Hamed Alavi

Hamed 's research is focused on the future of human's interactive experiences with built environments. Particularly, he is interested in the engagement of computer science in the evolution of buildings and urban spaces as they increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence, context-aware automation, and interactivity.
What are the specific attributes of building that HCI and Ubicomp researchers should take into account when shifting attention and scale from "artefact" to "architecture", from usability and engagement to occupant comfort across multiple dimensions (e.g., thermal, visual, acoustic, respiratory), and from (often) short lifespan or discretionary to durable and immersive experiences? These and other questions that embody the complexity of our interactive experiences with built environments define the scope of Hamed's research, which he has been developing with the notion of Human-Building Interaction.

Sample Publications:

• Alavi, Hamed S., Himanshu Verma, Jakub Mlynár, and Denis Lalanne. "The Hide and Seek of Workspace: Towards Human-Centric Sustainable Architecture." In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p. 75. ACM, 2018.

• Alavi, Hamed S., Elizabeth Churchill, David Kirk, Henriette Bier, Himanshu Verma, Denis Lalanne, and Holger Schnädelbach. "From Artifacts to Architecture." In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 387-390. ACM, 2018.

• Verma, Himanshu, Hamed S. Alavi, and Denis Lalanne. "Studying Space Use: Bringing HCI Tools to Architectural Projects." In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 3856-3866. ACM, 2017.

• Alavi, Hamed S., Himanshu Verma, Michael Papinutto, and Denis Lalanne. "Comfort: A Coordinate of User Experience in Interactive Built Environments." In IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 247-257. Springer, Cham, 2017.

• Alavi, Hamed S., Farzaneh Bahrami, Himanshu Verma, and Denis Lalanne. "Is Driverless Car Another Weiserian Mistake?." In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 249-253. ACM, 2017.

• Alavi, Hamed S., Elizabeth Churchill, David Kirk, Julien Nembrini, and Denis Lalanne. "Deconstructing Human-Building Interaction." interactions 23, no. 6 (2016): 60-62.

Brief biography

Hamed Alavi joined UCLIC, the UCL Interaction Centre as a visiting researcher in April 2018, from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where he is a lecturer. He holds a PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Hamed's doctoral research contributed to the application of ubiquitous technologies in classroom education, particularly ambient interfaces that can encourage and support collaborative learning.