PhD in Computer Science

Give Peace a Chance: HCI for Peace?

Academic year 2013/2014

Sommario del corso

• Course objectives
• Program
• Notes
• Teaching tools

Course objectives

ABSTRACT 

Can computers bring peace? Not yet perhaps, but today computers are increasingly mediating the way people make decisions, including those that can have an effect on conflict and peace. Human-Computer Interaction researchers have more opportunities than ever to contribute to this ambitious goal.

In this talk, I briefly introduce a new community of researchers, part of the Special Interest Group of the Association of Computing Machinery on HCI, called HCI for Peace [Hourcade et al., 2013]. The main goal is to provide an international forum in which to discuss ideas on how the HCI community can play a role in preventing, de-escalating and recovering from conflict.

I then present a  specific case of a collaborative system designed to support reconciliation of narratives of a conflict by means of a technology-enabled process aimed at encouraging the users to reconsider hostile attitudes towards another [Zancanaro et al., 2012]. The system is a tabletop interface that provides a setting for face-to-face shared narration and support for the management of disagreements. The interface supports escalation and de-escalation of the conflict emerging in the shared narration and requires that participants perform joint actions when a contribution to the story is to be removed from the overall narration. A between-subjects experiment compared the tabletop interface and a desktop multimedia interface with mixed pairs of Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab teenagers. The results demonstrated that the experience with the tabletop interface appears to be motivating and, most important, produce at least a short term shift of attitude toward the other.

Program

The course will be held by

Massimo Zancanaro

Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento) 

Class schedule

Note

REFERENCES

Hourcade  J.P., Busse D.K. , Nathan L., Kapros E., Thomas J.C.,  Zaphyris P., Zancanaro M. (2013) HCI for Peace Ideathon. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2013: Changing Perspectives, Paris, France

Zancanaro M., Stock O., Eisikovits Z., Koren C., Weiss P.L. (2012) Co-narrating a Conflict: An Interactive Tabletop to Facilitate Attitudinal Shifts. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 19, 3.

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