Reframing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as a cross-cultural and cultural psychology.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) involves the study, planning, design, and uses of the interaction between people (users) and computers. Psychology is a major function of this multidisicplinary field. While this field has been extremely successsful since its birth in the early 1980ties, the spread of the practice of using computers to all corners of the globe - and the endless many new contexts of use - challenges the scientific foundation of the field and its fundamental concepts and methods. In this talk, I will review some of the key research questions that we may want to answer in order to reframe human-computer interaction as a cross-cultural and cultural psychology field.

Program
14:00-14:05 Welcome by Head of Department, Jan Damsgaard
14:05-14:15 Welcome by the Dean of Research, Peter Møllgaard
14:15-14:55 Inaugural lecture by Ravi Vatrapu
15:00-15:40 Inaugural lecture by Torkil Clemmensen
15:40-16:30 Reception, Howitzvej 60 (4th floor)

About Torkil Clemmensen
Torkil Clemmensen is professor at Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He has a bachelor, a master, and a PhD in psychology from University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His research interest is in Human-Computer Interaction, in particular psychology as a science of design. The focus of his research is on cultural psychological perspectives on usability and user experience. As chair of International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP), TC Human-Computer Interaction’s Working Group 13.6 on Human Work Interaction Design (HWID) 2008-2014, and currently vice-chair, he co-organizes a series of international workshops and working conferences on work analysis and usability/user experiences in organizational, human, social and cultural contexts. He contributes to key conferences and journals within Human-Computer Interaction, Design, and Information Systems.

Current analytical approaches in computational social science can be characterized by four dominant paradigms: text analytics (information retrieval and classification), social network analysis (graph theory), social complexity analysis (complex systems science), and social simulations (cellular automata and agent-based modeling). However, when it comes to organizational and societal units of analysis, there exists no approach to conceptualize, describe, explain, model and predict social media interactions as individuals' associations with ideas, values, identities, aspirations and such. To address this limitation, based on the enactive approach to the philosophy of mind, phenomenological approach to sociology, and the mathematics of set theory, this second inaugural address presents a novel approach to big data analytics called Social Set Analysis (SSA). SSA consists of a generative framework for the philosophy of computational social science, a theory of social data, conceptual and formal models of social data, and an analytical framework for combining big social data with organizational and societal datasets for generating meaningful facts, actionable insights, valuable insights, and sustainable impacts. Three empirical studies in big social data analytics are presented to illustrate and demonstrate social set analysis in terms of (a) crisp and fuzzy set-theoretical interaction analysis, (b) set-theoretical visualizations of social media crises, and (c) fake news engagement and endorsement on Facebook walls of Clinton and Trump. Implications for big data analytics, current limitations of the set-theoretical approach, and future directions are outlined.

About Ravi Vatrapu
Ravi Vatrapu is a professor of business data analytics at the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School; professor of applied computing at the Westerdals Oslo School of Arts Communication and Technology; and director of the Centre for Business Data Analytics. Prof. Vatrapu’s current research focus is on big social data analytics to design, develop and evaluate a new holistic approach to computational social science, Social Set Analytics (SSA). Prof. Vatrapu holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Communication and Information Sciences from the University of Hawaii at Manoa (USA), a Graduate Certificate in International Cultural Studies from East-West Centre (USA), a Master of Science (M.Sc) in Computer Science and Applications from Virginia Tech (USA), and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Systems Engineering from Andhra University (India).