End-user development (EUD) aims at empowering end users to develop and adapt systems at a level of complexity that is adequate to their expertise, practices, and skills. EUD may occur along the entire software lifecycle, with the purpose of making users able to participate in their artifact development, not only at design time, but also during actual use.

Originally, EUD was conceived as a more general concept than end-user programming; thus, scholars proposed methods, techniques and tools that allow end users to modify or extend software artifacts, such as spreadsheets, web applications, video games, and mobile applications. In the co-called Internet of Things era, end-user development moved on to address the problem of defining and modifying the behavior of smart environments, including smart objects, pervasive displays, smart homes, smart cities, and so on. Therefore, the term ‘end-user development’ acquired a broader meaning covering approaches, frameworks and socio-technical environments that allow end users to express themselves in crafting digital artifacts that encompass both software and hardware technology.

Recent research and technological trends like Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data, cyber-security, robotics, and Industry 4.0, have contributed to renew the vision of end-user development, by providing tools and platforms that allow end users to harness the power of AI to create solutions involving computer vision, image processing, conversational user interfaces, as well as solutions for smart environments. Such developments lower the threshold for creating AI solutions, and  expand the programmer base for such solutions, by extending AI application both for professional and discretionary use.

IS-EUD is a bi-annual event for researchers and practitioners with an interdisciplinary approach to EUD, including: Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Human-Work Interaction Design, and related areas.

IS-EUD 2021 Theme: Democratizing AI development

The 2021’s edition of IS-EUD focuses on EUD for AI-based systems, where end users are called on to become end-user developers of intelligent agents, digital twins, collaborative and social robots. This edition would like to discuss the adoption of EUD in new fields, the proposal of novel EUD paradigms, and the impact of AI-based EUD in terms of user acceptability and appropriation. One of the most interesting topics in human-AI interaction is explainability of AI-based systems: research submissions presenting end-user oriented solutions to this problem will be particularly welcome. Theoretical and empirical work analyzing pros and cons of this new EUD wave, identifying requirements for end-user development of AI and acceptance of related solutions is invited. Software infrastructures and eco-systems supporting the re-use of solutions and the emergence of meta-design practices are of particular interest to this community, linking the challenges relating AI to topics central to the IS-EUD community.


Conference Topics

The conference welcomes contributions that:

    describe new, simple and efficient environments for end-user development
    describe new processes, methods and techniques for empowering users to create, modify and tailor digital artifacts
    present case studies and design implications on challenges and practices of end-user development
    develop theoretical concepts and foundations for the field of end-user development

Specific topics include (but are not limited to) the following ones:

    User-oriented orchestration of AI-based devices
    Conversational interfaces for end-user development
    End-user development for big data visualization and exploration
    End-user development for collaborative robotics
    End-user development for social robotics
    End-user development in Industry 4.0
    End-user development and explainable AI-based systems
    Cybersecurity and end-user development
    End-user development in daily life
    Technologies and infrastructures for end-user development
    Empirical studies of end-user development
    Recommender systems to support end-user development
    Cultures of participation and meta-design approaches
    Technology acceptance and adoption studies
    Evaluation of end-user development technologies
    Supporting creative work through end-user development