Keynote Lectures

Abstract
This talk will demonstrate how Virtual Reality (VR) can be used as a tool to understand and improve movement performance. The first part will show how rudimentary VR technology was used in the early 2000s to carefully control what the brain sees (perception), but also very accurately measure how the brain responds (action). The versatility of VR means it can be used to study human behaviour in many different sport and health applications. Examples from behavioural neuroscience will showcase how VR can help us understand decision-making in elite sport but also conditions such as freezing of gait in people with Parkinson’s disease.
The second part of the talk will highlight how the recent evolution of both VR hardware and software has opened exciting new possibilities to take research out of the lab so it can make a difference to people’s lives. Examples will demonstrate how VR applications that are commercially available can enhance performance through the power of gameplay. This could be VR apps that train perceptuo-motor skills in the home or monitor changes in players’ neural fitness that can occur because of injuries (e.g. concussions). 
The talk will conclude by sharing some thoughts on the future of VR technology and the Metaverse and highlight opportunities for researchers to take advantage of this technology.

Abstract
How people interact with digital technologies is currently caught between the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. Such technological trends provide great opportunities, new possibilities, but there are also risks and new problems. There can be intelligent services that eventually generate actions that do not match the real user needs. People may have difficulties understanding how to personalize the automatically generated automations. Thus, a fundamental challenge is how to provide tools that allow users to control and configure smart environments consisting of hundreds of interconnected devices, objects, and appliances. This means designing tools that allow people to obtain “humanations” (automations that users can understand and modify). This talk will discuss concepts and methods that can be useful to address the core challenges of human control over automations that can involve people, objects, devices, intelligent services, and robots. The goal is to identify innovative approaches to support end users, even without programming experience, to understand, create or modify the automations in their daily environments, augmenting the human capacity to manage automations through effective interaction modalities, relevant analytics, understandable explanations, and intelligent recommendations. From this perspective, I will discuss how trigger-action programming can be a useful connection point between a wide variety of technologies and implementation languages and people without programming experience. However, it also presents nuances that may become apparent and critical in realistic cases, generating undesired effects. Aspects that should be considered carefully include temporal aspects of triggers and actions, configuring smart environments with multiple active automations, and security and privacy issues. I will also discuss current practises, some experiences in application domains, such as the smart home, the opportunities provided by interaction modalities such as conversational agents and mobile augmented reality, how to provide explanations to make the behaviour of the smart space more transparent, and possible future research directions.