Elizabeth Churchill
Senior Director of UX at Google
Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a Senior Director of UX at Google. Elizabeth has built UX and Research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC, and FujiXerox. She Co-Chairs Google’s UX Leadership Council (UXLC) and was a co-founder of Google’s UXR Steering Committee which she co-chaired for 2 years before joining the UXLC.
Clara Crivellaro
Senior Research Fellow in Digital Local Democracy at Newcastle University.
Dr. Clara Crivellaro is the Principal Investigator for Not-Equal, the EPSRC Network on Social Justice through the Digital Economy (2018-2021). She is the Co-Investigator for the H2020 Generative European Urban Commons, gE.CO (2019-2022) and a member of OLAthens, a non-for profit organization that supports social innovation in Greece; and co-investigator in the EPSRC Centre for Digital Citizens – Next Stage Digital Economy Centre (2020-2025).
John McCarthy
Professor of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland and Co-PI at Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software.
John’s research is concerned with understanding the influence of emerging social, personal, and work technologies on people’s lived experience and using that understanding to inform the design of usable and enriching technologies. In a recent EU Project that piloted solutions for community information platforms and media pluralism in rural settings in Romania, Madeira, and islands off the south-west coast of Ireland, his group used an experience-centred approach to designing for those communities. Tensions between technological progress and community cohesion required a sensitive and responsible approach to development. This led to his current project which focuses on understanding Responsible Software Engineering as a social, experiential, and political concern.
Keynote Title: Responsible technology: Contexts, relationships, and infrastructure
Abstract: Technology is pervasive, invisible, intrusive, demanding, supportive, and fun. It can make us feel distant, small in an extremely busy world, and support personally meaningful human encounters with family and friends living half a world away. As social media and artificial intelligence present challenges with respect to the provenance of information, even to the extent of whether its origins are human or not, and their contribution to a rise in teenage anxiety and the prevalence of political dysfunction, issues of ‘responsibility’ become increasingly central in out work in cognitive ergonomics, human-computer interaction (HCI), and user-centred system design. In this talk, I argue for a ‘particular’, as against general, approach to responsibility in human-computer system design, development, and deployment. Reflecting on past and current projects, I emphasise the understated importance of appropriation in the real world impact of a number of these projects. Moving between two finished HCI design-projects – one in dementia care and another in rural digital community radio – and a current project concerned with responsible software engineering, I explore the potential of an infrastructural approach to computer-supported working in dialogue with a social connection model of responsibility as the basis for further enquiry into responsible technology and responsible practice.
Robert Pepperell
Professor of Fine Art, Cardiff Metropolitan University & Co-founder and leader of Fovolab at Cardiff Metropolitan University
Robert Pepperell PhD is Professor at Cardiff School of Art and leader of the multidisciplinary Fovolab at Cardiff Metropolitan University. He investigates the nature of the conscious mind and visual perception through painting and drawing, scientific experimentation, and philosophical inquiry.
Keynote Title: Stop emulating cameras in 3D graphics: emulate human vision instead!
Abstract: Linear perspective was discovered almost 600 years ago by artists in Italy. It’s an elegant and powerful way to represent 3D space on a 2D plane and now underpins all our imaging technologies, from cameras to CGI, VR, and AI. But even the artists who discovered linear perspective realised that it is a very limited and imperfect way to represent what we see, with the result that it was hardly ever used by artists at all. Instead, they developed many other methods of representing space that are far more effective. In this talk, I will point out why linear perspective is a limited method and demonstrate alternatives that provide a better user experience. I argue that we should be now actively implementing these alternatives in future imaging technology.
