HotSoft

This is the home page and blog of the HotSoft research group at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada, directed by Prof. Robert Biddle. Our group stems from a long history of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research at Carleton University, starting in the 1970s with the Computer User Research and Evaluation (CURE) group, later renamed the HOT (Human-Oriented Technology) Lab.

We conduct research in HCI and Software Design and are active in the HCI Graduate Program at Carleton. We are an interdisciplinary group with connections to computer science, cognitive science, psychology, and the humanities. Our emphasis is on design and understanding of software as a new form of interactive media, where the software interacts with human behaviour in rich and subtle ways. We are particularly active in applying our research to computer security are also interested in languages and practices that lead to such richly interactive software. We also used to do research on computer games, but that is not our current focus. If you are interested in that topic, you may wish to look at the work of former lab members Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr now at Concordia University, or that of David Mould or David Thue at Carleton.

We collaborate closely with a number of research groups at the University, in particular work closely with both the Carleton Computer Security Lab (CCSL), CHORUS, and SPIRL. Our work is funded principally through NSERC, the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and have participated in NSERC ISSNet, NSERC SurfNet, the GRAND NCE, and NSERC CLUE. Some papers may be found here.

We are not currently accepting new graduate students.