Conference Name, Date and Place

This Year's Conference in General

Looking into the program, I do feel there is not many innovations beyond the non-desktop paradigm. The main theme is still the same as last year such as, mobile devices, online representation, navigation, eye gaze, and usability. I wonder if CHI is experiencing some kind of innovation stagnation.

This year's conference talks more about reflection of what the community has reached since the conference first started in 1983. Ben Sneiderman delivered a speech on what the CHI community should be doing more: e.g. HCI for biomedical, politics and voting.

On the positive side, after 25 years of existence, this year CHI pays more attention to try to make a real difference by bringing technology to help communities in underdeveloped countries. The Social Impact Award is given to Gary Marsdenn from University of Cape Town. Gary's research interest is on using mobile technology to help people in South Africa.

I spend my time going to courses to brush up on experiment methods techniques, talk to people to see if they or other people which they know are trying to do the same thing which I am doing, and get inspiration from paper sessions.

Highlight: Social Award for Gary Marsden

The Social Award: Gary Marsden (University of Cape Town), for his work bringing HCI to Africa. Originally from Ireland, did his PhD in UK, moved to Africa in 1998. He tells a story about the cultural and social difference that made us realize that HCI plays an even more important role when trying to help bring technology to Africa. His emphasize Community-Computer Interaction rather then Human Computer Interaction.

In Africa, only 10% people use landline, 10% people have access to Internet, but 77% have mobile phones. So a lot of his research is directed towards finding solutions for the African community using the mobile phone. Some projects: Cell-life. One of his controversial comments: Usability is irrelevant. The reason is, the community desperately needs solution for many of their problems that they are willing to spend many hours learning if the technology helps them solving their problems.

His story of bringing HCI awareness and focus his research towards helping the community despite of all the hardship and obstacles in Africa moved the audience. They gave him a very long applaud. (Research that helps make the world a little bit better is inspiring and definitly worth doing... :-) )

CHI Lifetime Achievement Award: Jim Foley, Past, Present, and Future of HCC Education: What we teach, how we teach

Jim Foley talks about the early days when he started HCI research and the history of HCI community. HCI had many names: the man-computer dialogue, the psychology of computing, etc.

His message is the future of HCI should be more pervasive to other fields. HCI should now and the future be: human-centered computing concerns. (Semantic Media Interfaces group is going in the right way. :-) )

Workshop: Exploratory Search and HCI: Designing and Evaluating Interfaces to Support Exploratory Search Interaction

Organized by Ryen White, Steven Drucker, Gary Marchionini, Marti Hearst, and m.c. schraefel. (website)

Unfortunately I was only listening partially to the workshop, since workshops are not public, but luckily I got hold of the papers which are presented there. It seems exploratory interface research in HCI is concentrated on the usage of tagging and bookmarking. Never the less, its a nice read to know what the state of the art in exploratory search research and know who are the people working on this topic.

Impression: I came across was a paper from CACM 2006: Exploratory Search:from finding to understanding by Marchionini that talks cabout exploratory search research that is a combination of HCI and IR research. There is a lot to be learn from the HCI-IR research, if we want to do a HCI-SW research. Do not reinvent the wheel and learn from them.

Some research on exploratory interfaces are: (Maybe useful for eculture exploratory search applications)

Doctoral Consortium

Henriette got accepted on the doctoral consortium. Her research was: Interaction with user-adaptive information filters.: trust, transparency and acceptance (pdf). She can really recommend it because she gets a lot of useful feedback from HCI experts on her research. In a doctoral consortium session, your research questions and methods will be scruitinized and questioned under a magnifying glass, as a result you can improve your research and you will be better prepared on your defence. (See other doctoral consortium)

Evaluating experience-focused HCI by Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye: His research is about developing methods to evaluate applications which is experienced-based rather then tasked-based. His research is interesting because his research is about developing methods to evaluate a certain application, something which the SWUI community might need to do also for their applications.

Decision-making strategies in design meetings by Erin Friess: She studies how people makes decision. She uses the Toulmin model to explain argumentation within a group. She explains how a group of designers makes argumentation and decision for a design. (Might be interesting for Lynda to model design rule)

Paper: Expert/novice: Dynamic detection of novice vs. skilled use without a task model by Amy Hurst, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff

They tried to detect the type of users automatically. This is useful because once the system can clasify what type of user he/she is then the system can adapt any part of the application to suit the users' need.

What they use for detection: Fitts’ Law, the Steering Law and the Keystroke-Level Model. All methods rely heavily on detecting mouse and keystroke movement.

Relation to my research: we have the same problem but more complex situation: 1. we want to be able to detect what kind of Information seeking mode (FF, IG or JB) the user is currently doing while performing a certain search in eculture. Maybe we can develop some kind of javascript tool to detect mouse movement and combine them with clicks stream to do this.

Course: Information Foraging Theory (IFT) by Peter Pirolli

One of a very important model on information seeking. His model tries to explain how people will best shape themselves to their information environment and how enviroment can be best shaped to people. This theory is developed to understand, predict and imporve human-information interaction. The main idea of IFT:

The theory explains the decision why a person use a certain information source and why change to another source in a mathematical way. The theory suggest that we do some internal cost-benefit analysis that influences our decision when searching for information.

My critique: What this theory does not explain very well is exploratory behavior/serependity searching. I asked Pirolli if he can explain exploration with IFT, to his knowledge he does not know any established theory yet.(The slides are on my desk).

Relation to my research: this is one of the most accepted theory on information seeking, it probably is not very practical for my research now, but it is useful to understand the theory and I might use it for my reports later on.

Course: Card Sorting and Cluster Analysis for Information Architecture Design by Larry Wood et al.

Card sorting is a technique to cluster randoms words. It is used to make thesaurus which may consist of hierarchies. Negative point: It is laborous work if many words need sorting. If my memory serve me right (note to self: check which paper it is), there is a paper about techniques to reduce the work load to cluster many terms.

Relation to my research: eculture has many terms comming from many thesaurus, /facet evaluation shows that it is impossible just to load these thesaurus and let people browse. Probably what eculture needs is a "unified" human-friendly hierarchy. This technique can help.

Course: Emperical Research Methods by Scott Mackenzie

Emperical research methods are most common in HCI, used to test interfaces, different treatments/conditions and see if the interface/treatment/condition make any difference.

Nice tutorial on how to do an emperical research, how to formulate research questions and how to setup a simple research (eg. to know if there is a difference between one condition or another) and how to analyze data.

Interactive Sessions: Semantic Web HCI

Here is my impression of the panel: around 40 people attend, not enough participation from HCI people out side the SWUI people, the panel session ended before its end time.

The session started with Duane asked the attendees if they are familiar with SW (either worked or have some kind of experience with SW), less then half of the attendees raised their hands. Duane began with an introduction about SW and why HCI should care about it. He used three examples of application: mSpace, eculture basic search, and ginseng. Scott explained how protege works, he used the famous pizza ontology example to show how to make classess and assign properties, which was out of scope for the HCI community.

The most interesting talk was by Lisa Battle. She presented her work from last year SWUI workshop (doc). As a HCI practicioner she tries to see where SW technology can be useful for people. She looked into 30 different papers and identified them into tasks.

She explained it well, I can see a potential CHI paper if her work is extended into a more elaborate analysis. One thing she emphasize at her talk (maybe to the wrong community) is that developers are not users! :)

People who contributed in the discussion was m.c.schraefel, Anthony Jameson, me, and a couple of other people.

CHI 2007, 27 April - 4 May, San Jose, California