Academic Tracks

TBA – More information coming soon!

Chairs: Mattia Thibault (Tampere University), Leighton Evans (Swansea University)

The intersection of the digital and the urban is evolving rapidly, shaping new ways of living, working, and playing in our cities. As ’smart city’ technologies become more embedded in urban life, critical questions arise: What futures are we building? Who benefits from digital urbanisation? How can we ensure cities remain playful, inclusive, and sustainable spaces for diverse communities?

The Future of Smart Cities track explores these themes to investigate emerging digital technologies in urban environments. We critically assess the promises and limitations of "smart" urbanism, shifting focus toward agency, participation, play, and innovation in digital city-making. We encourage perspectives that challenge, rethink, and extend the role of technology in shaping urban experiences.

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Playable and Experiential Cities: urban gamification, playable media in public spaces, digital placemaking, interactive urban storytelling
• Critical Perspectives on Smart Cities: post-smart urbanism, algorithmic governance, surveillance and control
• Emerging Urban Ecologies: AI-driven urbanism, robot-human interaction, digital twins, Internet of Animals
• Community and Participation: bottom-up digital projects, co-creation and civic engagement, citizen science in urban contexts
• Sustainable and Ethical Urban Technologies: climate-adaptive infrastructures, sustainable digital cities, ethics of urban AI

We also welcome contributions focusing on this year’s special theme: “Cities and Resistance”. From civil rights movements to hackable cities, the urban space has often been at the centre of political acts of disobedience and defiance. In a moment when governments around the world seem to become increasingly authoritarian, we encourage submissions that look into the connections between resistance and the urban.

We particularly encourage submissions that push the boundaries of existing research, present speculative or experimental approaches, or engage with the intersections of urban technology, play, and community in novel ways.

Chairs: Zampeta Legaki (Tampere University), Daniel Fernández Galeote (Tampere University), Kostas Karpouzis (Panteion University)

As the pace at which humans create and consume data increases, the recent disruption caused by widely available artificial intelligence (AI) has made this growth even more exponential. This technological trend could enhance our perspective on how we look at the world, how we understand it, and how we can forecast its future. However, given the vast amounts of data generated in parallel to human technological progress, society is faced with the challenge of transforming a world full of data into a data-driven world. In this context, games and other engaging ways to interact with data (through interactive systems, either computer-based or analog) can provide motivating, insightful, and potentially transformative experiences so that this data-driven world has a purpose: to do good.

But what do we mean by good? Here, to do good means to engage (with) data for the flourishing of people and our planet. We may raise awareness, foster understanding, and support well-informed decision-making about current major societal challenges, including health and wellbeing; food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, water research, and the bioeconomy; secure, clean and efficient energy; smart, green and integrated transport; climate and pro-environmental action and resource efficiency; inclusive, innovative and reflective societies; protecting freedom, security, and at-risk populations; and ethics, both in research and in data-based practice.

This track welcomes contributions that focus on persuasive technologies, human-computer interaction, and strategies (analog or digital) that aim to support public understanding, engagement, or dissemination of societal challenges (e.g., data-driven strategies, playful methodologies), and/or are related to the Sustainable Development Goals.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Data for good, data for change
• Information systems and data visualization for social and planetary challenges
• Information design, data journalism, and data activism related to sustainability
• Prototypes, applications, and playful and gameful approaches and design for social change
• Artificial intelligence (AI) for good: Human interaction with sustainable AI

TBA – More information coming soon!

TBA – More information coming soon!

TBA – More information coming soon!

Chairs: Nannan Xi (Tampere University), Katya Krylova (Tampere University) and Marc Riar (IÉSEG School of Management)

With the rapid development and maturity of innovative information and computing technologies, the vision of an alternate and decentrally organized digital world has arisen – often referred to as the “metaverse”. The ongoing debates and research initiatives have not yet fully
concluded what exactly constitutes a – or the – metaverse but we know from research that virtual and hybrid reality formats, often summarized under the umbrella term “XR” (X can be replaced by any form of new reality), will play a dominant role. More specifically, concepts such as Virtual
Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) will provide access to Metaverse- environments. Within these environments, cryptocurrencies, digital twins, avatars, digital identities, and new social/legal systems will likely play important roles in distinguishing the metaverse concept from digital environments we know today.

On a broader level, little is known about the general “nature” of the metaverse concept (e.g., how different players define and evaluate it or how it can impact societies at large). In contrast to the idea of the metaverse, XR technologies have been on the market for several years and they provide multiple opportunities for research that include, but are not limited to, access, usability, comfort, functionality, interactivity, vividness, privacy, ethical and legal issues, and unexpected adverse outcomes. Such hurdles and concerns warrant researchers’ attention in view of prevailing private control over technologies and the lag in legislative regulation of AI and XR development and use. At the same time, as these technologies hold new opportunities for businesses, communities and creatives, we invite contributors to reflect on how a metaverse can redefine, among other things, economic, business, political, artistic and educational practices, and what new forms of sociality and agency can emerge from it.

We encourage submissions from any disciplinary background that uses any research approach. Authors of accepted papers in this track are also invited to submit an expanded version of their papers to the AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (THCI) after the conference.

Topics of interest to this track include but are not limited to:

• Usability: e.g. design, interface, affordances and evaluation
• Adoption: e.g. acceptance, usage, and satisfaction
• Dark side: e.g. challenges, risks, and ethical concerns
• Experience: e.g. affect, enjoyment, playfulness, presence, immersion, embodiment, flow, interactivity, and vividness
• Information and knowledge: e.g. cognitive skill, learning performance, training, information processing, exchange of ideas, and knowledge management
• Social interaction: e.g. crowdsourcing, grassroots activism, team and community building, co-creation, collaboration, competition, and social capital
• Organizational system: e.g. decision making, strategic management, leadership, innovation, and communication
• Value and outcomes: e.g. individual wellbeing, self-efficacy, empowerment, trust, pro-environmental outcomes, sustainability, human rights, and cultural aspects
• Power structures, governance and regulation: e.g. centralized control by governments, technology corporations and financial structures vs decentralized community run platforms and application

Chairs: Ferran Altarriba Bertran (Escola Universitària ERAM), Sebastian Prost (City St George’s, University of London), Samuel Chovanec (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design)

This track aims to bring together research exploring how to design interactive technologies that support, encourage, and inform human-nature interaction. We welcome a broad range of research topics, projects, and methodologies as long as they inquire into the potential of technology to enhance people’s experiences of and relationships with(in) nature. We are particularly interested in works that transcend the bounds of techno-solutionism; that is, works that explore how technology could contribute to enriching human-nature interactions beyond productivist or otherwise utilitarian frames, thus embracing the importance of alternative values such as joy, fun, care, or multi-species kinship. Overall, we intend to stimulate a conversation around the potential of computation to support future human-nature interactions that are experientially rich, socio-culturally meaningful, ecologically caring, fun and/or a source of awe or joy.

We welcome papers and pictorials, as well as workshops, posters, and demonstrations representing various research approaches and methodologies. Due to the track’s theme and focus, we expect the conversation to have a slight orientation toward HCI, interaction design, and design research. However, we also welcome submissions from other disciplines such as social sciences or the arts, e.g. in the form of research or artistic work centered on the impact of tech on people’s relationship with nature. We invite a range of different submission types, including theoretical works, argumentation essays, empirical studies, design cases, annotated portfolios and pictorials, experiences, artworks, and methods papers.

In summary, this track’s topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Technology designs and artefacts aimed at enriching human-nature connections in playful, pedagogical, caring, and/or more-than-humanely sensitive ways
• Novel design and research methods for human-nature interaction, including more-than-human and participatory approaches
• Critical, speculative, and/or theoretical explorations into the impact of technology on human-nature interactions, including sustainability, ecological justice, and nature-related future-making
• Works that explore the intersection between human-nature interactions and other domains, e.g. food practices, mental and physical health, education, etc.

Chairs: Sumita Sharma (University of Oulu), Yixiao Wang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Grace Eden (University of Tartu, Estonia), and Biju Thankachan (Tampere Universities, Tampere).

Our lives are more technology rich than ever. From Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies that impact our lives in various ways, such as, LLMs disrupting how we work, think, write, and imagine. To robots, rapidly spreading to all spheres of life and taking on more roles in society, such as massive industrial automation to applications in education, medicine, and households. However, Robots and AI in our everyday lives are not without concerns and consequences.

For this track, we welcome papers focusing on all things related to Robots and AI!

This includes how various demographics of people interact with robots and AI in their everyday lives, the impact of such interactions on people, community, and society at large, the ethical and societal issues that arise, and also explorations of newer ways of interactions.

We especially encourage papers that present explorations, experiments, and/or field studies focusing on AI-embedded robotics that are socially interactive/intelligent.

This track is a great opportunity to initiate a multidisciplinary discussion on the key challenges and opportunities of human-robot-interactions and human-machine(AI) interactions on theoretical and practical levels.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Sciences
• Human-robot communication and interactions
• Ethical perspectives to Robots and/or AI (data privacy, security, trustworthiness, transparency, fairness, accountability)
• User-centred and machine-centred design: theories, methods, frameworks
• UX in Robots and/or AI

Chairs: Muhterem Dindar (Tampere University) and Mohammad Khalil (University of Bergen)

Rapid technological advancements have fastened uptaking of digital tools and environments in the educational landscape. Games, simulations, extended reality mediums, Artificial Intelligence, and internet-enabled platforms have been increasingly used for teaching and learning within and outside the schools. The challenges in designing effective, efficient and enjoyable learning experiences with digital technologies have drawn the attention of scholars from a broad range of fields including psychology, learning sciences, and computer science. This track provides an opportunity for the researchers to partake in transdisciplinary discussions and collaborations on designing and implementing context-aware, social, adaptive, personalized, and playful technologies for education.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Gamified/Game-based Learning
• Virtual, Mixed and Augmented Reality Applications in Education
• Teaching and Learning with Artificial Intelligence
• Learning Analytics • Human-Computer Interaction in Educational Technology
• Online Learning Platforms (e.g. MOOCS, and video conferencing systems)
• Mobile Learning Systems
• Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning
• Data and Methodological Issues in Digital Education