IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing

Dal Foreword al volume dei Proceedings Twenty years have passed since we met for the first time at Hiroshima University (1984) and started a series of Workshops, Working Conferences and, more recently, Symposia that were centred on the concept of the possibility of a universal high-level visual programming language. We must recognize today, that such a concept was only a dream! Nevertheless, the importance of visual communication cannot be overestimated. Visual modelling has become widespread, especially with the success of UML, whose languages, as well as their predecessors, have been the subject of many papers at the VL series. Nor is the domain of visual techniques restricted to software engineering, as we have hosted along the years original and innovative usage of pictures and diagrams, in architecture, biology or, broadly speaking, in design. So, it looks like visual communication provides its best services whenever we have a domain which can be structured along concepts of entities, relationships, processes or configurations, and some metaphor or notation shared by a given community. On the other hand, as many cognitive scientists have proved, our brain works along two separate channels, a linguistic one (coinciding with the absorption of text) and a visual one (acquiring pictorial components as seen on the screen), neither of these two is always dominant nor is their ratio fixed for all individuals. An integration of different kinds of representations is certainly the viable approach to new programming or modelling languages that may hide the details and provide insight into the relevant aspects of the phenomena of interest. This was the driving force towards the renaming of the conference series to Human Centric Computing. It was recognised that what we are really up to is putting the user – any human user – centre stage for our design, development and testing of computer systems. This brings in the importance of human-computer interfaces, their relevance in the success (or failure) of a new system. It is essential that the system be well understood by the user, and direct manipulation interfaces generally accomplish this job although new strategies employing other human senses (gestures, touch, speech) are coming of age. Putting back Visual Languages in the name of the series acknowledges the fact that visual technologies are those which still lie at the core of most forms of interaction between humans and other humans, even mediated by computer-based systems, including those allowed by the new portable communication devices, and that new specific problems in terms of usability, reliability, expressiveness, scalability etc. arise from the diffusion of visual techniques into new territories. We are very happy to host this new edition of an old series in Rome, a town where old and new stay shoulder to shoulder, home to many world-known masterpieces, as well as to important experiences in the mobile industry, and, as participants will notice, where human-to-human communication has developed over the centuries into an art. We hope that our meeting in Rome will prove that sharing knowledge on the experience gained designing, implementing and testing human-centred systems can show the way to the new systems to come in our near future.