A Newcomer's Guide to EICS, the Engineering Interactive Computing Systems Community

Abstract

Welcome to EICS, the Engineering Interactive Computing Systems community, PACMHCI/EICS journal, and annual conference! In this short article, we introduce newcomers to the field and to our community with an overview of what EICS is and how it positions with respect to other venues in Human-Computer Interaction, such as CHI, UIST, and IUI, highlighting its legacy and paying homage to past scientific events from which EICS emerged. We also take this opportunity to enumerate and exemplify scientific contributions to the field of Engineering Interactive Computing Systems, which we hope to guide researchers and practitioners towards making their future PACMHCI/EICS submissions successful and impactful in the EICS community.

Designing and Engineering Interactive Computing Systems

“…To respond to the earlier statements of "what EICS is" and "what EICS is not" by Lopez et al [3] and later Bowen et al [1], we offer a perspective of what EICS is not yet.…”

How Do HCI Researchers Describe Their Software Tools? Insights From a Synopsis Survey of Tools for Multimodal Interaction

“…The research question addressed in our work-how do HCI researchers document their software tools to support design and engineering of multimodal interaction systems?-can be seen as a complementary survey to the existing literature [3,8,12,17,19,31], yet limited in depth (see the next section introducing synopsis surveys) reporting on how researchers have chosen to describe their prototypes, tools, libraries, frameworks, and applications designed to support multimodal interaction systems.…”

“…This finding may seem surprising on a first look, but can be interpreted from the perspective that tools for multimodal interaction are situated at the intersection of software engineering and HCI. In this context, the audience is primarily represented by researchers and practitioners that will use the tools to engineer new interactive computing systems (EICS), and that speak the same language of EICS [17], a strongly technically-oriented subcommunity of HCI.…”

“…To this end, we perform a characterization of the ways in which HCI researchers describe their software tools in academic publications, and report results of a case study in multimodal interaction, an active area with a long tradition in HCI [8] and, hence, with established practices for providing tools. We use our findings to reflect on the dissemination of tools at the intersection of software engineering and HCI [17].…”