Research field: engineering Human Computer Interaction

Research context: ubiquitous computing
Nowadays people live in heterogeneous and dynamic interaction spaces: services may appear and disappear dynamically, physical objects may be interaction resources, and human goals may emerge opportunistically. As a result, User Interfaces (UIs) can not be predesigned anymore.

Research problem: variability of UI specifications
The need for UIs to dynamically adapt to the context of use bridges the gap between design time and runtime. This requires to move to another system under study: the "supra" (for supervision) interactive system in charge of sensing the context of use, and of adapting the UI accordingly. The supra UI is in charge of conducting smooth transition from one context to another one.

Research challenge: UI quality at anytime
Two complementary research objectives:
- To establish a theory of adaptation for predicting and explaining the co-evolution between the system and the user in context;
- To explore development and execution environments for ensuring UI quality at anytime.

This covers the many faces of quality:
- Quality by design, including worth-centered design, creativity support tools and evaluation methods,
- Quality by adaptation, including UI plasticity and persuasive technology,
- Quality by reuse, including UI composition,
- Quality by repairment, including self explanative UIs,
The very challenge being to sense the user's needs, thereby opening a large set of applications, including incentives.