and at play, and that facilitates natural and productive human-software-device collaboration. HCC research will enhance human insight and creativity through highly interactive visual interfaces coupled with tools and techniques that enable people to synthesize information, to derive insight from massive, dynamic, and often conflicting data, to detect the expected, and to discover the unexpected. HCC encourages research onhow humans, in various roles and domains, perceive computing artifacts as they use them.
Human-Centered Computing topics include, but are not limited to:
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Problem-solving in distributed environments, ranging across Internet-based information systems, grids, sensor-based information networks, and mobile and wearable information appliances.
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Multimedia and multi-modal interfaces in which combinations of speech, text, graphics, gesture, movement, touch, sound, etc. are used by people and machines to communicate with one another.
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Intelligent interfaces and user modeling, information visualization, and adaptation of content to accommodate different display capabilities, modalities, bandwidth and latency.
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Multi-agent systems that control and coordinate actions and solve complex problems in distributed environments in a wide variety of domains, such as disaster response teams, e-commerce, education, and successful aging.
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Models for effective computer-mediated human-human interaction under a variety of constraints, (e.g., video conferencing, collaboration across high vs. low bandwidth networks, etc.).
Definition of semantic structures for multimedia information to support cross-modal input and output.
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Specific solutions to address the special needs of particular communities.
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Collaborative systems that enable knowledge-intensive and dynamic interactions for innovation and knowledge generation across organizational boundaries, national borders, and professional fields.
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Novel methods to support and enhance social interaction, including innovative ideas like social orthotics, affective computing, and experience capture.
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Studies of how social organizations, such as government agencies or corporations, respond to and shape the introduction of new information technologies, especially with the goal of improving scientific understanding and technical design.
It is anticipated that Human-Centered Computing will support computer scientists as well as social and behavioral scientists and economists whose work contributes to the design and understanding of novel information technologies. However, HCC research should primarily advance the computer and information sciences rather than the social, behavioral, or economic sciences. Similarly, algorithms, protocols and hardware to build mobile networks would not be appropriate unless there was a very strong focus on individual or group users.
Human-Centered Computing (HCC) subsumes topics covered by these areas previously supported by the IIS Division: Digital Society and Technologies; Human-Computer Interaction; and Universal Access.
Links
IIS Announcement
Wikipedia HCC Page
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