Dr.  Benjamin Richard Cowan

Dr Benjamin R Cowan is Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Information & Communication Studies in Ireland. He completed his undergraduate studies in Psychology & Business Studies (2006) as well as his PhD in Usability Engineering (2011) at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His research lies at the juncture between psychology, human-computer interaction and communication systems in investigating how design impacts aspects of user behaviour in social, collaborative and communicative technology interactions. Dr Cowan is the co-founder and co-director of the HCI@UCD group, one of the largest Human-Computer Interaction groups in Europe. He is also Co-Principal investigator in the SFI funded ADAPT Centre, a world leading €90+ million Research Centre on AI driven content technologies, where he leads the Interaction and Control research strand. Dr Cowan is an ACM Professional Member and is the co-founder of the ACM SIGCHI In-CoOperation International Conferences Series on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI). He has also been involved in the ACM CHI conference, having acted as Associate Chair (AC-2017-2018; 2021) and Subcommittee Chair (SC- 2021) of the Understanding People: Theory, Concepts, Methods Subcommittee.

• All too human? Exploring the impact of human-likeness in speech interface design
  Speech interfaces are now commonly used through phones, laptops and smartspeakers.  Current speech interfaces fundamentally rely on human conversation as an interaction metaphor, using...
• Perspective taking, partner models and user behaviour in speech interface interaction
  Speech is now a mainstream interaction modality. Design is critical in supporting and informing our perceptions of speech agents as dialogue partners (i.e. our partner models), which are commonly...
• Speech Interfaces: Where we are and where we need to be
  We now interact with voice interfaces on a daily basis. My talk aims to uncover the main trends in human computer interaction based speech interface research over the past 40 years. It discusses...
• Talking my (second) language: How second language speakers interact with voice user interfaces.
  Voice user interfaces are now common. Yet not all functionality is afforded to all languages, leaving some users to have to use a second language to engage through voice, or face being excluded...