The Interactive Critical Systems (ICS) team at IRIT carries out research centered in the field of Human-Computer Interaction with a specific on the engineering of interactive systems. The mains scientific contributions deal with notations, processes and tools for the design, implementation and evaluation of interactive systems thus having a strong bias towards software engineering or more specifically the validation and verification aspects of interactive systems and technologies. ICS team focusses on the integration of multiple and sometimes conflicting properties such as usability, user experience, dependability and safety.

Human-Computer Interaction is by nature a multidisciplinary domain involving disciplines such as computer science, software engineering, psychology, ergonomics, … However, ICS team does not includes lecturers from these domains but rather collaborate with researchers in those disciplines through projects (e.g. 3 projects CORAC (FENICS, IKKY-MAGIC and IKKY-MATRHICS with Airbus Commercial Aircrafts) and international (e.g. secondment of Philippe Palanque at TU/E Eindhoven in 2019) but also with shared supervision  shared PhD supervision in different domains:

• Fault tolerance for interactive systems (J-C . Fabre LAAS ) ;
• Human factors for critical command and control systems (A. Pasquini DeepBlue) ;
• Multimodal and multitouch interactions in critical contexts (focus on interactive cockpits) (Y. Deleris Airbus).

More details about projects (both running and finished) can be found on ICS web site.

ICS team is renowned for its research in HCI at regional, national and international levels:

• Regional visibility with the management of the HCI master created in 2000 (Master informatique Interaction Homme-Machine) ;
• National visibility with the recuring participation in the organisation of the main events in HCI including presidence of IHM 2009 (the Francophone conference on HCI) and the long lasting support to AFIHM with the presidence and participation of the steering committee of IHM conference series.
• International visibility with the presidence of the IFIP Technical Committee TC13 on Human Computer Interaction. Beyond, ICS team members have a major participation in the ACM SIGCHI leadership with long lasting involvement in its Executive Committee and via the chairing of the steering committee of ACM CHI conference series.

The research contributions have been applied in various domains (but mainly to aeronautics and space) such as:

• Air traffic control and more precisely user interfaces and interactions for air-ground communications with data-link technologies but also with automation design and impact of automation on controlers work (HALA ! research network and SPAD project) ;
• Interactive cockpits both military (multimodal interactions (head tracking, voice recognition, multiple joysticks, touch) in collaboration with Thales) and civil (interactive applications compatible with « ARINC 661 specification » standard) in collaboration with Airbus‏ ;
• Future multi-touch cockpits in close relationship and collaboration with Airbus Commercial Aircrafts and Airbus Helicopters ;
• Satelite Ground segments (interactive systems for command and control systems via multiple long lasting cooperations with CNES) ;
• Command and Control systems for drones (in collaboration with French Department of Defense DGA) ;
• Web engineering (in collaboration with Genigraph (now Softeam Group)) ;
• Home entertainment and leisure application domain (including remote controls) with close collaboration with the Austria, company ruwido.
• Working on research projects with leading companies in those domains allow us to access large-scale case studies (otherwise inaccessible), real life data and problems and to ensure take-up ability and usefulness of our research results in industry. For instance, research work carried out with the European Space Agency (ESA) lead to the production of the Handbook on Human Dependability.
• Multiple scientific contributions (international publications in the area of HCI, formal methods and software engineering) as well as more practical ones (ICS tools publicly available to the community and industry) have been produced over the years. Scientific work has been published in main journals in HCI (e.g. ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, Interacting With Computers, Int. Journal on Human-Computer Studies) as well as in safety and dependability (e.g. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Safety Science). The exhaustive list of publication from ICS group (since year 2000) is available here.