HCI (Human Computer Interaction) is a field of study that refers to communication between the human user and a computer system. Here interface refers to a medium or interaction between the computer and the end user. It is also known as CHI (Computer Human Interface) or MMI (Man Machine Interaction). It is concerned with design, evaluation, and implementation. It is used to provide a user-friendly environment.
Objective
Human uses digital devices to perform various activities. HCI is to design a systems in such a way that make them efficient, stable, usable and attainable. Lack of communication can result in poor designed user interfaces. It provides a ways to reduce design time through various task models. There are some disciplines contributing to HCI
Computer Science
Computer science is a field of computation and information. Computer science plays a crucial role in modern development of HCI. Smart Television, Voice assistant, AR/VR technology and gaze detection are some of the technology exists in modern world, that are running our day to day life.
Cognitive Psychology
It is a field of HCI which identifies how human interact with systems. It includes Language based interaction, a set of rules are provided to the system. Based on that rules we create our model. It also includes Human motor skills, where we identifies physical characteristics of user and based on that characteristics we create our model.
Fine arts design
An artistic way of thinking always produce creative ideas. E-books and novels, digital drawings, video games are some of the applications of fine arts contributing to HCI.
History
- Early computers was extremely difficult to use, it was large and expensive. It was used by specialists or engineers.
- ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was released in 1945. It was the first programmable electronic and general purpose digital computer.
- In mid 1960's command line interface(CLI) was used to interact with computer. CLI are light weight and requires few memory consumption.
- 1980's are the booming phase for HCI. Some of the market leaders like Apple and Microsoft plays a crucial role for the modern development of HCI. GUI (Graphic User Interface) application was created that was easy to use, understand and visualize.
- XEROX STAR was released in 1981. It had mouse driven graphical user interface and built-in ethernet network and protocol. It also had laser printer. This was considered far ahead of its time. Two years later in 1983 Apple Lisa was released, it offered document-centered graphical interface based on the metaphor of desktop.
- In 1984 first Macintosh was release and it was revolutionary. It had good graphic user interface and a variety of fonts that makes your document more appealing to readers.
- In 1990's internet starts it's journey. Communication between people become very easy through social networking like Email. The World Wide Web(WWW) was created by Tim Berners-Lee. It is way for people to share information.
- In 2000 mobile, laptop, tablet was a buzz word in this period. These gadget provides more flexibility to user. User can connect with anyone at any place. Smart phones comes into picture. User don't need any mouse or pointing device to select anything. They can use their fingers to interact with device. It provides more features like built-in music player, camera, weather forecast, Internet, GPS, games, video conferencing and many more.
- In 2006 NINTENDO released Wii. It was famous for it's rear remote controller a handheld pointing device that detects movements in 3D. It enables users to simulate real world sports and activities through different games. This paved the way for gaming consoles like XBOX
- Windows 10 is a series of operating systems developed by Microsoft released in 2015. It made user experience more consistent between different classes of device. The rising popularity and availability of laptops and computer systems, Microsoft made windows 10 adaptable into different systems.
- VR oculus rift was a revolution in virtual reality. It was launched in 2016. The rift is primarily a gaming device. However it is also capable of viewing conventional movies and videos from inside the virtual cinema environment. It is increasingly used in universities and schools as an educational tool.
omplexity and ComputabilityÂ
Course Description
This course provides a rigorous introduction to the fundamental limits and capabilities of computation. It explores two central questions of theoretical computer science:
- Which problems can be solved algorithmically at all? (computability)
- Among those that can, which can be solved efficiently? (complexity)
The course covers two main areas:
- Computability Theory Turing machines (deterministic and nondeterministic), variants and equivalence of models, the Church-Turing thesis, decidable and undecidable problems, the Halting Problem, recursive and recursively enumerable languages, many-one and Turing reductions, Rice's theorem, and diagonalization arguments.
- Computational Complexity Theory Time and space complexity, asymptotic notation, the classes P, NP, co-NP, and PSPACE, polynomial-time reductions, NP-completeness (Cook-Levin theorem), canonical NP-complete problems (e.g., SAT, 3-SAT, Clique, Vertex Cover, Subset Sum), hierarchy theorems, and selected topics such as circuit complexity, randomized computation (RP, BPP), or the P vs. NP problem