Browsers and User Interfaces

The Web browser has become the face of cyberspace. As new uses of the Internet are invented and network bandwidth goes up, web user interfaces will need to become richer and more interactive. At the same time, the population of users seeking access to the Web is becoming more diverse, requiring innovative software that will meet the needs of all, not just skilled users. A number of key technologies and applications are driving browser development. For example, the Web is moving off the desktop and into mobile phones, embedded devices and large shared displays. Delivering a good experience across a variety of platforms and form factors remains a major challenge. Also, the design of Web search engines, which are important tools for information discovery tasks, remain a challenge. Designing effective search interfaces are critical to improve their usability. Emerging as important technologies are collaboration tools that allow Web users new ways of communicating and interacting (e.g., communities of trust, social networks, blogs). These present additional design challenges and research opportunities: Will familiar paradigms be able to evolve to accommodate new devices, high bandwidth interaction, and new use cases, or is radical change needed in web interface design?

The Browsers and User Interfaces track at WWW2008 will provide a forum where both researchers and practitioners can share new approaches, applications, and experimental results about web user interfaces. We invite original papers describing theoretical or experimental research including (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Adaptive web interfaces and personalization
• Blogging and social networks
• Browsers and user experience on mobile devices
• Browser interoperability
• Information visualization on the Web
• Multilingual web content design
• Multimodal web interfaces (e.g. speech and gestures)
• Novel client-side applications
• Ubiquitous web access, shared displays, and wearable computing
• Web accessibility
• Web-based collaboration and collaborative web use
• Web interaction with the real world (e.g. robotics and sensor networks)
• Web search interfaces
• Web usability and user experience

Paper formatting requirements will be provided on the submissions page.

• Track Chairs:
  Xing Xie (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
  Vicki Hanson (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)
• Program Committee:
  Chieko Asakawa (IBM Research)
  Ed H. Chi (PARC)
  Kaj Grnbk (University of Aarhus)
  Luis Von Ahn (CMU)
  Masahiro Hori (Kansai University)
  Mor Naaman (Yahoo! Research Berkeley)
  Patrick Baudisch (Microsoft Research)
  Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh)
  Rob Miller (MIT)
  Shumeet Baluja (Google, Inc.)
  Simon Harper (University of Manchester)
  Susan Dumais (Microsoft Research)
  Tessa Lau (IBM Almaden Research Center)
  Yutaka Kidawara (National Institution of Communications and Technology)