Special Sessions
Special Sessions are part of the main IHCI 2026 technical program, highlighting emerging, timely, or underrepresented topics in HCI. Each session brings together 4-6 peer-reviewed papers, optionally complemented by an invited talk or moderated discussion, and runs for 40-60 minutes.
Browse the announced sessions below. Researchers interested in organising a new session should consult the Call for Special Session Proposals .
Inquiries: publication@ihci2026.com
Announced Sessions
Deviceless Multidimensional Human–Object Perception
This special session explores emerging paradigms in device-free human–object perception, focusing on the extraction of multidimensional attributes, including spatial location, motion dynamics, shape and size, and interaction semantics without requiring targets to carry any physical device. By leveraging vision-based techniques and emerging non-vision wireless modalities such as RGB, RGB-D camera, mmWave radar, LiDAR, WiFi Channel State Information (CSI), and 6G Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) base station, the workshop aims to advance HCI community’s goal of creating human-centred technologies that organically augment how we live, work, and learn.
Chairs:
- Dr. David Chieng, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
- Dr. Yi Zhong, Beijing Institute of Technology, China
- Professor Alan Marshall, University of Liverpool, U.K.
- Professor Carlos J. Bernardos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
- Dr. Chee Keong Tan, Monash University, Malaysia Campus, Malaysia
Biomedical Informatics and Image Analysis for Precision Healthcare
Biomedical informatics and next-generation image analysis are rapidly transforming healthcare by enabling the translation of massive biomedical datasets into actionable clinical knowledge. The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), bioinformatics, medical imaging, and multi-omics technologies is driving a new era of precision medicine, where disease diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic interventions are increasingly personalized and data-driven.
Recent advances in medical imaging technologies—including MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound, digital pathology, and microscopy—generate unprecedented volumes of high-resolution data. Efficient management, analysis, and interpretation of these datasets require advanced computational approaches capable of extracting clinically meaningful information while ensuring scalability, reproducibility, and interoperability.
This special session aims to provide a multidisciplinary platform for researchers, clinicians, engineers, and data scientists to present recent advances in biomedical informatics, AI-assisted image analysis, computational biology, and intelligent healthcare systems. The session will emphasize innovative algorithms, translational research, and real-world clinical applications that improve patient care and accelerate biomedical discoveries.
Chairs:
- Dr. Perugu Shyam, Associate Professor, Department of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology Warangal, Hanamkonda, Telangana, India
HAI for Digital Security
The rapid integration of Artificial Intelligence into cybersecurity and digital ecosystems has transformed the way cyber threats are detected, investigated, and mitigated. However, alongside technological advancements, there is an increasing need to ensure that AI-driven security solutions remain transparent, trustworthy, ethical, and centered around human values. This special session aims to bring together researchers, academicians, industry professionals, and practitioners to discuss innovative methodologies, emerging technologies, practical applications, and future challenges in developing human-centered AI solutions that enhance cybersecurity, digital forensic investigations, privacy protection, and digital trust.
Chairs:
- Prof. Manju Khari, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
- Dr. Rajiv Singh, Banasthali Vidyapith, India
- Dr. Arvind Panwar, Galgotias University, India
- Dr. Ankit Agarwal, Galgotias University, India
On-Device AI for Human-AI Interaction
On-device AI can support private, responsive, and context-aware interaction through personal agents that combine visual, spoken, and textual input. Yet generic image understanding quality does not describe whether an agent can complete a meaningful human task. This tutorial therefore uses task-level multimodal cases. In the main physical-to-digital case, a user points a camera at a product or device and asks the agent to identify it, resolve a spoken reference, read relevant labels, search for a compatible item, navigate a graphical interface, and request confirmation before acting. Supporting cases examine step-aware guidance during assembly or maintenance and local visual assistance for sign, object, and hazard queries. Engineers measure grounding, OCR, clarification accuracy, action success, time to first token, peak memory, data movement, fallback, and thermal stability; HCI asks whether people understand system state, control automation, recover from errors, and make informed privacy choices. A systems-to-interaction worksheet links human goals, usage context, engineering proxies, evidence boundaries, and evaluation plans. OptAI’s MeSP research extends the discussion to memory-efficient local adaptation and user controls for consent, inspection, reset, and forgetting. Participants leave with cloud/on-device/hybrid decisions and reproducible evaluation plans for useful, accessible, and responsible multimodal personal agents across diverse devices and everyday usage contexts.
Chairs:
- Junyoung Park, On-Device Gen.AI, OptAI Inc., Republic of Korea
- Seongbae Lee, On-Device Gen.AI, OptAI Inc., Republic of Korea
Human-Centred AI in AEC (HCAI-AEC)
Architecture, engineering and construction have adopted AI faster than they have learned to supervise it. Practices now use generative layout tools, drawing recognition, and schedule prediction on live projects, yet the people accountable for those projects are rarely given the means to interrogate what a model produced or to know when to override it. Progress is measured in model accuracy, while the questions a practising architect asks, whether the output can be checked, who signs it off, and what happens when it is wrong, remain outside the evaluation. This session treats those questions as the research problem rather than as deployment detail. It brings together work on human oversight of AI in design and construction workflows, explainability for spatial and drawing-based data, trust calibration among domain professionals, and organisational readiness for responsible adoption. We welcome empirical studies, system contributions, frameworks, and critical analyses. The aim is a programme that connects the conference’s first topic, trustworthy and explainable human-AI interaction, to a domain that builds the environment everyone else studies interaction within, and where the consequences of uncalibrated automation are physical and long-lived.
Chairs:
- Vivek Kumar Chenna, National Institute of Technology Calicut, India
Connecting Computing and AI Governance in Legal, Medical, Financial, and Cultural Domains
The session focuses on the role of AI governance in four important domains: Legal, Medical, Financial, and Cultural. As AI systems move beyond automation toward autonomous decision-making, it is essential to keep humans at the center of their design, deployment, and oversight. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays a vital role in creating AI systems that are explainable, trustworthy, inclusive, and aligned with human values. It is aligns with the conference track on Human-Centered AI, Ethics, and Governance. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted across critical sectors, there is a growing need for governance frameworks that ensure these technologies are safe, transparent, fair, and accountable. While AI has the potential to transform decision-making and improve efficiency, its widespread use also raises important ethical, legal, and societal challenges that require careful attention. The aim of this special session is to bring together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, healthcare professionals, legal experts, financial specialists, and cultural and heritage scholars to discuss the responsible development and use of AI. By encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration, the session will explore emerging governance frameworks, ethical principles, regulatory approaches, and technical innovations that support trustworthy and human-centered AI. It will provide a platform for sharing ideas, addressing real-world challenges, and identifying practical solutions for deploying AI responsibly across diverse application domains.
Chairs:
- Dr. Vimal Babu Undru, Deputy Controller, Legal Metrology, Telangana — Expertise: Public Policy & Automated Verification Systems
- Dr. Gundala Nagaraju, Entrepreneur & C-Level Authority for AI Governance
- Dr. Keerthana Yadav, Associate Professor, Osmania Medical College, Hyderabad — Expertise: Clinical Safety, Medical Ethics & Healthcare AI
- Dr. DVK Vasudevan, Contemporary World Musician
Propose a Special Session
Want to organise a Special Session at IHCI 2026? Proposals are open until 1 August 2026. See the Call for Special Session Proposals for guidelines, important dates, and submission instructions.