- HCC will support projects that investigate the use of IT in highly distributed and rapidly changing environments at various levels of granularity to achieve both immediate and long-term goals. It will support bold approaches to improving education, for example, through the integration of research and education in scientific collaboratories, which require new methods for giving the user a realistic experience of doing science and the opportunity to work collaboratively with other students, teachers, and scientists at multiple locations.
- Human-centered technology will enable all people to take advantage of the full benefits of computing, will empower people with disabilities, young children, seniors, and members of other traditionally under-represented groups to participate fully in the Information Society, and will foster independent aging in the community while maintaining social relationships and autonomy.
Projects that are supported will, amongst other things, deepen our understanding of the globalization of communications and commerce, expanded value chains and clusters, outsourcing in all its forms, the transformation of knowledge and knowledge generation, and the role of IT in innovation and competition. The study of online interactions that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries, through new community-oriented applications in such areas as Internet voting and other electronic forms of citizenship, collaborative electronic publishing, Blogs, online multi-player games, computer-mediated arts and culture, virtual participatory theater, and ensemble music-making at-a-distance are encouraged. Inquires into the effect of IT on government-citizen interactions and digital democracy and IT-enabled community creation and development are also encouraged.
HCC researchers will explore unprecedented human-computer and human-human interactions through systems that are aware of their social surroundings, systems that understand concepts such as location in human terms, realistic immersive and multi-sensory technologies, and direct brain-computer interfaces. HCC research will transform the human-computer interaction experience, so that the computer is no longer a distraction or worse yet an obstacle, but rather a tool that empowers the user at work, in school, at home and at play, and that facilitates natural and productive human-software-device collaboration. HCC research will enhance human insight and creativity through highly interactive visual interfaces coupled with tools and techniques that enable people to synthesize information, to derive insight from massive, dynamic, and often conflicting data, to detect the expected, and to discover the unexpected. HCC encourages research on how humans, in various roles and domains, perceive computing artifacts as they use them.