Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces - AVI'98

I am happy to welcome you to our fourth International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '98) at the Castle of L'Aquila (Italy) this Spring.We have received sixtythree manuscripts out of which about one third were accepted by the reviewers. Three invited speakers will present their recent work: Wendy Mackay (University of Paris-Sud) on Augmented Reality, Rex Hartson (Virginia Tech) on Remote Evaluation of Usability and Moshe Zloof (Hewlett Packard Laboratories) on Ingredients for End-User Programming.The scientific program is based on 22 papers and 11 demos of recent prototype systems. We will also have a Panel on Cultural Interfaces as well as some tutorial courses plus a workshop on Interaction Agents.The presentations cover the following areas: visualization techniques for high quantities of data, usability engineering applied to interfaces, design of multimedia systems and new proposals for enhancing visual interaction during the accomplishement of tasks.I am particularly indebted to the Program Committee and to all the reviewers who have helped us with their hard work to select the best papers for this Conference, while, at the same time, I wish to thank all the sponsors without whom we could never have organized this fourth edition.If software may be seen as a medium for creating vktualities (as in a spreadsheet program, through the use of a desktop metaphor, playing a videogame or browsing the Internet); we may assert that the interface is the main communication channel between such a software and the user who is, always more frequently, a technically unskilled person. It is for this reason that visual interface design is crucial to the success of an application (any practical computer program), but its construction requires a variety of skills, generally found in different professions: graphical art, psychology, usability engineering, computer science and programming.From a broad perspective, we may agree with Kuhn [1] in considering the software system (application program), together with the collected data, as a representation of the work to be done by the user. Moreover, according to Sachs [2], there are two different views of such representation, one in which the set of jobs constitutes the full task and it is explicitly expressed (as in a handbook) and another one, which is implicitly declared, reporting common practices, human relationships and the everyday work practice: I argue that it is this second view which must be reflected in the interface.This particular component of the full software system is indeed responsible for providing the user with the operative modes and tools which s/he will need, use and master, blending function and appearance in a natural way.In order to foster this direction, the ACM has established, only one year ago, a specific award for Interaction Design, which promotes the quality of design for interactive tools and systems which are generally rooted at the interface level.From another perspective, the interface is paramount to the user because it is the incarnation of the application itself, and its effectiveness depends on how the users will interpret what they see on the screen which, in turn, is strongly related to context, cultural codes, shared sensibilities, pragmatics. [3].For all the above reasons, and aiming towards systems where users will be able to work at their own pace, with functions they can easily manage and keeping always full control on the computation, we may conclude by pointing out that the design of good interfaces is a very challenging work and, at the same time, a never-ending one, since application domains are increasing by the day as well as user classes...It is this challenge that has convinced us to keep the AVI Conferences running, hoping that its participants will be encouraged to both exchange and generate new ideas so favouring better systems design in the future, but at present, also to have a good time together.