Abstract: Within the field of human-computer interaction, a small but growing community of researchers has concentrated on the value that modeling can bring to interaction design and interface development. In this context, models are specifications (often static, but some models are executable as well) that abstract away some of the details of actual interfaces. Building and evaluating models can be much faster than user studies of actual interfaces. Models can suggest novel directions for interaction that might not be considered otherwise. Models provide a rigorous way to encapsulate what we know about specific aspects of interaction, for the benefit of other designers and developers. In this talk I'll review some of the results my lab has produced, both models and interactive systems, in the areas of HCI, intelligent user interfaces, and cognitive science. I'll describe our current research directions and outline expectations for future work.

Bio: Rob St. Amant is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. He studied computer science at Johns Hopkins (B.S., 1985) and artificial intelligence at the University of Massachusetts (Ph.D., 1996). His publications have appeared in TOCHI, CHI, IUI, AAAI, and elsewhere; he is on the steering committee for the ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces and is an associate editor for AI Magazine. He has received Best Paper awards at BRIMS (2010), ESEM (2007), and ICCM (2004).

Web: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~stamant/