Date:
Wednesday 3 June 2026, 1:00pm to 2:30pm AEST
Location:
Online
Link: Click here to join the Webinar
Abstract
Please join us for the Canberra HCI/AI Online Symposium 2026, co-hosted by the ACM SIGCHI Chapter for Canberra and the ACM Women in Computing Professional Chapter. This event features five researchers from the Canberra HCI, AI, and Robotics community, showcasing their latest research through a series of presentations.
Please see the schedule, list of presenters, and presentation titles below.
| 1:00 – 1:05 pm Welcome and Introduction |
| 1:05 – 1:20 pm Presentation 1 How to design technology solutions for older Australians with mild cognitive impairment to maximise adoption and ongoing use Snezna Bizilj Schmidt, University of Canberra Email: snezna.schmidt@canberra.edu.au Biography Snezna is a PhD Researcher in the Information Technology and Systems, and Health faculties at the University of Canberra. Her professional experience is in service design and solution evaluation in federal government agencies. She is passionate about designing technology solutions which are user focussed and which include co-design and user centred activities to include target users during the design process. |
| 1:20 – 1:35 pm Presentation 2 Development of a Self-Modulating Model for a Robotic Embodied System Nipuni Wijesinghe, University of Canberra Biography Nipuni Wijesinghe is a PhD student in the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Canberra, with a background in computer science and three plus years of industry exposure. Her research interests are centred around the fields of embodied AI, human-robot interaction, social presence of robots, and the modulating presence of embodied systems. Through her work, she aims to explore and enhance the interactions between humans and robotic systems. |
| 1:35 – 1:50 pm Presentation 3 Resource-Aware AI: Adapting Federated Learning to Computational Heterogeneity Jifeng Chen, UNSW Canberra Biography Jifeng Chen is a PhD student at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra. His research focuses on Machine Learning, Federated Learning, and Distributed Systems. He is dedicated to addressing core algorithmic challenges in decentralized AI, with a particular interest in optimizing large-scale model collaboration and algorithmic privacy. |
| 1:50 – 2:05 pm Presentation 4 SwarmChat: Designing Multimodal AI Interfaces for Human–Swarm Collaboration Ettilla Mohiuddin Eumi, UNSW Canberra Google Scholar Biography Ettilla Mohiuddin Eumi is a PhD student at UNSW Canberra researching human–computer interaction, multimodal human–swarm interaction, cognitive-load-aware interface design, and AI-supported robotic systems. Her PhD project, SwarmChat, investigates how humans can communicate with robot swarms through text, voice, and gesture, and how structured interaction design can improve task performance, usability, cognitive effort, and user confidence. She has 4 peer-reviewed publications, including 1 journal article and 3 conference papers, and received a Best Student Paper Award for her SwarmChat work. |
| 2:05 – 2:20 pm Presentation 5 Expectation Gaps and Perceived Performance: Key Drivers of User Adoption in HRI Aurora Hu, University of Canberra Biography Aurora is a PhD candidate at the Collaborative Robotics Lab with a background in psychology and criminology. She has experience in VR-assisted experiments, public health-oriented research, and forensic psychology studies. Her PhD focuses on Human-Robot Interaction, with an emphasis on the expectation gap and its role in shaping user trust and robot adoption. |
| 2:20 – 2:30 pm Closing and Announcements |