News Releases for Human-Computer Interaction
IU School of Informatics at IUPUI launches new interactive Web site
October 7, 2009 — The Indiana University School of Informatics at IUPUI has launched a new interactive Web site developed to better serve students, faculty, staff and others, and to foster a clearer definition of informatics and its implications for the future.
Full storyIUPUI Human-Computer Interaction Program sponsors World Usability Day conference
October 2, 2009 — As part of World Usability Day, the Indiana Chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association is hosting an event to promote the exchange of ideas on sustainability as it relates to usability and product development. The IU School of Informatics, Human-Computer Interaction Program is co-sponsoring the event.
Full storyToo scary to be real, research looks to quantify eeriness in virtual characters
September 24, 2009 —
Indiana University's Karl MacDorman has been to the valley -- the uncanny valley of virtual humans so lifelike they give us real humans the creeps. What he's found is that things don't look so bad after all.
MacDorman and the Terminator
May 20, 2009 — Karl MacDorman, associate professor, is an IUPUI School of Informatics researcher studying the "uncanny valley". MacDorman's perspective about this cognitive phenomenon is included in the article Why "Terminator" is so creepy at livescience.com.
Full storyIU School of Informatics announces Semester II Colloquia
January 15, 2009 — The Indiana University School of Informatics at IUPUI is pleased to announce its academic colloquia series – six one-hour lectures that are free of charge and open to the public. Talk subjects range from human interaction with robots, to proteomics and systems biology; digital video sculpturing, to understanding application development using LEGO bricks.
Full storyBolchini co-publishes paper on Web usability in bioinformatics research
January 12, 2009 —
Usability should be engineered into the development process of Web-based bioinformatics resources, particularly because databases and applications don’t grow in linear patterns, according to a team of researchers from the UK, the US, Switzerland and Italy. Davide Bolchini, assistant professor, Indiana University School of Informatics at IUPUI, was lead author of the paper, published in the journal Bioinformatics.
Usability is a new field in bioinformatics and is a “very unexplored area so far,” Bolchini told Genomeweb, an online news source for integrated informatics, which re-printed the paper's finding in its newsletter BioInform.
According to BioInform writer Vivien Marx, Bolchini and his team used "state of the art" usability evaluation methods to examine an online repository of proteins, noting that scientists often encounter "breakdowns" when browsing through different sub-systems of the repository that are updated at different times. The result often leads to obsolete content, according to the research team.
The study unfolded during Bolchini’s post-doctoral fellowship from 2007 to 2008 with University College London computer scientist Anthony Finkelstein and colleagues, who were “applying usability methodologies and usability inspection and other evaluation methods to improve the quality” of bioinformatics applications, according to Bolchini.
The full journal paper is available online here.
