IHC

IHC --- the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems --- was first organized in 1998, and after 2002 became a biannual event, alternating with CLIHC --- the Latin American Conference on HCI. Being HCI a multidisciplinary field, since its first edition the event has been organized in partnership with other events of related fields, with the goal to foster the exchange and collaboration between members of the communities. In its 7th edition IHC 2006 is being organized in Natal, Brazil, 19-22 of November, and has as partners Webmedia 2006 --- Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web and SBSC 2006 --- III Brazilian Symposium on Collaborative Systems.

This year's theme is "Interaction: integrating people, communities and regions" and we hope that the event will promote this integration through its many participation categories, as well as the partnership with Webmedia 2006 and SBSC 2006. The tutorials, the national and the three international keynotes will be common to the three events, and will present topics that will be of interest to all three communities. Furthermore, IHC 2006 brings to its participants the traditional and well known participation categories: full and short papers, workshops and panels, and has added two new categories, namely reports from industry and the student evaluation competion. The varied range of categories aims at expanding the HCI issues discussed during the event and the community's participation. In the extended proceedings volume we present each one of these categories, as well as the selected contributions. Besides the proceedings, the book "Topics on Interactive and Collaborative Systems" brings (in Portuguese) the full text produced by the authors of the tutorials.

These proceedings include 20 full articles selected for publication and presentation from 68 submissions, with an acceptance rate of 29%. The articles allow for a high quality program that brings relevant and diverse topics, that range from social aspects and multidisciplinarity to new challenges to the field and interaction styles. Original contributions on interface design and evaluation methods and approaches are also worth noting. We'd also like to point out that the program brings contributions not only from the established HCI research groups in Brazil, but also new groups, participating in the event for the first time. Authors come from all over Brazil, including all 5 regions, as well as other countries.