Alessio Malizia

I am a Professor of User Experience Design at University of Hertfordshire and a distinguished speaker of the ACM (the international Association for Computer Machinery); I live in London but I am a “global soul” and have been living in Italy, Spain and US. I am the son of a blacksmith, but thereafter all pretensions of manual skills end. I began my career as a bearded computer scientist at Sapienza – University of Rome and then, after an industrial experience in IBM and Silicon Graphics, moved on with my career in research. I was visiting researcher at the Xerox PARC where I was appreciated for my skills in neural networks (Multilayer Perceptrons) and as peanut butter and chocolate biscuits eater. I worked as associate professor (and Spanish tapas aficionado) at the University Carlos III of Madrid. I was senior lecturer at Brunel University London for five years where I was teaching and playing videogames. From 2017 I joined the University of Hertfordshire.

My research and teaching interests focus on Human-Centred Systems. I am interested in the design of Ubiquitous Interactive Systems with a special focus on the End-User Development community. I am particularly interested in systems where the physical and digital become seamlessly intertwined producing a new hybrid landscape and the study of problems arising from designing such complex hybrid environments involving collaboration of various disciplines and stakeholders.

In my role at Hertfordshire, I am keen to develop novel approaches and attract funding for improve scientific methods to design almost invisible interfaces embedded in a physical environment naturally exploited by users’ innate interaction modalities.