- Marta E. Cecchinato is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer and Information Science Department at Northumbria University. Prior to this, she has worked at the UCL Interaction Centre and at Microsoft Research in Cambridge (UK). She has a BSc (Hons) and MSc in Psychology from University of Padua (Italy) and a PhD in human-computer interaction from the UCL Interaction Centre. Her research focuses on understanding and promoting digital wellbeing. In particular, she is interested in the impact technology can have on productivity, and has developed interventions around work-life balance for various stakeholders, such as students, knowledge workers, and junior doctors. Her work on the complexities of dealing with digital technologies in everyday life was awarded best paper (CHI 2016, top 1%). More recently, she has been working on understanding how to improve students’ mental health through digital interventions and, separately, how to better support parental leave through digital technologies. In addition to her extensive publications, her work has been featured in academic and non-academic magazines, such as the New Scientist and IEEE Computer.University profile: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/c/marta-cecchinato/
Personal website: http://www.cecchinato.me/ - Contact: marta.cecchinato@northumbria.ac.uk
Dave Kirk
I am Professor of Digital Living in the School of Computer and Information Science. I study Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the design of interactive computational technologies. I'm particularly interested in design research methods and the ways in which technology design can be centred on rich understanding of user experiences, cultures and contexts.
I have previously held positions as Senior Lecturer of Experience-Centred Design and then Reader in Cultural Computing at Newcastle University, Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction in the Mixed Reality Lab and School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, and as a post-doc in the Socio-Digital Systems group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. My background is in Psychology (BSc) and Ergonomics (MSc) with a PhD in Computer Science. Over the years my work has been heavily influenced by the sociologists, philosophers and designers that I've collaborated with and consequently I take a design-led, social science orientation to understanding human experience and its application to the design of digital technologies. Accordingly, and although trained as an experimental scientist, my research is increasingly based on qualitative methods and design-research practices.