Clodis Boscarioli

HCI education in brazil: challenges and opportunities

HCI Education in Brazil has come a long way. Since 1999, the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) included HCI in its reference curriculum for its Computing courses. Since then, the community has discussed the perspective of the area in our country. From 2010 to this day, we have held a series of workshops on HCI Education, called WEIHC, as a permanent discussion forum within the Brazilian HCI conference, IHC. We report here the results of the WEIHC discussions and of two surveys, conducted in 2009 and in 2012, to help us assess the status of HCI Education in Brazil. Despite the advances of the Brazilian HCI community, our surveys show that we still face some important challenges. We should curate existing teaching material to further enhance collaboration among professors, to increase the quality of our courses, and to broaden HCI awareness across all related departments.

Charting the Landscape of HCI Education in Brazil

One of the issues the Brazilian HCI community has paid great attention to is HCI education in the country. One of the efforts has been to understand, through the use of surveys, how HCI has been taught in Brazil. So far, two reports on HCI education profile in Brazil have been presented: one from 2009 that described HCI courses being taught, and another from 2012 that was in response to a SIGCHI demand and targeted a broader audience, not taking into account specificities of the Brazilian context. Therefore, the need for an updated analysis of HCI education in Brazil was identified and a new survey applied. In this paper we present the initial analysis of the results of this survey and delineate what HCI courses have been offered at undergraduate or graduate levels around the country and their topics they cover.

How Does HCI Research Affect Education Programs? A Study in the Brazilian Context

This paper presents a comparative analysis based on two independent studies of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education and research in Brazil. The first study was conducted to understand how HCI has been taught in Brazil, via a survey responded by 114 educators and researchers in the country. The second study analyzed the scientific production of HCI in Brazil from a fifteen-year analysis of full papers published on the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC). Our analysis is based on data-driven visual exploration, and it can help to get insights from the data and to identify how HCI research in Brazil relates to our education programs. We believe this kind of analysis can shed some light in the evolution of HCI in other countries.

Gesture recognition for fingerspelling applications: an approach based on sign language cheremes

This paper presents an approach for carrying out gesture recognition for the Brazilian Sign Language Manual Alphabet. The gestural patterns are treated as a combination of three primitives, or cheremes - hand configuration, hand orientation and hand movement. The recognizer is built in a modular architecture composed by inductive reasoning modules, which use the artificial neural network Fuzzy Learning Vector Quantization; and rule-based modules. This architecture has been tested and results are presented here. Some strengths of such approach are: robustness of recognition, portability to similar contexts, extensibility of the dataset to be recognize and reduction of the vocabulary recognition problem to the recognition of its primitives.

HCI with Chocolate: Introducing HCI Concepts to Brazilian Girls in Elementary School

In order to attract women to the area of computing there are several initiatives in the Brazilian context. The project named Meninas Digitais (Digital Girls) is one of them.In this paper we discuss one experiment carried out in the context of this project. A Computer Science Unplugged activity (The Chocolate Factory) was performed in a Brazilian state school. The activity was about HCI design and was done with nine teenagers. Most of these girls do not have a computer, so they rarely use one. The experiment was their first contact with a topic related to concepts of HCI design, and the girls succeeded in the activity giving interesting solutions for the problem situations presented. The experiment showed that it is possible to introduce some activities to elementary school students so as to present HCI and promote courses in the area of Computing.

Tutorial sobre Fuzzy-c-Means e Fuzzy Learning Vector Quantization: Abordagens Híbridas para Tarefas de Agrupamento e Classificação

Neste tutorial e apresentada uma discussao sobre o algoritmo Fuzzy-c-Means e sobre as Redes Neurais Fuzzy, considerando a proposta de insercao de principios da Teoria de Conjuntos Fuzzynas abordagens de agrupamento e classificacao classicas: algoritmo c-Means e o modelo neural Learning Vector Quantization. A motivacao para a construcao de um modelo hibrido, dessa categoria, e conferir as abordagens classicas a capacidade de lidar adequadamente com aspectos de incerteza e imprecisao, comumente encontrados em problemas reais.

HCI Education in Brazil from the Results of the Workshop on Teaching of HCI

The teaching of Human-Computer Interaction in Computer courses in Brazil is still in consolidation and expansion. In this context, the Special Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (CEIHC) of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) has instituted in its annual symposium a permanent forum for discussion of this topic, the Workshop on IHC Education (WEIHC). This article presents an analysis of the six editions of this event concerning its execution and content covered, pointing developments and perspectives of this initiative.

How to Join Theoretical Concepts, Industry Needs and Innovative Technologies in HCI Courses? The Big Challenge of Teaching HCI

The relation between HCI Education and the Industry needs is a challenge to the HCI community. HCI professors should be aware of their role to persuade students that user experience and experience design are cross-cutting concepts, which therefore influence all other areas involved in innovative product and service development, from conceptual design to implementation and testing. In this paper we present a revised HCI Brazilian syllabus for undergraduate Computer Science courses, discussing HCI requirements for UX professional and academic formation of the students. We also describe some research questions that have been raised in this context.

Introducing Computer Science to Brazilian Girls in Elementary School Through HCI Concepts

The participation of women in workgroups is essential to any kind of job. Nowadays Computer Science has little presence of women. Consequently, it is necessary to motivate girls to choose Computing as a career. This paper describes an experiment consisting of Human-Computer Interaction HCI activities that were used to demonstrate that Computing is more than only programming. The activities were based on the concepts and materials of the Computer Science Unplugged Project. Besides, this work presents the results with the HCI activities performed in the context two Brazilian projects. The results are qualitative in nature and provide insights about HCI activities to elementary school student girls. Fifty-two girls from two different cities and four different public schools participated. All students developed the five tasks designed by CSU materials and were able to articulate concepts of HCI.

PlatMult: a multisensory platform with web accessibility features for low vision users

Screen magnifiers are the usual assistive technology for low vision users in computer interaction. However, even using a screen magnifier, low vision users have serious limitations for web access. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose a multisensory platform called PlatMult, composed of visual, auditory, tactile feedback. The PlatMult provides a screen magnifier, integrated with a screen reader, and an adapted mouse with motor feedback. The feedback is fired in an integrated way; for instance, when the user moves the mouse over links and buttons in a webpage, the PlatMult activates the screen reader and the mouse motor feedback. This paper describes the components developed in order to obtain the accessible events from the Firefox web browser.