Workshops

SYNERGY - Designing and Building Hybrid Human-AI Systems

Full day

This workshop addresses the critical challenge of designing AI systems that genuinely augment human capabilities through meaningful collaboration, moving beyond human-in-the-loop approaches where humans function as mere cogs in the machine. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into creative and decision-making processes – directly aligning with AVI 2026's theme of "Interactive Creativity: Agencies, Interfaces, and Ethics" – understanding how to design truly synergistic human-AI systems becomes paramount. The workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to advance both theoretical frameworks and practical implementations that preserve human agency while leveraging AI's computational power.

Organizers:

• Tommaso Turchi, University of Pisa (Italy)
• Alan Dix, Cardiff Metropolitan University (UK)
• Ben Wilson, Swansea University (UK)
• Matt Roach, Swansea University (UK)
• Alessio Malizia, University of Pisa (Italy)

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Designing Advanced Interfaces for Learning and Teaching

Half day

The goal of this workshop is to present an overview of ongoing research on innovative and AI-enhanced Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for teaching and learning. The workshop focuses on how emerging interaction paradigms, such as adaptive interfaces, multimodal interaction, and game-based learning, can support richer, more engaging, and more inclusive Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) experiences. The discussion will be framed around three research questions that remain insufficiently explored:

1. How can we facilitate the design and evaluation of Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) systems that promote effective learning, quality of experience, well-being, and inclusivity with innovative HCI?
2. How can we adapt TEL systems to the complexity of educational environments?
3. How can we model users in TEL systems to take into account their diversity (age, educational level), their preferences and constraints in HCIs?

After their presentations, each researcher will be invited to showcase their work in the form of a demonstration and to contribute to the creation of a mind map illustrating the current trends and future directions related to these 3 questions. The ultimate goal is to bring participants together around a joint publication on the future challenges and opportunities of the field.

Organizers:

• Audrey Serna, INSA de Lyon (France)
• Antonio Bucchiarone, University of L'Aquila (Italy)
• Iza Marfisi, Le Mans Université (France)
• Sebastian Simon, Copenhagen University (Denmark)
• Arnaud Prouzeau, Université Paris-Saclay (France)
• David Bertolo, Université de Lorraine (France)
• Elise Lavoué, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (France)
• Alina Glushkova, Mines Paris (France)

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2nd Workshop on Innovative Interfaces in Digital Healthcare (INI-DH)

Half day

This workshop addresses the growing gap between rapidly evolving digital health technologies (e.g., wearables, AR/VR, AI-driven systems) and the limited research on how to design effective, accessible, and engaging visual interfaces for these solutions.
It is timely for the AVI community because immersive and intelligent interfaces are becoming central to diverse domains of application, and particularly in health, including healthcare training, patient engagement, and clinical decision-support. Despite this growing interest in the research community, there is still a lack of shared design principles and evaluation frameworks.
The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to identify current challenges, define research priorities, and outline actionable design directions for next-generation digital health interfaces.

Organizers:

• Teresa Onorati, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain)
• Paola Barra, University of Naples Parthenope (Italy)
• Andrea Antonio Cantone, University of Salerno (Italy)

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GUIDE - Generative UI and Dynamic Experiences

Half day

Vibe Coding is evolving rapidly, yet current research focuses mainly on code generation and overlooks the broader opportunity to transform raw user content into structured, interactive, domain-specific interfaces. This workshop is timely for the AVI community as generative systems increasingly reshape how users capture, reinterpret, and manipulate information, opening unexplored design, methodological, and evaluation challenges. Our objective is to define the research agenda for this next paradigm of Generative User Interfaces by identifying key questions, use cases, and interdisciplinary pathways that will guide future work.

Organizers:

• Christophe Hurter, ENAC, Toulouse (France)
• Nathalie Henry Riche, Microsoft Research Lab - Redmond (USA)
• Kori Inkpen, MSR, Microsoft Research Lab - Redmond (USA) 
   

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CoPDA2026 - 10th International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age
Exploring the Relationship between EUD, AI-Assisted Development, and Meta-Design

Full day

Meta-design promotes the creation of socio-technical environments that can evolve in the hands of the users. From a technical perspective, meta-design has traditionally involved variable participation and learning effort from end users, fostering different types of End-User Development (EUD) activities related to software programming. 
The recent role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are playing in system design and development, mainly with co-piloting and vibe coding, promises to transform EUD into a more spontaneous, creative, and inclusive activity with a wide range of applications. However, several issues affect AI-assisted development, such as sustainability, unpredictability, overreliance, and scalability (just to name a few). Potential harms and damages caused by AI-based technologies must be minimized. At the same time, as the possibility of errors or hallucinations may exist, there must be interaction paradigms to inform humans about the processes that generated outputs (e.g., explanations) providing an overall vision of the context that allows them to make informed decisions.
Symbiotic AI (SAI), an emerging perspective and specialization of Distributed Cognition, explores the synergistic possibilities of “AI and Humans” by empowering humans to take advantage of capabilities that modern AI (LLM) systems can contribute and at the same time, humans engaged in EUD and Meta-Design will improve the computational components.
This edition of the CoPDA workshop aligns with the 2026 AVI’s main theme “Interactive Creativity: Agencies, Interfaces, and Ethics” by investigating how EUD, Meta-Design, and Cultures of Participation could and should evolve in the AI era. With a focus on socio-technical system design, the workshop will identify unique promises and pitfalls of AI for rethinking and reinventing learning, working, and collaborating in the AI age. The 4Cs (critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication) will be discussed and critically evaluated as 21st-century skills required to cope with the wicked problems and the design trade-offs that our world faces.

Organizers:

• Barbara Rita Barricelli, University of Brescia (Italy)
• Gerhard Fischer, University of Colorado (USA)
• Daniela Fogli, University of Brescia (Italy)
• Anders Mørch, University of Oslo (Norway)
• Antonio Piccinno, University of Bari (Italy)
• Stefano Valtolina, University of Milano (Italy)

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Evaluation of Advanced Multimodal Interfaces
Towards New Methodologies

Full day

As interfaces become increasingly advanced and multimodal, ranging from complex dashboards to XR applications, traditional evaluation methods and questionnaires are often inadequate for capturing the full spectrum of user experience. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the development of new evaluation instruments and heuristics tailored to contemporary multimodal interfaces. The expected outcome is a modular questionnaire framework that supports rigorous and flexible assessment of user experience (including both qualitative and quantitative measures) across diverse interaction modalities.

Organizers:

• Camilla Forsell, Linköping University (Sweden)
• Niklas Rönnberg, Linköping University (Sweden)

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Future Horizons in Human-AI Interaction
Joint Perspectives from HCI and AI

Half day

Recent advances in AI, from generative models to socially interactive agents, present new opportunities and challenges for user interaction, creating a pressing need for joint HCI and AI perspectives on designing human-centered AI systems. This workshop addresses the gap between AI development and human-centered design by bringing together researchers and practitioners from both communities to explore future horizons in Human-AI interaction. The topic is timely and relevant to AVI 2026’s theme of “Interactive Creativity: Agencies, Interfaces, and Ethics”, as the proliferation of AI technologies raises fundamental questions about user agency, transparent interfaces, and ethical design. The goal of the proposed interactive workshop’s goal is to formulate shared guidelines, research directions, and collaborative initiatives that will shape the next generation of interactive AI systems in a human-centered, socially responsible manner.

Organizers:

• Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg (Germany)
• Cristina Conati, University of British Columbia (Canada)
• Shelly Levy-Tzedek, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel)
• Maristella Matera, Polytechnic of Milan (Italy)
• Micol Spitale, Polytechnic of Milan (Italy)
   

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Distributed Agency and Multimodal AI Interfaces
Meaning, Human-Centric Implications, and Pathways to Design and Implementation

Half day

Multimodal AI systems promise more natural, expressive, and creatively rich interactions, yet they complicate how users convey intent and maintain agency.
As these systems rapidly move into everyday practice and agency becomes increasingly distributed between humans and machines, urgent questions arise around responsibility, trust, creative authorship, and the design of meaningful human-AI decision-making.
This workshop will bring the AVI community together to clarify the concept of distributed agency, including its implications for human and computational creativity, and to develop human-centric design pathways for multimodal AI systems.

Organizers:

• Umberto Domanti, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy)
• Angela Faiella, University of Bologna (Italy)
• Caterina Moruzzi, University of Edinburgh (UK)
• Chiara Natali, University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
• Anna Rezk-Parker, University of Glasgow (UK)
• Mario Mirabile, University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain); University of Bologna (Italy)

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Advanced Visual Interfaces for Cultural Heritage (AVI-CH) 2026

Full day

Following the wealth of studies and publications in recent years focusing on exploring the potential of novel technology to enhance CH experience, the success of AVI-CH 2016 (that yielded a follow-up special issue focused on advances visual interfaces for cultural heritage) and its following editions, the goal of the workshop is again to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in exploring the potential of state of the art, advanced visual interfaces in enhancing our daily cultural heritage experience, but this time with an emphasis on Hybrid Reasoning Methods behind Interactive Cultural Heritage Applications. This topic aims at bringing forward a discussion about how to guide visualisation strategies through automatic reasoning methods drawing from both symbolic and probabilistic methods, combining them into a new view of AI approaches dedicated to better understanding Cultural Heritage. The goal of the workshop is to establish the role of an emerging field of AI, which has the potential to bridge past and modern approaches, in the field of CH, one of the main ones in applying new interactive technologies for social good.

Organizers:

• Antonio Origlia, University of Naples Federico II (Italy)
• Julia Sheidin, Braude College of Engineering (Israel)
• Tsvi Kuflik, The University of Haifa (Israel)
• Niccolò Pretto, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy)

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CIVICS 26 - Citizen scIence adVanced InterfaCes
From Sensing to Sensemaking

Full day

Citizen Science (CS) has democratised urban data collection through low-cost sensors, mobile applications, and IoT platforms, enabling communities to actively monitor their environments. However, a critical gap persists between data collection and meaningful action: while DIY and mobile technologies now enable citizens to gather hyperlocal data, their capacity to interpret, analyse, and act upon this information remains limited. This gap also raises important questions related to social justice, ethics, and agency – who has access to urban data, who can understand and make sense of it, and whose voices inform decisions that shape the city?
These concerns are particularly consequential in fragile urban ecosystems, where environmental vulnerability, heritage preservation, and community resilience are deeply intertwined. In such contexts, equitable access to data and the tools to visualize and interpret it is not only a matter of civic participation but a precondition for agency and inclusive and sustainable urban transformation. Addressing this gap requires designing technologies and advanced interfaces that reduce barriers to data literacy and empower diverse communities – including those historically excluded from urban decision-making – to contribute meaningfully to the future of their cities.
As visual and interactive systems become central to how people engage with complex data, the AVI community is uniquely positioned to address how advanced interfaces and interactive creativity can mediate between citizen sensing and urban transformation. Venice, hosting AVI 2026, exemplifies the fragile urban ecosystem: a city facing hydro-geological vulnerability, mass tourism pressures, and demographic decline. This context offers a timely opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners from Human-Computer Interaction and the data visualisation field to critically examine how advanced interfaces can support bottom-up approaches to urban challenges.
The workshop aims to:

1. map current approaches linking citizen-driven sensing, data visualisation, and urban decision-making;
2. identify design challenges and opportunities for supporting data literacy and collective sensemaking in fragile ecosystems;
3. foster dialogue between HCI researchers, designers, urban practitioners, and city representatives.

The expected outcome is the consolidation of a community of practice around citizen-driven urban transformation, with a shared research agenda connecting visualization, citizen science, and actionable urban interventions and social justice.

Organizers:

• Catia Prandi, University of Bologna (Italy)
• Simone Mora, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
• Diego Morra, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
• Alberto Martinetti, University of Twente (The Netherlands)

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Advances in Map-based Interfaces and Interactions

Full day

The main objective of this workshop is to provide a collaborative informal venue for its participants to showcase their latest design, research, or professional work on map-based interfaces and interactions and to share their diverse research and practical expertise, best practices, learnings, and experiences with each other. Through this, the workshop also aims to help the participants to further develop their work and contribute to future research and design in their specific fields in an interdisciplinary manner.

Organizers:

• Masood Masoodian, Aalto University (Finland)
• Saturnino Luz, University of Edinburgh (UK)

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Interfaces to the Futures of the Past
Identifying requirements for the design of interfaces that will support and encourage ‘sociable’ individual and collective interaction with machine learning outputs for the purposes of the exploration and improvement of historical data, its semantic model

Full day

Semantic knowledge graph databases offer exciting possibilities for modelling historical data and enabling nuanced exploration of lived experience, but they require large volumes of carefully prepared data and remain limited by the unreliability of machine-learning outputs at scale. Dynamic, interactive, or “conversational” forms of data visualisation offer a way to sustain human engagement with such data, motivating annotation, correction, and higher-level reflection on mis-conceptualisation, but often demand new visual grammars and interaction principles. This workshop will open a conversation within the AVI community around this formulation of a “social machine,” with the aim of identifying requirements and good practice for the design of sociable, exploratory visualisation components that support human-AI co-production, aimed at documenting a shared set of design requirements and principles for sociable, exploratory visualisation components that support human-AI co-production and the development toward future funding applications.

Organizers:

• Andrew Richardson, University of Northumbria (UK)
• Alex Butterworth, Science Museum/University of Sussex (UK)

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Intelligent Information Management Systems supporting Trust, Reproducibility, Regulations, Visualizations

Half day

AVI has a long history in visual interfaces and more specifically in information visualization user interfaces and data analysis. In the scientific landscape data analysis has been supported initially by Machine Learning, now also by Artificial Intelligence. Currently we are also assisting a visible growth of bioinformatics and genomics. This workshop addresses such topics by focusing on the intersection of these technologies, covering challenges in data storage, access and ethics.
The overall goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers active in the areas of AI and ML, Big Data analysis, and visualization to support the research and data science activities employing, transforming, enriching, and deploying AI and ML models and algorithms as well as intelligent advanced visual user interfaces supporting creation, configuration, management, and usage of distributed Big Data analysis.

Organizers:

• Paolo Buono, University of Bari (Italy)
• Philippe Tamla, Fernuniversität Hagen (Germany)
• Thomas Krause, Fernuniversität Hagen (Germany)
• Haithem Afli, Munster University of Technology (Ireland)
• Matthias Hemmje, Fernuniversität Hagen (Germany)

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Rethinking Artistic Research in the Age of AI
New Frameworks, HCAI Practices, and Challenges

Half day

Artistic research is increasingly conducted through intelligent visual and interactive interfaces: generative image and sound tools, multimodal dashboards, interactive repositories, and mixed reality environments. These systems reshape how artists inquire, document, and share knowledge, redistributing agency among artists, AI models, datasets, and institutions.
This workshop explores how advanced visual interfaces, possibly based on intelligent interaction paradigms, can support artistic research in the age of generative AI. We invite contributions that present design cases, prototypes, and critical reflections on tools and environments created for and with artists and art schools. Of particular interest are interfaces and Human-Centred AI approaches that make agency visible and negotiable, foster critical and ethical stances toward AI, and enable learning ecosystems across academies and universities.
The workshop aims to create a venue where HCI researchers, designers, artists, and art educators can:

1. map current and emerging interaction paradigms for AI-supported artistic research;
2. discuss responsible and inclusive approaches to intelligent interfaces in artistic contexts;
3. share examples of platforms, repositories, and tools that foreground artistic agency and creative self-actualization. 

Organizers:

• Claudio Pomo, Polytechnic of Bari (Italy)
• Carmelo Ardito, Polytechnic of Bari (Italy)