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Designing Affective Augmentation Systems for Mind, Body, and Social Connection: A Conversation with Abdo El Ali and Andrew Kun

    Join us for a CHIWORK conversation on February 9 at 11am EST. Click here: Download Calendar Invite

    We are entering a digital wave where the user experience is transforming through immersive, interactive, and multi-sensory technologies. Advancements in biosensing and actuation enable us to not only visualize hidden physiological data, but also to create artificial haptic sensations (thermal, vibrotactile), which together can potentially enhance our mind, body, and social connections. This creates unfamiliar human-human and human-machine interactions that warrant further exploration. In this talk, I will introduce what we call Affective Augmentation Systems: systems designed to enhance, modify, or diminish our physical/virtual bodies and senses, creating new affective user experiences. Through several research prototypes, I will explore: What effects do affective augmentation systems have on user experience across the reality-virtuality spectrum? How do they influence our cognitive, affective, and (social) bodily perceptions? What social and ethical concerns do they give rise to? I will conclude with a cautionary outlook, emphasizing the need for designing *responsible* human-machine integration technology.

    Speaker: Abdallah (Abdo) El Ali

    Research Scientist at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)

    Abdallah El Ali is a research scientist in Human Computer Interactions (HCI) at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam within the Distributed & Interactive Systems (DIS) group. He is also on the executive board (events, web, comms) for CHI Nederland (CHI NL) (https://chinederland.nl/), an ACM SIGCHI Chapter that connects, supports, and represents the HCI community in the Netherlands. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Master’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Amsterdam. He is currently leading the research area on Affective Interactive Systems, with a focus on ground truth label acquisition techniques, emotion understanding and recognition, and affective augmentation systems that leverage physiological signals and multimodal feedback. Learn more at: https://abdoelali.com.

    Conversation Details: