User Interfaces; Who Cares?

According to Michael Stonebraker’s experiences, if you select a group of well-known experts in database research and ask them to identify the domains where meeting use+ requirements is of primary importance and at the ‘same time more significant advances are needed and more research should be promoted, user interfaces comes out as number one in the list. This has been the case over the last decade. Despite such a strong incentive, research on user interfaces seems to remain marginal within the database community. Part of this community considers that this is a domain for development, not for research. Often researchers feel that the specification of an user interface is not much more than assembling widgets in some order. Significantly, the VLDB 94 program offers no contribution on user interfaces. This panel will try to investigate the reasons for such a gap between discourse and practice, and look for remedies. It will start by setting the scene: