• User Interface design for online social networks and virtual communities
• User Interface design and evaluation issues for small screen devices (Mobile Entertainment & M-Commerce)
• Impact of Interactive technologies on work and social life
• Practices and opportunities in User Interface design for eLearning

• All submissions must be in English and must include title and author information, including author affiliations.
• Faxed submissions are not acceptable.
• Late submissions will not be reviewed.
• The written paper should include a short abstract, keywords, body, and references (for more detail, please see the USID2008 Conference Publication Format .
• Submissions must not contain proprietary or confidential material and should not cite proprietary or confidential publications.
• All submissions must be in the camera-ready format (PDF). Due to tight publication schedules, revisions will not be possible. The submitted PDF version will be considered the final version of the paper.
• We recommend that you register using an e-mail address for communication between the review panel and the individuals. Important information will be distributed via e-mail for individuals invited to attend the conference, which must be acted on in a timely fashion.
• Submit your papers at usid_callforpapers@usidfoundation.org

Registration: July 31st 2008
Submission Closed

• Originality of the content
• Quality of the content
• Relevance to the theme
• Clarity of the written presentation

Dr.S.Ghosal is currently the Acting Dean of NID's R&D Campus at Bangalore. He joined the National Institute of Design in 1987 in the Faculty of Industrial Design. His parent subject being Ergonomics / Human Factors, he has worked in almost all areas of design. He has been teaching Human Factors and UID both for the UG and PG Courses at NID India since 1987 and was instrumental in developing NID's two PG Programmes in Software and User Interface Design and Information and Digital Design, which were offered during the period 2001-2007. He has guided more than 75 projects (students' projects, research and consultancy projects) in UID and Interaction Design including innovative ones. In his Administrative positions, Dr. Ghosal was in charge of NID's training activities (as Vice-Chairman of the Activity) during the period 1996 – 2000. During the period 2000 – 2002, he was in charge of NID's Outreach Activities (As Chairman of the Activity). As academic and research accolades, till date, he has been the recipient of a number of international scholarships from the World Health Organisation, British Council, International Council of Societies of Industrial Design etc. Dr. Ghosal holds a Ph.D (with specialization in Ergonomics) from the University of Calcutta, a Post Graduate Diploma in Management of Technology and he has about 20 publications, nationally and internationally. Dr. Ghosal's areas of interest in education research and consultancy range from User Interface Design, Management of R&D and Product Innovation, Strategic intervention of design in new business developments and systems development and integration.

Sekhar Muddana is currently working in Hyderabad as a Research Staff Member with CA Labs a small research group within CA. Prior to CA he worked in several start up companies in the USA. He did his Batchelors in computer science from University of Baroda , Masters and Doctorate from Clemson University . He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University and also worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He is interested in various aspects of human computer intera c tion, natural language processing, software engineering and theory of computation.

Presently, Dinesh Katre is Group-head of National Multimedia Resource Centre at C-DAC, Pune. This centre was established under his leadership and with the sponsorship of Dept. of Information Technology, Govt. of India in 1998. Recently, he has envisioned the R&D charter for Human Computer Interaction Design activity at C-DAC. In this responsibility, he manages multiple teams and coordinates between diverse technology development groups. He has Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from BITS, Pilani and M.Des. in Visual Communication from IIT, Mumbai. His Ph.D. research was fully sponsored and hosted by C-DAC. He is interested in the cognitive psychology of technology users, particularly the illiterate users and children. His research includes metaphorical approach to innovation and interaction design, cognitive linguistics, instructional models, visual comprehension, user experience research, remote usability testing, etc. During past 15 years at C-DAC, he has conceptualized and implemented many R&D projects that deal with Digital Library, e-Learning, Game Design, Museum Informatics, Multimedia Authoring and Content Creation. He is the principle designer of many software, content and training products. He has published around 25 research papers in international conferences and journals. He has received many accolades for innovative design and research. He is invited by universities from USA , UK and Denmark to share his expertise in the area of HCI and Usability. During past 2 years, he has delivered over 60 invited talks on wide ranging topics related to HCI and usability at multinational IT companies, research and academic institutes. In the year 2005, he has launched the Journal of HCI Vistas, which is an e-publication meant for awareness creation of usability and to encourage the budding usability practitioners in India .