Considering the social, cultural, educational and economic diversity of developing regions, the challenge is to develop appropriate and effective interfaces/interaction techniques that will enable these users to access services that currently remain elusive to them. The focus areas of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

  • Novel and effective interfaces that reduces the cognitive load on the users who usually operate in chaotic environments:
    People in developing regions often would access these interfaces in noisy and crowded surroundings. Providing privacy through the intelligent UI and handling the noise would be a challenge for such interfaces.
  • Interfaces for semi-literate and illiterate users:
    Iconic interfaces, speech-based interfaces and multimodal interfaces offer promising solutions to overcome literacy issues. Any other interface that does not need language skills will be of interest to this workshop.
  • Designs tailored to factor social and cultural issues:
    If an interface technology is culturally not acceptable to a society, it may not have acceptability. So interfaces that reflect the culture of the society are bound to be promising.
  • Shared user interfaces and devices:
    People developing regions seldom own a computing device on an individual basis. Access to applications or services is mainly through kiosks or phones. Most families now own a cell phone that is shared among family members.
  • Cost-effective interfaces:
    Since the purchase power of this society is not high, expensive and sophisticated interfaces may not be the right choice. Intelligent use of cost-effective devices will therefore be more acceptable for this population.

We seek original, unpublished papers in the following three categories: (a) Position papers that describe novel ideas that can lead to interesting research directions, (b) Early results or work-in-progress that has significant promise, or, (c) Full papers. Papers should be of 4-6 pages in length in the IUI publication format. The LaTeX and Microsoft Word templates are available through these links. All submissions should be in the PDF format and should be submitted electronically through the IUI4DR Easychair Conference site. Since the submission deadlines are dependent on the IUI conference, we will not be able to grant any extensions in any circumstances.

Since the workshop also aims to be a meeting point for researchers working in this area, atleast one author of accepted papers should attend the workshop to present their work.

The PDF version of CFP is available here.