Sylvain Malacria

Loki group

Inria Centre at the University of Lille

Batiment B, bureau B102

40, avenue Halley - Park Plaza

59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq, France

Phone: +33 (0)3 59 35 8785

sylvain dot malacria at inria dot fr

Latest news:

2024 Feb. 21st:

Two papers conditionally accepted. First is DirectGPT, a work led by Damien Masson in collaboration with Dan Vogel and Gery Casiez that has been conditonally accepted to CHI 2024. The other is GUI Behaviors to Minimize Pointing-based Interaction Interferences, led by Alice Loizeau in collaboration with Mathieu Nancel that has been accepted to TOCHI.

2023 Dec. 21st:

Very happy for Eva Mackamul successfully defended her PhD on Investigating the Influence of Visual Signifiers to Foster the Discovery of Touch-Based Interactions. Congratulations Dr. Mackamul. Wish you the best in the future.

2023 Oct. 25th:

I have just successfully defended my HDR thesis on why interaction methods should be exposed and recognizable in front of my family, friends, colleagues, and a fantastic Jury.

I am a research scientist (Chargé de Recherche 1ère classe, HDR) at Inria, in the Loki group. Prior to that, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University College London and at the University of Canterbury (New-Zealand). I did my Ph.D. at Télécom ParisTech, and passed my Master Degree at UPMC in Artificial Intelligence with a speciality in HCI. I am also an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada (2021-2024).

My research interests are in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), with additional focus on designing interactive systems and interaction techniques that can be easily discovered and learned by novice users, while still yielding high performance to more practiced users. More generally, I am highly interested in how interaction can be communicated to the user to foster its discovery. If you are curious about my research, giving a look at the selected publications below should provide a decent overview.

I currently am the Principal Investigator of the ANR JCJC Discovery project (2020-2024) that investigates the design of Graphical User Interfaces that would better support the discovery of their interactive principles.

Selected Publications

Why interaction methods should be exposed and recognizable (HDR)
[PDF]
Statslator: Interactive Translation of NHST and Estimation Statistics Reporting Styles in Scientific Documents (UIST' 23)
[PDF]
Exploring Visual Signifier Characteristics to Improve the Perception of Affordances of In-Place Touch Inputs (Mobile HCI' 23)
[PDF]
Studying the Visual Representation of Microgestures (Mobile HCI' 23)
[PDF]
Charagraph: Interactive Generation of Charts for Realtime Annotation of Data-Rich Paragraphs (CHI' 23)
[PDF]

Ongoing student supervisions

  • Suliac Lavenant (PhD Student funded by the ANR MIC project, co-supervised with Laurence Nigay, Alix Goguey and Thomas Pietrzak)
  • Raphaël Perraud (PhD Student funded by the Discovery project and Région Hauts-de-France)
  • Vincent Lambert (PhD Student at Grenoble Alpes University, co-supervised with Laurence Nigay and Alix Goguey)
  • Constant Yuan Chen (PhD Student in co-tutelle with University of Waterloo, co-supervised with Géry Casiez, Daniel Vogel and Edward Lank)

Previous student supervisions

  • Eva Mackamul (Defended Dec. 21st 2023, co-supervised with Géry Casiez)
  • Damien Masson (Defended Aug. 2nd 2023, co-supervised with Géry Casiez, Daniel Vogel and Edward Lank) -- Now Post Doc at University of Toronto
  • Axel Antoine (Defended Jan. 29th 2021, co-supervised with Géry Casiez) -- Now lead software engineer at Stereograph
  • Nicole Pong (Defended Oct. 21st 2020, co-supervised with Stéphane Huot and Nicolas Roussel)