The study of operational strategies and processes used by human beings has been the place where Cognitive Science and more traditional approaches recently met, and has led to the concept of Human Centered Designs and Technologies. Such a movement is an important challenge for both scientists and firms concerned by human beings in a workday context because the complementarity of cognitive and traditional approaches provide a great number of additional dimensions that allow to design and analyse more complete and complex systems.
This group will be concerned with analysis and modelling of advanced manufacturing, information, or action systems which are strongly dependant on a balanced integration between human and computer skills: collaborative working, cooperation, user adapted interaction, etc. Its activities will be supported both by industrial fields and by scientific research in cognitive sciences and operational research, as well as mathematical and computer modelling.
Several kinds of systems and processes will be concerned: production systems, information systems, action systems, etc. A special challenge is the multiple bind between systems and users, systems and systems and users and users: this raise the question of how a system (resp. a human user) can recognize a human user (resp. a system) and adapt it to its / his / her behavior. The actual development of communication tools (Web, Internet, Intranet, Hypermedia tools, etc.) involving distributed, shared and multi-modal information makes such questions very accurate from social and technical points of view.
As a consequence, the HCP group will be pluridisciplinary and application oriented. It will be mainly concerned by the study of operational strategies and processes. Embodied in the broad domain of information sciences, it will be more concerned with semantics and qualitative aspects than by digital and quantitative ones.