Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) discipline is taught in almost all the Computer Science curricula, whose students are typically attracted by computer technologies and inclined to consider the study of user interaction factors less valued. The aim of this workshop is to bring together HCI teachers and practitioners to discuss how to improve quality, efficacy and appeal of HCI courses.

The goal of this panel is to discuss some significant examples of current R&D projects related to visual interfaces, which are part of the different R&D programmes partially funded by the European Commission, and in particular of the Esprit programme. Even if the panel will concentrate on user interface issues, the scope of the presented projects is fairly broad: from user interface development technologies (as in HYPERFACE and INTERACTORS), to banking and financial environments and applications (as in FAST), to hypermedia platforms and applications (as in MINERS), to navigational user interfaces to traditional information systems (as in HIFI), to multimedia educational environments (as in MULTED), to multimedia medical information (as in MILORD), to 3D interaction with data bases (as in FADIVA). All the presented projects make large use of multimedia concepts and technologies.