IT solutions must be designed by people for people: digital tools must be intuitive to use and make a difference in our daily lives. In fact, technological solutions should be an extension of human abilities, without us thinking about it.

The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays a key role in the technology that surrounds us every day, and for the way the labour market develops, so that new IT solutions can support human use in the best possible way.

One of Denmark’s leading researchers in the HCI field is Susanne Bødker, a computer science professor at Aarhus University, honored multiple times for her research in human-machine interaction.

Since the 1980s, the researcher from Aarhus has worked to design the Danes’ digital everyday lives and working lives, so that technology develops in a constructive way and takes a critical approach to challenges and opportunities.

Currently, she is particularly interested in how hybrid work challenges companies and employees, and fundamentally changes the interaction and relationship between people in a workplace, for better or worse.

– Hybrid work is becoming increasingly widespread, so we must be critical of the technology’s possibilities and limitations, and of the way we organize ourselves and perform management. For example, when a workplace with several hundred employees decides to enable all kinds of activities to take place hybridly in future, it places new demands on personnel management. It changes the nature of work and meetings when employees must be able always to participate remotely. It affects what can be shared with each other, when and how. In fact, it changes everything that participants see, hear, and experience because on the screen, we are still just ‘flat people’, says Susanne Bødker.

Take a critical and investigative look at your organization

When advising organizations on how to best set up as a modern hybrid workplace, it involves considering both the technology, the physical environment, and the management aspects of hybrid work.

– Companies have very different challenges, and the technology must be considered in the specific context. Are you a software company with employees all over the world, struggling with people who do not want to move to Aarhus? Are you a bank looking to replace physical customer meetings with online meetings? Do you simply want people to have the freedom to work from home and only to show up physically at the office a few days a week? In that case, it will be necessary to organize differently so that people work at the office on the same days. Every company needs to address its own reality and current challenges.

Her many years of research in user interfaces and user experiences have led to new methods and theories that have gained international attention. In 2017, she received an ERC Advanced Grant of over 2 million euros from the European Research Council for research in user interfaces for complex human use of computers and the research project “Common Interactive Objects.” The goal was to investigate the possibility of building open and shareable platforms and communities on the user’s terms – and not on the terms of the computer systems.

Recently, she has been participating in the ReWork project, funded by the Digital Research Centre Denmark. ReWork is a multidisciplinary research project where researchers, several companies, and three recognized artists explore the future of the hybrid workplace and, not least, technologies that support aspects such as human needs, work with relationship and articulation, as well as embodiment and presence.

Inspires more women to pursue a career in information and technology

As one of the few female computer scientists and top researchers in Denmark, she has inspired more young women to choose an IT career, over the years. A theme that is important to her. Therefore, she has been active as a member of the diversity committee at Aarhus University. 

One of her strong arguments to young women is that the development in the information and technology field is fundamental to the development and the future of our society. Therefore, as a computer scientist you can look forward to getting influence, good well-paid jobs, and a high degree of freedom.

One of the mayor barriers for using AI and image analysis in the agricultural and food industry is to create confidence that it works. Today, the manual visual inspection of grain remains one of the most important quality assurance procedures throughout the value chain to bring grain from field to table – and to ensure that the farmers get the right price for their grain.

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For most people the term digital microfluidics doesn’t mean a whole lot. But it’s a technology which could revolutionise lab work completely.

“The idea is that whatever a biochemist normally spends a lot of time doing with pipettes, can be done by a chip instead,” Luca Pezzarossa explains and plays a short video of the technology at work.

The lab on a chip is basically a biochemical lab scaled down to the size of a small portable device. The idea is to make tiny droplets of fluid move around on a chip by activating a sequence of electrodes. Luca Pezzarossa’s job is to make the hardware and software work together to move the microfluidic droplets the right way.

“But one thing that is very common in this field is that the people who do this research are not biochemists, ” he says.

The problem with this is that there are real-world constraints, which makes moving the droplets much harder.

“Two droplets cannot go as close as they do in a simulation, because they would touch and merge. Or from a biological point of view, some droplets might leave behind a contaminating residue. Blood that leaves a trail for example, and so other droplets cannot move where this has moved earlier,” Luca Pezzarossa explains.

This represents a difficult problem. To translate from a high-level protocol that is user-friendly – something which is useful for a biochemist – down to a controlling sequence is very difficult. Especially when the constraints are complex real-world issues, like a droplet leaving a contaminating trail of blood on the chip.

“When I presented these challenges at a DIREC seminar, two algorithm-oriented scientists said: ‘This is very cool from a theoretical point of view. We should apply for a DIREC Explore project.’ And we did,” Luca Pezzarossa says.

Digital Research Centre Denmark (DIREC) supports multidisciplinary research – often with external partners – with the so called Explore projects, which are small agile research projects with the purpose of screening new ideas.

So for most of 2022 he worked with two fellow assistant professors, Eva Rotenberg from DTU Compute and Lene Monrad Favrholdt from University of Southern Denmark, on developing algorithms that could do this scheduling and routing on applied cyber-physical systems – while DTU research assistant Kasper Skov Johansen, who is now a PhD student at DTU, did most of the practical work.

Time was precious when a critical machine component broke down and the new spare part had to be shipped all the way from SANOVO in Denmark to Brazil, where the processing plant was idle in the meantime.

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Fortunately, the gap was quickly closed, but system owners and developers worldwide were left with the dilemma of being dependent on logging modules and open source code developed by external companies and developers on the one hand, and having to provide solutions that are both secure and trustworthy.

At Aarhus University and University of Copenhagen, two young researchers, Magnus Madsen and Troels Henriksen, have a potential solution to this dilemma. They will add an extra dimension called effect systems to the programming languages used today. This will make it easier to maintain programs and discover vulnerabilities by keeping track of how code snippets and libraries, which you have not developed yourself, behave.

Denmark is in the lead when it comes to programming languages of the future
We have a long tradition of developing new programming languages, and Danish researchers have developed several of the most used languages. In the 1980s, Bjarne Stroustrup designed the C++ programming language, and Anders Hejlsberg is a core developer on Typescript.

When it comes to the development of the next generation of programming languages that support effects systems, we are once again at the forefront in Denmark with two innovative programming languages. Magnus Madsen and his colleagues from Aarhus University are developers of the programming language Flix, which is a relatively new language. They have developed Flix to combine the best aspects of functional programming and logic programming. The programming language is designed to develop modern applications with a focus on avoiding errors by using a powerful type and effect system.

At the University of Copenhagen, Troels Henriksen and his colleagues have been working on another new programming language called Furthark. The language was originally developed to support complex calculations in the financial sector, where there was a need for computing power that can be provided by graphics card processors. Thus, the language excels in supporting advanced applications that need to be optimized to run in parallel. Furthermore, in Furthark effect systems constitute a key building block.

 
Focus on speed and user-friendliness
Although both programming languages have overlapping functionalities, they are not direct competitors as they are targeted at different areas of work. Therefore, it was only natural that the two researchers started a collaboration supported by the Digital Research Centre Denmark (DIREC), where they were given the opportunity to improve effect systems.

According to Troels Henriksen and Magnus Madsen, there are two major challenges in the practical use of effect systems:

– One challenge is that it may take a long time for a computer to check that the programs that are written comply with the established rules – and this lowers the programmer’s productivity. We therefore focus on optimizing the speed of the translators (compilers) that check the code.

– The second challenge is user-friendliness. If using effects systems requires too much of the programmer and the error messages are too complicated to understand, people will not use them, no matter how many advantages they have. We are therefore also working on making effect systems more user-friendly.

The collaboration across universities has provided a lot of inspiration and created new relationships. Magnus Madsen explains that he has visited the University of Copenhagen several times to talk to their programming language researchers. Each of them has their own opinion and idea on how to solve specific problems, and it has been extremely valuable to gain new perspectives and build new working relationships, he says.

From niche languages to mainstream
To the question of whether large companies in the future will use Flix and Futhark to develop software for example to the financial sector, both Troels Henriksen and Magnus Madsen respond with a smile.

– It is a long and difficult journey to go from niche languages to mainstream. First, we need to get the hobbyist programmers to adopt the languages, and then the languages need to be spread to their networks and workplaces. The big companies are often conservative in their choice of new programming languages, and they are likely to be the last to adopt new languages.

Now the two researchers are focusing on making it as easy as possible to use Flix and Furthark by developing good documentation, guides and web pages, and we will see what the future brings.

Explore the programming languages:

·   https://flix.dev
·   https://futhark-lang.org

Test Flix in an online simulator:

·   https://play.flix.dev

Test Futhark in an online simulator:

·   http://playground.futhark-lang.org/

Read more about the project Ergonomic and Practical Effect Systems