Professor Daniel Vogel at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, Professor Géry Casiez at France’s University of Lille, and researchers Mathieu Nancel and Sylvain Malacria at the Inria centre at the University of Lille, have been funded to create an Associate Team at Inria — France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Inria’s Associate Team program fosters bilateral scientific collaboration on jointly defined scientific objectives for three years while promoting and strengthening partnerships with leading researchers abroad.
The research consortium, titled INPUT, is focused on re-designing the input pipeline in interactive systems. The international team will mentor two master’s and two PhD candidates across the two universities. Their project will explore input for real-time interaction — how input is sensed, how it is transformed, how it is used, and most importantly how to give control of input across all of these aspects back to users and interaction designers.
“Géry and I have collaborated for more than 15 years. We first met when he was a postdoctoral researcher and I was a PhD student at the University of Toronto,” said Professor Vogel. “Our work together resulted in more than 20 research papers. Most of these were presented at ACM CHI and ACM UIST, the top conferences in human-computer interaction research. I’m very much looking forward to working closely with Géry, my former postdoctoral researcher Mathieu, as well as Sylvain and the graduate students we will mentor together at the Universities of Waterloo and Lille.”
Professor Daniel Vogel studies the fundamental characteristics of human input and novel forms of interaction for current and future computing form factors such as touch, tangibles, mid-air gestures, and whole-body input, for everything from on-body wearable devices and mobile phones to large displays and virtual reality.
About the research focus of the INPUT consortium
Desktop and mobile computing, and now augmented and virtual reality systems, all process complex inputs. However, for input to be useable, a user’s movements and gestures need to be captured by sensors then filtered, transformed, and interpreted by the system to trigger appropriate responses and to provide feedback. Even tasks as routine as controlling a cursor on a screen involve continuous visuo-motor control to which the system must respond accurately and quickly. Modern user interfaces use multi-step input pipelines between the user’s movements and the system’s feedback, but often they are opaque. Each step strongly affects the next and they collectively determine the result of the pipeline.
However, these pipeline steps are often designed in isolation and tuned by trial and error using legacy or ad hoc approaches with little thought or knowledge of the underlying psychomotor phenomena. This approach not only limits performance and experience in everyday computer use, but it also hinders the design and adoption of new devices and sensing methods.
The goal of INPUT is to explore and address knowledge gaps in the design of continuous input pipelines. This includes a deeper understanding of how people perceive, decide, and act in real-time tasks involving these pipelines, and the principles and methods to improve the design of each pipeline step.
The proposed research will involve methods and tools from human-computer interaction, experimental psychology, machine learning, and control theory. The proposed research program will discover and establish generalizable guidelines, methods, and algorithms to build input pipelines whose steps can fit and adapt to any user, system, or device. By building knowledge and tools focused on the sensing, processing, and transforming of input, the Associate Team’s objective is to fundamentally redesign the input pipeline for current and future interactive systems.
The INPUT Associate Team expects to disseminate its findings in leading journals and at the top international human-computer interaction conferences. The main long-term benefit of this project will be to lower the barrier to entry to use digital products by improving user performance with interactive systems. Even though this project has much practical relevance to industry, the research the team will conduct is in many ways fundamental given the lack of scientific methods developed to address the problem of input pipelines.
Previous Waterloo–Inria Associate Teams and International Research Chairs
Curious
Tech
2023–2026
Led
by
Professor
Edith
Law
at
the
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
and
Professor
Hélène
Sauzéon
at
Université
de
Bordeaux,
Curious
Tech
is
creating
educational
technologies
that
use
curiosity
as
the
key
ingredient
to
meet
the
learning
needs
of
individuals
across
all
ages
and
cognitive
abilities
to
enhance
their
health
and
well-being.
Symbolic
2022–2024
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
Professor
Éric
Schost
is
the
Waterloo
principal
investigator
on
Symbolic,
an
Inria
Associate
Team
focusing
on
symbolic
computation
research.
NetMSS
—
NETwork
Monitoring
and
Service
orchestration
for
Softwarized
networks
2018–2020;
renewed
2022–2024
NetMSS
is
an
Associate
Team
formed
between
Inria
RESIST
and
the
University
of
Waterloo
focusing
on
network
softwarization
and
network
security.
NetMSS
is
led
by
Jérôme
François,
Inria
Research
scientist,
and
by
Raouf
Boutaba,
Professor
and
Director
of
the
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science.
Professor
Boutaba
also
held
an
Inria
International
Research
Chair
(2017–2022)
attached
to
Inria
RESIST
at
Nancy
Grand-Est.
Loki
2018–2020
Loki’s
research
explored
original
ideas,
fundamental
knowledge,
and
practical
tools
to
inspire,
inform
and
support
the
design
of
human-computer
interactions.
The
late
Professor
Edward
Lank
held
an
Inria
International
Research
Chair
attached
to
the
Loki
team
at
the
Inria
Centre
at
the
University
of
Lille.