Philip Barnard: Research on HCI

From the mid-1970's to the mid-1990's, a large proportion of Philip Barnard's research was devoted to Human-Computer interaction.

This work included numerous observational studies of commercial products; studies of computer system designers; laboratory experiments comparing the performance consequences of interface characteristics; and the development of theoretical techniques for addressing fundamental aspects of cognition in human-computer interaction. Philip collaborated with IBM for the best part of ten years and then spent seven years co-ordinating Esprit projects 3066 and 7040 - AMODEUS. In these projects, his own research used AI technology to model users' mental activity on the basis of cognitive theory (Barnard, 1985; 1987; Barnard, Wilson & MacLean, 1988; Barnard & May, 1999; May & Barnard, 2003). A particularly novel development was the application of formal methods to model users, systems and their interaction (Duke, Barnard, Duce & May, 1998). A retrospective summary of the key points of this work was reported in Barnard, May, Duke & Duce (2000). The old archive for the AMODEUS project is still available for the brave hearted interested in bibliographic excavation.

The main program of HCI research at Chaucer Road ended in 1998. Philip collaborated with Jon May in Sheffield on the analysis of complex graphic displays and multimodal interactions (e.g. see Barnard & May, 1995). Jon is now at Plymouth. As a part of the AMODEUS project the group here also developed interdisciplinary models of the conjoint behaviour of users & systems in interaction (in collaboration with Michael Harrison and David Duke both at the University of York at the time) and David Duce the at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Michael Harrison went to Newcastle and has subsequently retires, David Duke is at Leeds and David Duce is at Oxford Brookes.

Some limited collaboratice HCI research conitued until 2011 with Howard Bowman and Su Li both of the Cognitive Systems Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Canterbury. Information is available on their website about our collaboration on Emotions, Salience Sensitive Control of Human Attention and Computational Modelling.

In addition to our own bibliography there are a number of external bibliographical resources to find out about and gain access to papers on this research. They include

The HCI Bibliography (search on both Phil Barnard & Philip Barnard)

The ACM portal has both a guide and a digital library from which pdf's can be found (search on both Phil Barnard & Philip Barnard)

Interaction-Design.org (This site also enables a direct search of other sites)