A grand challenge in our networked world is the growth of data. A timely example can be found in the biomedical domain: the trend towards personalized medicine produces big data sets. However, in the life sciences, most data models are characterized by high complexity, which makes manual analysis very time-consuming, often impossible. Computational methods may help; however, we know that the problem-solving ability is located in the human mind and – not in Von-Neumann machines. A strategic aim to find solutions for data intensive problems could lay in the combination of two areas, which bring ideal pre-conditions: HCI deals with questions of human perception, cognition, intelligence, sensemaking, decision-making and interactive techniques of visualization; KDD deals mainly with questions of machine intelligence and data mining, in particular with the development of scalable algorithms for finding previously unknown relationships in data, thus centers on automatic computational methods. A proverb attributed perhaps incorrectly to Albert Einstein illustrates our aim maybe ideally: “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, but stupid. Humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate, but brilliant. Together they may be powerful beyond imagination”. Consequently, our mission is in a novel approach to combine HCI & KDD in order to enhance human intelligence by computational intelligence.

This special session is organized in beautiful Lisbon in the context of the international conference on physiological computing systems, January, 7-9, 2014 . A cross-domain integration and appraisal of different fields provide an atmosphere to foster different perspectives and opinions; it will offer a platform for novel ideas and a fresh look on the methodologies to put these ideas into Business.