Areas of Expertise
Human Computer
Interaction, Multimodal Interaction, User Interface Plasticity,
End-User Programming/End-User Development, Digital Behaviour Change
Intervention, Ambient Intelligence, Smart Home Technologies.
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Education and
Responsibilities
I
have studied Computer Science at Universitˇ
Grenoble Alpes (formerly
Universitˇ Grenoble 1) where I obtained my doctorate in 1970 and
Th¸se dÕEtat ¸s Sciences Mathˇmatiques in
1988 in which I
set the foundations of software engineering for Human Computer
Interaction (HCI). I am currently professor honorary, formerly full
professor at Universitˇ Grenoble Alpes
from 1973 to Oct. 2012, and professor emeritus until Sept. 2020. I am
the founder in 1990, of the IIHM research
group (Ingˇnierie de lÕInteraction
Homme-Machine) at the LIG
laboratory
(Laboratory of
Informatics of Grenoble), and served as group leader until
2010.
I have been
involved in the
ACM CHI conference as paper and panel chairs. I have served as vice
chair of the
IFIP
Working Group 2.7(13.4) (User
Interface Engineering). I have served as a
member of
the editorial board of Interacting
with Computer (Oxford Academic) and of the ACM Transactions On
Computer Human
Interaction (TOCHI).
In France, I was
the co-founder of two working groups on Computer Supported
Collaborative Work (CSCW) and Multimodal interaction of the CNRS
national programme.
I have served as expert for ANR (Agence
Nationale de Recherche)
as
well as for the European Commission. I have been involved in the
ESPRIT-FP3
BRA/LTR
project AMODEUS 1&2
(1989-1995) which was the first project in Europe to
truly
promote a multidisciplinary approach to HCI.
In 2008, I have
coordinated a
working group on Ambient Intelligence for the French Ministry of
Research
(MESR) to create a new trans-disciplinary field that brings together
Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) and Social and Human
Sciences (SHS) to
address societal challenges in novel ways. From 2012 to 2020, I
co-directed the Amiqual4Home innovation
platform in the field of
Ambient Intelligence funded by the EquipEx program of the French
"Programme d'Investissement d'Avenir" in collaboration with Inria
centre at the University Grenoble Alpes.
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Awards
In 2007, I received the honorary degree of
Doctor
of Science from
the University of Glasgow and I have been elected to the SIGCHI
Academy for Ņleadership
in the profession in Computer Human InteractionÓ. On March 8, 2013, I
was awarded Knight of the
Legion of Honour by the Republic of France for my
pioneering contributions to Human-Computer Interaction. I was also
awarded the title of "IFIP
TC13 Pioneer" in 2013, then nominated "IFIP
Fellow" in 2019 in recognition of
"outstanding contributions to the educational, theoretical, technical,
commercial aspects of analysis, design, construction, evaluation and
use of interactive systems". I am deeply honored to be included
in the HCI
Pioneers website launched by Ben
Shneiderman to draw attention to the trail blazers in HCI.
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Research Interests
My early
interests concerned the software
foundations for the sound implementation of graphical and multimodal
interactive systems. In 1987, I
invented the Presentation-Abstraction-Control (PAC) software
architecture model whose
innovations have since been incorporated into modern
forms of MVC (see wikipedia).
This model was subsequently
improved with colleagues as the Arch
model then as the PAC-Amodeus model to support
multimodal interaction.
In 1999,
with the move to ubiquitous
computing, I defined the concept of "User
Interface Plasticity" as Ņthe
capacity of user interfaces to adapt to the context of use while
preserving usability.Ó In collaboration with colleagues, I
developed the notion of "Context"
of use. User Interface Plasticity has
then been elaborated within the
European CAMELEON
project as a
Unifying Reference Framework that operationalizes
the development of
plastic user interfaces. This framework has received high attention
since its publication in 2003 and has
served as a structure for the definition of UI description languages
developed in the European UsiXML
project.
In 2007, I
was invited to
participate to the Dagsthul Seminar on End-user
Software Engineering to
work on the challenges faced in helping end-user programmers to create
dependable software. As a follow-up of this work, I
co-directed the Catrene AppsGate
project that sought to empower ordinary people to configure and
program smart home services. We have been living
with Appsgate in our own
home from Fall 2014 to Winter 2023 (due to the final breakdown of
hardware !). AppsGate let us program many convenient functionalities
such as using Philips Hue lights as eco-feedback on our energy
consumption. From end-user programming facility, AppsGate turned to be
used as a Digital Behavior Change Intervention (DBCI) system.
Since
2013, my research
interest focuses on Digital Behavior Change Intervention,
with early experiments on energy consumption in office buildings and domestic spaces.
I currently participate to the ANR ePsyCHI
project that aims to develop a set of semi-formal languages, called the
ePsyCHI language, to formalize, articulate, and make operational key
psychological theories related to behaviour change.
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Research Projects
European Commission projects
FP3 BRA/LTR AMODEUS 1&2,
Assaying Means of Design Expression for Users and Systems (1989-1995)
FP5-IST-FET-Disappearing Computer initiative GLOSS,
GLObal Smart Spaces (2001-2003)
FP5-IST CAMELEON,
Context Aware Modeling for Enabling & Leveraging Effective
InteractiON (2001-2004)
FP5-IST FAME, Facilitating Agents Multicultural Exchange
(2001-2005)
FP6-IST NoE SIMILAR,
Creating human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication
(2003-2007)
ITEA4 Emode,
Enabling Adaptive Multimodal Interfaces (2005 Š 2008)
ITEA4 UsiXML,
User Interface in Multiple Contexts of Use (2009 Š 2013)
Catrene AppsGate,
a new generation of set-top box for smart home applications including
end-user programming for the home (2012-2015)
National projects
FUI Minalogic NOMAD,
Concepts for mobile interaction for iPhones and tablets (2007-2011)
ANR CONTINUUM,
CONtinuitˇ de Service en INformatique Ubiquitaire et Mobile (2009-2012)
EquipEx Amiqual4Home
innovation platform (2012-2019)
ANR INVOLVED,
E-consultant Persuasif pour la Gestion Eenergˇtique des B‰timents
(2015-2019)
Idex Grenoble-Alpes Eco-SESA, Safe,
Efficient, Sustainable and Accessible energy (2017-2020)
ANR ePsyCHI,
Engineering Digital Behaviour Change Intervention: from Psychological
theories to Computer-Human Interaction (2022-2026)
Significant international workshops
Dagstuhl
seminars on Software
architecture (1995), Ubiquitous
Computing (2001), End-User
Software Engineering
(2007), Human
activity recognition in smart environments (2012)
EU/NSF
strategic research workshop ŅThe Disappearing ComputerÓ to identify
key research challenges and opportunities in Information and
Communication Technologies (Vienna, 2004)
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A
bit of history: How I switched from
Operating Systems to HCI
It was at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
that, in 1982, I first used a mouse to interact with a computer. I
returned to CMU
in 1983 as
a scientific visitor, and it is there that I developed the concept of
the UI mediator published in IEEE Computer
Sept. 1985 (ŅAbstractions for User Interface DesignÓ), as well as a
constraint-based screen layout manager for the syntactic editor of the
Gandalf
project (one of the very first software development environments, led
by Nico Haberman).
In France, at the
time, personal workstations did not exist, whereas CMU was equipped
with Altos and
Perqs.
At CMU, I had the opportunity to chat
with James
Gosling who was developing the window manager for the Andrew
system. I
remember rich discussions about the pros and cons of overlapping VS
tiled
windows. I used my own money to buy one of the first Macs and to attend
CHI 83
in
Boston, just out of curiosity. CHI 83 changed my scientific orientation
completely. I returned to France in December 84 with my Apple Macintosh
(imagine: no disk drive and 128 Kbyte of main memory, but a very
well-designed
programmers toolkit!). It is then that I left behind my research in
operating
systems and networks (in Grenoble, I experimented the use of packet
switching for
interconnecting computers), and
started working on the software aspects of HCI (not knowing yet that
HCI would
become a research area).
My
belief: you need to do
what you feel is right, and not systematically follow the comfortabe
path paved by mainstream
research areas.
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Last
update: February 2023
