AVI

Thirteen years ago, when we conceived the idea of a meeting in Italy on the topic of visual interfaces, and we called it Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces to be held in Rome in May 1992, we did not have any idea it could became a series of meetings held every two years, still alive in the new millennium, becoming a Working Conference, and attracting the world leaders in the area. Of course, because of the new class of computers, such as palmtops and mobile phones, new technologies and new possibilities for user interfaces in the information society, AVI has broadened the topics it covers, keeping its main focus on the conception, design, implementation, and evaluation of novel visual interfaces. As a member of AVI Steering Committee, I am very pleased at the AVI success. As the General Chair of AVI 2004, I am happy to host the conference in the region where I live and work.The number of submissions to AVI 2004 has been the highest of all its editions, and of excellent quality. I thank all members of the Program Committee for their hard work in selecting the papers to be presented at the conference and included in these proceedings. The 22 long papers accepted are one fourth of the submissions we received in that category. Short papers report on very interesting and novel work. The third category of papers, system papers, demonstrate various techniques for data and software visualization, data exploration and retrieval, interface generation, advanced interaction. The authors of the papers come from twenty countries worldwide.As usual at the AVI conferences, there are three invited talks, one for each day of the conference, delivered by distinguished researchers. The main topics they address provide the general umbrellas under which most papers in these proceedings have been grouped. The first invited paper is by Michel Bedouin-Lafon, of the University of Paris-Sud, France, who argues that, in order to innovate human-computer interaction products, we have to shift our focus from designing interfaces to designing interaction. Designing Interaction is the title of the first chapter of these proceedings. The second invited paper is by Catherine Plaisant, of the University of Maryland, USA, who discusses the importance of evaluation to improve visualization techniques; more specifically, she addresses the need for better metrics and benchmark repositories to compare tools, and also for reports of successful adoption and demonstrated utility, if we want the tools and ideas that have been promoted for many years to eventually reach the desktop. Improving Visualization is the title of the second chapter. The third invited paper is by Boris de Ruyter and Emile Aarts, of Philips Research, The Netherlands, who present challenges for interaction in ambient intelligence systems that embed interactive displays into our environments to make user-system interaction and content consumption a truly positive experience. Advancing Interaction is the title of the third chapter. Two more chapters are titled Extending to Multidimensional Interfaces and Designing Better Visual Interfaces, respectively.Three workshops have been associated to AVI 2004: one is on Environments for Personalized Information Access, organized by Liliana Ardissono of University of Torino, Italy, and Giovanni Semeraro of University of Bari, Italy; another is on Developing User Interfaces with XML: Advances on User Interface Description Languages, organized by Kris Luyten of Limburgs University Centre, Belgium, Marc Abrams of Harmonia, Inc., USA, Jean Vanderdonckt and Quentin Limbourg of Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium; the third one is on Invisible & Transparent Interfaces, organized by Aaron Quigley of University of Sydney, Australia, and Steven Tanimoto of University of Washington, USA.