EICS

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 4th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems -- EICS'12 held in Copenhagen (25--28 June 2012). EICS is an international conference devoted to all aspects of engineering usable and effective interactive computing systems. Topics of interest include multi-device interactive systems, new and emerging modalities (e.g., gesture), entertaining applications (e.g., mobile and ubiquitous games), safety critical systems (e.g. medical devices), and design and development methods (e.g., extreme programming).

EICS focuses on tools, techniques and methods for designing and developing interactive systems. The conference brings together people who study or practice the engineering of interactive systems, drawing from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Software Engineering, Requirements Engineering, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Ubiquitous & Pervasive Systems, Game Development, and Cognitive Engineering communities. The conference is the legatee of a number of conferences and workshops series: EHCI (Engineering Human Computer Interaction), DSV-IS (International Workshop on the Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems), CADUI (International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces) and TAMODIA (International Workshop on Task Models and Diagrams).

Since its beginning EICS has witnessed a growing number of submissions. This year the program contains 21 full papers carefully chosen from a total of 95 submissions (22% acceptance rate). There are also 12 late breaking papers (five of which presented as posters) as well as a number of doctoral reports, workshop reports, tutorial abstracts and demonstration descriptions. The published material originates from 15 countries, including New Zealand, North and South America, and Europe. In addition, keynote addresses will be offered by Robert Jacob (Tufts University, USA) and Jakob Bardram (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark).

We believe that for this fourth EICS edition we obtained an exciting and interactive program, which stimulates fruitful discussion in the relevant research fields. Topics range from model-based approaches to the design, analysis and generation of user interfaces, to toolkits supporting their development. A diversity of interaction styles and application areas is covered including multimodal, multidevice or multi-touch interfaces, ubiquitous computing, and health.

We hope that you will find this year program interesting and thought provoking. The symposium aims to provide you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world. We also wish the best to the next edition, EICS 2013 to be held in London, UK, in June 2013.