AVI

We are faced everyday with an enormous amount of information: from television, from the newspapers, from the web, at the same time we also own a number of personal gadgets: cellular phone, personal and portable computers, personal assistants...yet we have difficulties in filtering, highlighting and using the information we really need.

When users search specific information on the web, very often they run into difficulties and find other types of data (perhaps even interesting) but different from the ones they were searching. In a world where communication is one of the most important issues for succeeding in life (sitting for exams, undergoing a hiring interview, writing reports and, above all, interacting with others) we all need good interfaces - not only between humans and programs, but more often than not, between different kinds of humans. The Mid-East crisis is a very good example, unfortunately.

We have been organizing the AVI International Workshops having - at the back of our minds - the idea that no application program may be really successful if its corresponding interface is not geared towards human capabilities. Usability studies have proved, in a number of cases, that if the user does not participate in the design process of a system (and of its interface) it is very unlikely that such system will meet the user's needs. Due to such experience in the design and evaluation of interfaces, we feel that there are important issues to be discussed like the relevance of the cultural background of users, the different information interaction strategies, the conditions and constraints of attention focusing, the design and evaluation of visual tools for improving understandability, learnability and plain usage.

The invited speakers of the AVI '02 edition in Trento are well known in the area of interface design and will provide us with their insight and forecasting of what is round the corner in the next years pertaining to the above subject. The accepted papers (less than one out of three) report on very recent work using a variety of technologies like virtual reality, information visualization, icon design...whilst the system papers that will be demonstrated give us a glance at potentially new applications for improving human computer interaction, for increasing multimodality and even pioneering musical interfaces.