Interview with Beat Signer

Abstract

Beat Signer is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and co-director of the Web & Information Systems Engineering (WISE) research lab. He received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich where he has also been leading the Interactive Paper lab as a senior researcher for four years. He is an internationally distinguished expert in cross-media technologies and interactive paper solutions. His further research interests include human-information interaction, document engineering, data physicalisation, mixed reality as well as multimodal interaction. He has published more than 100 papers on these topics at international conferences and journals, and received multiple best paper awards.

Beat has 20 years of experience in research on cross-media information management and multimodal user interfaces. As part of his PhD research, he investigated the use of paper as an interactive user interface and developed the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel. With the interactive paper platform (iPaper), he strongly contributed to the interdisciplinary European Paper++ and PaperWorks research projects and the seminal research on paper-digital user interfaces led to innovative cross-media publishing solutions and novel forms of paper-based human-computer interaction. The RSL hypermedia metamodel is nowadays widely applied in his research lab and has, for example, been used for cross-media personal information management, an extensible cross-document link service, the MindXpres presentation platform as well as in a framework for cross-device and Internet of Things applications. For more details, please visit https://beatsigner.com.