HCC

HCC

Technical Committee 9 (TC9) on ICT and Society hold the Human Choice and Computers conference biennially. The Editorial for the HCC12 explains well what the conference series is about and what it has sought to achieve since the first conference, in 1974.  A fuller chapter in AICT 600 details the history of TC9 and HCC together.

On this page you will find details – as they become available – of the upcoming HCC, and archive material (what survives) of previous HCC conferences.

The last Human Choice and Computers conference, HCC15 took place in 2022, at the Faculty of Global Informatics (iTL), Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan.

The next Human Choice and Computers conference, HCC16, will take place 8th-10th September 2024, at the Dusit Thani Laguna, Phuket, Thailand.

Human Choice and Computers

Fourteen years after the formation of IFIP, in 1974, the Human Choice and Computers (HCC) conference series – the biennial conference of Technical Committee 9 (TC9) – began with its first gathering in Vienna. The conference was led by Heinz Zemanek, as the President of IFIP, with the proceedings, published in the following year by Mumford and Sackman undertaking duties as the editors. In this first conference, trade unionists, social scientists, and computer technologists all expressed their dismay at being reduced to mere tools of management. The participants notably included Fred Margulies who had foreshadowed much of this concern in a paper on trade unionism at the IFIP World Computer Congress in 1970. The overarching outcome was a concern over the way they felt people were being forced to use computers in dehumanizing ways. The consensus of the conference, and of Mumford and Sackman’s subsequent summary chapter in the proceedings (‘International Human Choice and Computers: Conference Retrospect and Prospect’) was that sociotechnical problems, including the use of computer systems, must be solved in ways that include community, national, and especially workers’ interests; that, ultimately, humanistic needs must take precedence over technological and economic considerations.

Since that first conference, the HCC series has firmly remained at the cutting edge of innovative and critical thinking about the interface between the social and technology. The central remit of IFIP’s Technical Committee 9 – of which HCC is the flagship conference – is the relationship between computers and society. As Jacques Berleur, Magda Herschui and Lorenz Hilty related in their introduction to the Proceedings of HCC9, “The success of HCC1 was such that IFIP-TC9 henceforth considered it the TC’s founding event, if not birthplace. TC9 was conceived in 1976, two years after HCC1.”

This founding focus has been repeatedly explored throughout the decades long journey of HCC even surviving the difficult period documented by the third HCC conference proceedings. The emerging distinctiveness of HCC conferences is highlighted by the fact that in 1986 it was the very nature, scope and purpose of the relationship between technology and people that was at the heart of an intensely critical and heated debate. In his introduction to HCC3, Sackman chooses to remind an increasingly diverse readership of the ranked list of objectives for TC9 as:

1.        Protection of Individual Rights
2.        Employment and the Quality of Life
3.        International Problem Solving
4.        International Studies on Social Impacts
5.        Professional Social Accountability
6.        Universal Social Benefits
7.        Protection of Group and Collective Rights
8.        International Planning and Cooperation
9.        International Education

The Proceedings of HCC Conferences have been published every year the conference has run.  Details are also kept going back to HCC5 at the Computer Science Bibliography in Trier, including contents lists.  The  proceedings for many of the conferences are available in the IFIP digital Library, and links are added below.  A short history of the early years of HCC was written by Zamandina Mthembu at the University of Pretoria in 2007.

The conferences are as follows (in reverse order):