Issue
Article
Vol.26 No.1, January 1994
Article
Issue
Issue |
Article |
Vol.26 No.1, January 1994 |
Article |
Issue |
The third annual East-West Human-Computer Interaction conference was held in Moscow in early August, 1993. The first meeting of this kind was a single-track symposium held just before the collapse of the USSR in 1991; the second used the East-West name and was held in St. Petersburg in 1992. The conference took place at the International Centre for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI). ICSTI, led by Juri Gornostaev, served as the Russian organizers of the conference. The western organization was chaired by Austin Henderson, with Len Bass and Claus Unger serving as the technical program chairs.
The conference was truly international in nature, as the 89 participants represented 18 countries. Russia and Ukraine sent 58 delegates and represented the "east" (or former Soviet Union). North America and western Europe sent a substantial number of people, but the "west" was also made up of such not-really-in-the-west-geographically nations of Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Obviously, the terms "east" and "west" are used in the historical sense, and not the geographical sense.
The purpose of EWHCI '93 was to bring together those involved in the research, development, introduction and use of interactive systems in these two "hemispheres" to promote the understanding and development of HCI in both areas.
Apple Computer was the major corporate sponsor of the conference. SIGCHI acted as a cooperating society. Several Russian companies also sponsored the event.
Although the main topic of the conference was human-computer interaction, a lot of effort was put into improving the human-human interaction between participants from the east and the west.
The program was made up of 20 papers from the east and 29 from the west, with two papers representing inter-hemisphere coordination. All of the papers were written in English and presented in the traditional lecture style in English, with translators in attendance to help bridge the language gap. It was not uncommon for a question to be asked in one language and the answer given in another, with adequate translation in between.
All of the papers were presented in parallel tracks, with either two or three sessions going on at once. The papers were grouped into nine main themes (see the summaries below).
Each paper was also presented as a poster, where authors were available to discuss their paper face-to-face with other attendees. Translators were also around at this time to help easterners and westerners communicate. Also, all of the poster presenters were asked to write a short summary of their papers in their own language (English or Russian) and then have someone from the other hemisphere translate the summary into the other tongue. This was intended to encourage communication between participants. People presented their posters at the end of the same day that they gave their lecture.
There were also eight posters/demonstrations from the east that were not presented in lecture format, making the poster total pretty balanced east-to-west.
The poster sessions were not too successful, however, since people were often tired at the end of the day. Nonetheless, some very good discussions arose during the poster sessions.
At the beginning of the conference, summary discussants were chosen for each of the nine main themes of the conference. Of the people presenting papers on a particular theme, one person from the east and one person from the west were randomly selected. After attending all of the talks on their theme, these two people then worked together with a translator to produce a summary paragraph in both English and Russian. On the last day of the conference, they read their paragraphs and then each of them gave 5-minute summaries of the papers in their native language. This was quite successful, since it required people from the east and west to get to know each other, and to communicate their understandings of the subject matter. The Russian participants at the conference particularly appreciated hearing summaries in Russian.
The following is a list of the summary session topics, along with the people who worked on each summary and a short paragraph on each topic.
Hypertext (Valery Chelnokov, Keith Instone): There appears to be two major differences between the east and the west with respect to how they are doing research in the field of hypertext. One is technical: the west is using commercial hypertext products while the east is creating their own hypertext programs. The other difference is theoretical: the west is focusing on the user interface to make the information easier to understand, while the east is focusing on ways to re-structure the hypertext network to make it understandable.
Teaching & Learning (Damian Conway, Ruben Gerr, Anna Zueva): The papers presented in this area discussed the enhancement, facilitation and mediation of the educational process. Hence, they were about humans more than about computers. Sometimes the use of computer media was evolutionary (extending an existing paradigm), sometimes it was revolutionary (defining a new paradigm), but always with the same two goals: to empower teachers by creating new channels of communication with students, and to empower students by giving them guided control over their own learning.
Information Visualization/Navigation (Vladimir Averbukh, Matthew Chalmers): The papers reviewed fell into two main areas of the presentation and structuring of information. The first group dealt with the measurement and evaluation of visualization means. The second group applied visualization to a variety of complex information structures. There were also many approaches to the fundamental structuring and presentation of information: what to cut out; what to compress; how to structure information to suit a task, a model of use or individual abilities. The papers in this section covered many areas and the approaches of east and west were mixed among them. It was good to see an increasing concord in approaches, ideas and interests.
Interface Design: Techniques, Tools & Paradigms (Steven Pemberton, Misha Donskoy): There were 7 papers in this section and they were of a fairly diverse nature, so any summary of their content cannot really do justice to them. Similarly, it is rather hard to identify themes and trends within them. However, of the 7 papers, there are 3 themes that can be picked out. The 3 themes are: there is something rotten in the state of user interfaces and this should be changed; automatic support for making user interface design less of an artisan practice and more systematic; and design and implementation issues, where there was a noticeable presence of Petri-net, state-transition diagram, decision tree and data flow techniques.
Customizing Interfaces (Mikhail Zyryanov, Allen Cypher): Several papers at the conference were concerned with adapting interfaces to meet the needs of specific, individual users. The adaptivity can be important because different users have different levels of experience in using a particular program, they have different tasks to perform, and they have different individual interests.
Multi-media (Misha Donskoy, Arthur Karshmer): Multi-media papers primarily focused on the use of the sound channel. Other related talks touched on graphics, but were only tangentially in the area of multi-media. It seems that agreement should be reached on the synchronization of sound and graphical information in multi-media. That is, they should not be considered separate issues. A clearer focus on true multi-media papers should be a goal of this meeting. Finally, as can be seen from the Information Visualization session, new methods for categorizing multimedia information are emerging.
Foundations of HCI (Irina Verenikina, Susanne Bødker): The papers in this section were very different. We can see in them many new ideas and perspectives, such as those coming out of semiotics and activity theory.
Empirical Studies & Experience/Applications (Victor Kaptelinin, Brad Blumenthal): The common feature of the papers in these sessions is that they deal with the people's experience in building, using or testing real systems. One way to organize these papers is to use the stages of the interface development life cycle: user studies, design, implementation, user testing, analysis (and then re-design, re-implementation, etc.). The papers are also distinguished along two other important dimensions: qualitative vs. quantitative methodologies, and papers that describe characteristics of humans vs. papers that describe characteristics of systems. Finally, an interesting distinction between eastern and western papers is that the western papers tended to combine questions about abstract concepts with pragmatic questions in system design, while the eastern papers tended to separate the two.
Expert Systems/Knowledge Engineering (Igor Skorodumov, Alistair Sutcliffe): The papers fell into two groups: intelligent decision support systems and embedded expert systems. Many papers reported adaptation and learning, either by automatic processes or by human assisted adaptation. There were novel approaches to knowledge acquisition and to making knowledge representation that unifies databases with knowledge bases. The papers showed an interesting mix of western logically-based and eastern mathematically-based approaches to inference, with convergence of the two. All papers paid great attention to the human-computer interface with interesting approaches to visualization, intelligent prediction for dialogue and use of speech. It is clear that concepts in HCI are becoming increasingly important for IKES and vice versa.
Several westerners had the opportunity to help eastern authors improve the English wording of their written papers, since these papers will be published as a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science. This was yet another activity which improved contact and communication between easterners and westerners.
Seven papers from eastern participants will be published, along with 26 from western participants. The eastern papers represent some of the very best HCI work from the former Soviet Union to date. The seven papers are:
Eve Wilson was awarded the prize for the best paper on user models and adaptive interfaces for her paper An intelligent interface for computer assisted language learning. She will receive a one-year subscription to the journal User Models and User Adapted Interaction (UMUAI).
In order to integrate some democracy into the conference, we held elections for the best presentations. Each participant was asked to list the five best presentations. Out of the 51 conference presentations, 41 were listed at least once, this proving again the high quality of the conference as a whole. The ten best speakers were awarded nice souvenirs from Suzdal, selected and handed over by Juri Gornostaev.
"HCI" also stood for human-culture interaction. In our field, it seems particularly appropriate to emphasize the importance of culture in understanding people. At EWHCI '93, there was certainly no shortage of culture, as the western participants were kept busy with many events that helped them understand Russian history and the Russian way of life.
For those who arrived early, there were several days of unannounced pre-conference activities, including a tour of the many "Holy Places" of Moscow (which jokingly started off with a visit to the Lenin Mausoleum).
Monday, August 2 was the beginning of the major part of the cultural program. The day was spent at the Kremlin and the incredible Armoury Museum. After the first day of the conference (Tuesday), we had the traditional, toast-filled cocktail reception. Before that, however, was a concert to celebrate the first anniversary of the formation of the local SIGCHI chapter in Moscow. Evening activities during the rest of the week included the Moscow circus and a concert in the old KGB theater. After two days of hard work, both the western and eastern attendees took a day off and visited the ancient cities of Vladimir and Suzdal. Dinner in Suzdal was pleasantly interrupted by an engaging performance by a Russian folk group. The conference was officially closed on Saturday, August 7th with a boat trip along the Moscow River, concluding with a lot of "friendly farewell handshaking."
But if that seems like a lot of sight-seeing, the "accompanying persons" toured all day while their friends and spouses were attending the conference. They got to visit the Tretiakov Art Gallery, the Kuskovo museum and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, for example.
All in all, the cultural program was extremely enjoyable, even if it did succeed in wearing everyone out.
Given the superb Russian organization and extreme interest from both the eastern and western participants, many attendees are already looking forward to EWHCI '94. We cannot stress enough how well everything went this year, especially considering the quickly-changing state of affairs of the Russian economy. For example, while the rest of the country was still reeling from the week-old declaration that pre-1993 rubles were to soon become worthless, Juri Gornostaev and the other ICSTI organizers did not have to change their plans or reduce the quality of the program.
Also, we were impressed with the overall improvement in the quality of the papers, especially those from the east. The eastern HCI community is certainly developing. For example, free copies of a new Russian-language journal (ISSN 0869-7957) were available at the conference. Its title translates as "User interfaces: Research, design and implementation."
Just like last year, disks containing the most recent version of the HCI Bibliography were given to the eastern organizers to distribute to the eastern attendees. In return, a copy of the proceedings was donated to the project, so the titles and abstracts from EWHCI '93 should be available on-line soon. (This will make the proceedings of all three conferences available through the bibliography.) This type of an agreement benefits both sides, as easterners can keep up-to-date on HCI work, while westerners can easily learn about what is going on in the east.
The support from Apple was extremely valuable because it was used to increase communication between the eastern and western participants. For example, some of the Apple money was used to hire translators. Other money was used to help "equalize" the costs for the east so they could afford to participate in some of the cultural events. This made it possible to talk with members of the other hemisphere in an informal manner, during lunches and on the trip to Suzdal.
The Apple presence at EWHCI '93 was the focus of a newspaper report in the prominent business newspaper, Merchant Daily (see the picture below).
Both sides had trouble taking advantage of the interpreters. Only a few speakers actively involved the translators into their presentations, stopping their talks and having the interpreters summarize what had been said so far. Both sides need to plan some translation into their presentations in the future.
EWHCI '94 will take place August 2 - 6, 1994, in St. Petersburg. The first "Call for Participation" was sent out in late September. The submission deadline is in January, so anyone interested in contributing to EWHCI '94 should get the CFP as soon as possible. Send email to
ew-info.chi@xerox.com for current EWHCI '94 information, such as the call for participation. The CFP is also available by ftp from andy.bgsu.edu in the directory pub/EWHCI. As in the past two years, mailing lists will be set up to help interested parties in the west keep in touch and plan for the upcoming conference. Anyone interested in attending should contact the address above and ask to be added to the mailing list.
Many people helped out with this trip report. The summary paragraphs presented here came almost verbatim from the reports given at the conference. We thank those people mentioned above for their contributions to each of the summaries. Also, Austin Henderson, Blaine Price, Jonathan Grudin, Jean Vanderdonckt and Allan MacLean contributed to this report.
Keith Instone is the Research Associate for the Computer Science Department at Bowling Green State University; email: instone@hydra.bgsu.edu.
Allen Cypher is a research scientist in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, Inc.; email: cypher@apple.com.
Claus Unger is full professor for applied computer science at the University of Hagen and chair of IFIP WG2.7 `User Interface Engineering'; email claus.unger@fernuni-hagen.de.
This is the photograph that accompanied an article on EWHCI '93 in a Russian daily newspaper. The caption states "Apple Computer representative (right) persuades a colleague of the advantage of new computer technology," although it appears more like Allen Cypher is yelling at Steven Pemberton to get his rear end off the table while Keith Instone sleeps standing up.
Issue |
Article |
Vol.26 No.1, January 1994 |
Article |
Issue |