Overview

The topic of this summer school is Intelligent User Interfaces in Cultural Heritage (CH), which is tightly linked with the ACM-IUI conference and community, the user modelling community, the SIGCHI Heritage Matter community, as well as with the wider ACM-CHI community and the Israeli chapter of SIGCHI. The intended audience are graduate students, researchers, and practitioners both from Israel and abroad, whose research and work focuses on this area. Based upon the Minerva School which ran in Haifa Israel a few years ago, and the ACM Sponsored Summer School on Intelligent User Interfaces in the era of IoT and Smart Environments organized by Tsvi Kuflik, we take a blended “theory and application” approach. This includes hands-on design team work in a realistic setting, envisioning the potential of intuitive interaction in smart environments, indoors and outdoors.

As the costs and dimensions of sensors and ICT devices lower, wearable computers, IoT, mobile smart glasses and smart environments in general are becoming a reality, including in CH sites. Novel human-computer interaction techniques are necessary to support these new environments, which also open possibilities for more natural and intuitive interaction. IUI research offers new ways for human-computer interaction in such environments. For this summer school we propose four thematic areas with the specific characters and constraints of cultural heritage institutions (the technology should be “invisible” and blend into the museum environment, reasoning should be made implicitly using any available information while respecting user’s privacy, high quality content preparation is another challenge):

1. Social signal processing – reasoning on users’ behavior in smart CH environments by measuring and fusing signals from multiple sources.

2. Using machine vision in CH applications – indoors and outdoors

3. Intuitive interaction with smart CH environments: Gesture, Eye-Gaze and voice-based interaction.

4. Displays in smart environments (e.g., ubiquitous/mobile/wearable/AR/VR).

The suggested summer school will integrate frontal presentations by domain experts (listed below), to familiarize the participants with the state of the art and research challenges of smart environments. Following these presentations, there will be a hands-on part where the participants will be split into teams, and think of initial designs for intelligent user interfaces in smart environments. Finally, there will be a Hakathon, jointly with the Digital Humanities program of the University of Haifa, as a final event, where mixed teams will aim at proposing new ideas and hopefully even demonstrate them as mock-ups or prototype, as a first step for new research projects.

The summer school will teach students about smart environments, their challenges and how to think, plan and design user interfaces to enable intuitive interaction in CH.

Dates: May 18th-May 22nd 2020:

• May 18th-May 20th - busy days of talks, demos and small groups work
• May 21-22 - a Joint Hakathon with the Digital Humanities program at the University of Haifa

Place: The University of Haifa

For any enquiries please contact: tsvikak@is.haifa.ac.il or ylanir@is.haifa.ac.il