EICS

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 3rd ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems -- EICS'11 held in Pisa (13-16 June 2011). EICS is an international conference devoted to all aspects of engineering usable and effective interactive computing systems, ranging from graphical interactive systems to those involving new and emerging modalities (e.g. gesture), environments (e.g. ubiquitous ones) and development methods (e.g. model-based design and development).

EICS focuses on tools, techniques and methods for designing and developing interactive systems. EICS brings together people who study or practice the engineering of interactive systems, drawing from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Software Engineering, Requirements Engineering, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), Ubiquitous & Pervasive Systems, and Cognitive Engineering fields. EICS encompasses the former conferences and workshops EHCI (Engineering Human Computer Interaction, sponsored by IFIP 2.7/13.4), 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).

We hope that you will find this year program interesting and thought provoking. The symposium will 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 2012 to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark in June 2012.

We believe that with this third EICS edition, by increasing the diversity of paper presentations, posters, workshops, tutorials, demonstrations and doctoral presentations, we obtained an exciting and interactive program, which stimulates fruitful discussion in the relevant research fields. The distinctive focus of the conference is the engineering of interactive computer systems. Themes include: tools to support the engineering of interactive systems; notations that specify key aspects of interactive behaviour; and models that enable the analysis of interactive systems. There are several papers on context, adaptation, and migration, particularly in relation to engineering ubiquitous systems, as well as papers that discuss engineering issues associated with novel interaction techniques. A further substantial and somewhat novel theme for EICS revolves around interaction with large screens.

Since its beginning EICS has witnessed a growing number of submissions. This year the program contains 14 full papers carefully chosen from a total of 65 submissions (22% acceptance rate). There are also 21 late breaking papers (six of them are presented as posters) as well as a number of doctoral reports, workshop reports, tutorial abstracts and demonstration descriptions. The competition was strong and the selection difficult. The published material originates from 17 countries, including New Zealand, North and South America, China and Europe.

The conference is young and its identity is still evolving. Effie Law and Albrecht Schmidt, our keynote speakers, bring interesting novel perspectives in key topics for the engineering community in next years: user experience and ubiquitous systems. This should provide further useful content for good discussion. Our commitment to industry is underlined by an industrial panel held at the symposium, entitled "Research Agenda for Service Front-Ends", that will provide an interactive discussion forum and a meeting point for industry and academics.