I’m excited to announce my involvement in two upcoming EICS conferences: I’m co-chairing the EICS 2026 Doctoral Consortium together with Fabio Paternò from CNR-ISTI, Italy, and Nikos Avouris, and I will be a general co-chair together with Célia Martinie for EICS 2027.
I wanted to show my students appropriate ways of using LLMs for and during coding, so I started building (with some LLM help) a Slidev component, LLMQuery.vue, that adds LLM interactions to slides. It feels important to actively show students how these tools can amplify human knowledge and skill building rather than replace it altogether, even if I’m far from an expert. So with a bit of LLM help , I put together a sli.dev component in Vue that integrates LLMQuery right into my Slidev presentation. Maybe it’s useful for others too, so I’m sharing it here for download and further tinkering—people who are much better at web dev (there are many!) can probably turn it into something truly polished.
I am pleased to share the results of individual student projects from our Human-AI Interaction (HAII) course at Hasselt University. The YouTube playlist showcases some of the work our students have done throughout the course.
The official launch of the Digital Future Lab (DFL) marks an exciting step forward for Hasselt University and for the ecosystem of digital innovation in Flanders. With over 80 researchers across various interdisciplinary groups, DFL focuses on creating well-designed, human-centered, trustworthy, and useful digital systems that address both industrial and societal challenges. We did an interview (in Dutch, with Ann T’Syen) that can be found here.
Our short paper, Challenges and Opportunities for Delay-Invariant Telerobotic Interactions, has been accepted for the 29th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2025).
Very proud of my thesis student Maties Claesen, who has been nominated for the EOS thesis award! His work, “ZeroTraining: Extending Zero-Gravity Objects Simulation in Virtual Reality Using Robotics,” combines virtual reality and robotics to simulate weightless objects more realistically – crucial for astronaut training and space exploration. Maties demonstrated some impressive creative problem-solving skills, especially in combining diverse fields to tackle complex challenges with limited hardware resources.
Special thanks to Andreas Treuer, Martial Costantini, and Lionel Ferra at ESA for their support, valuable insights and feedback on this work. Andreas was particularly instrumental for this work by sharing his experiences and providing feedback throughout the project which was crucial in refining both the scope as well as the implementation of this work.
This year marks 20 years since I co-organized the Workshop on User Interface Description Languages (UIDLs) during the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, held in Gallipoli, Italy (May 25–28, 2004). Together with Marc Abrams, Jean Vanderdonckt, and Quentin Limbourg, we created an event that surpassed all expectations in terms of attendance, engagement, and the quality of contributions.
The early 2000s were a transformative period for the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Researchers and practitioners alike were grappling with the challenge of building flexible, reusable, and context-aware user interfaces (UIs) that could adapt to the growing variety of devices and use cases. XML, with its ability to structure and abstract information, became the language of choice for UIDLs.
In AI research, model multiplicity can help users better understand the diversity of AI predictions. Our new system “AI-Spectra” provides a visual dashboard to harness this concept effectively. Instead of relying on a single AI model, AI-Spectra uses multiple models—each seen as an expert—to produce predictions for the same task. This helps users see not only what different models agree or disagree on, but also why these differences occur. Gilles Eerlings (a FAIR PhD student ) and Sebe Vanbrabant where the main contributors for this work and combined machine learning, model multiplicity and visualisations that focus on the characteristics of an AI model, instead of explaining the behaviour.
Together with Eva Geurts, we explored Anthropomorphic User Interfaces (AUIs) and created a taxonomy that helps us to analyze, identify, and design appropriate AUIs. The paper is available here, and our interactive tool that helps you to find related resources for specific aspects from our technology is available at this URL: https://anthropomorphic-ui.onrender.com.
@inproceedings{geurtsantropomorphic2024,
title = {Anthropomorphic User Interfaces: Past, Present and Future of
Anthropomorphic Aspects for Sustainable Digital Interface Design},
author = {Eva Geurts and Kris Luyten},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2024},
articleno = {31},
numpages = {7},
keywords = {Anthropomorphism, Human-like interfaces, Taxonomy, User interface design},
location = {Paris, France},
series = {ECCE '24},
year = {2024},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
url={https://anthropomorphic-ui.onrender.com},
doi = {10.1145/3673805.3673831},
isbn = {9798400718243}
}
Interactions with computing systems and conversational services such as ChatGPT have become an inherent part of our daily lives. It is surprising that user interfaces, the gateways through which we communicate with an interactive intelligent system, are still predominantly devoid of hedonic aspects. There is little attempt to make communication through user interfaces intentionally more like communication with humans. Anthropomorphic user interfaces can transform interactions with intelligent software into more pleasant experiences by integrating human-like attributes. Anthropomorphic user interfaces expose human-like attributes that enable people to perceive, connect, and interact with the interfaces as social actors. This integration of human-like aspects not only enhances user experience but also holds the potential to make interfaces more sustainable, as they rely on familiar human interaction patterns, thus potentially reducing the learning curve and increasing user adoption rates. However, there is little consensus on how to build these anthropomorphic user interfaces. We conducted an extensive literature review on existing anthropomorphic user interfaces for software systems (past), in order to map and connect existing definitions and interpretations in an overarching taxonomy (present). The taxonomy is used to organize and structure examples of anthropomorphic user interfaces into an accessible collection. The taxonomy and an accompanying web tool provide designers with a reference framework for analyzing and dissecting existing anthropomorphic user interfaces, and for designing new anthropomorphic user interfaces (future).
We are excited to announce that both our paper and poster have been conditionally accepted for presentation at the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) 2024, which will take place in Trier, Germany.
Our full paper titled “Evaluation of AR Pattern Guidance Methods for a Surface Cleaning Task.” has been conditionally accepted.