[Local news] The School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL (my alma mater) has a research day on June 4 about Invisible Computing: Novel Interfaces to Digital Environments organized by two ex-bosses (Pierre Dillenbourg and Jeffrey Huang). There's going to be three interesting talks about this topic:

"Programmable Reality by Ivan Poupyrev (Sony CSL, interaction Lab, Tokyo): What would happen when we will be able to computationally control physical matter?

The Myth of Touch by Chia Shen (Harvard University): Are multi-touch tabletop interfaces as intuitive as they seem in YouTube demonstrations? Do we perceive better by touching? How do users really perform on a touch surface?

Labours of Love in the Digital Home of the Future by Richard harper (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK): What will homes of the future be? Will they offer all sorts of automation that will let the occupants be lazy and indolent? Will this make for contentment? We think that automation will have a place in the home of the future, but our concern is not with proving the individual with machines that take over their every labour: we think contentment at home will also be delivered through allowing people to invest in labours of love. These can take many forms and can be supported in various new ways."

Why do I blog this? I am especially interested in the last speaker as I follow his work about ethnography and design, as well as his interest in automation. On a different note, it's intriguing to see this faculty finally having an event about human-computer interaction.