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I recently asked someone who browsed the World Wide Web daily why she found it so interesting. "Because everyone is there", she replied. Well "everyone" includes SIGCHI as well as its affiliated conferences and publications. Check out the SIGCHI home page at http://www.acm.org/sigchi/ for links to these and other topics of interest.
Now, "everyone" includes a general web page for local SIGs, at http://www.acm.org/sigchi/local-sigs/. This is the main entry point for reaching the page of an individual local group and replaces the old scheme of listing all local SIGs on the main SIGCHI page. That list, complete with links to web pages and contact names and addresses has been moved to the new local SIG page. This page will be a general resource for information related to local groups such as information about forming a new group, by-laws, links to back issues of this column, a list of all official and forming local SIGs and links to other CHI related material. In addition to the reference material, we hope to offer an updated list of meetings and seminars from all local SIGs not just those with web pages. My deepest thanks to Kenny Kutney of GB/SIGCHI and Christina Gibbs of BayCHI who, as the joint webmasters of the local SIG page, will make all this possible. My thanks also to Gary Perlman and Scott Robertson of SIGCHI who took the time during the busy holiday time to work out many of the finer details.
In case you haven't yet had a chance to visit one of the local SIG web pages, please do so. You will find information of value there whether or not you reside in the area of that group. At the time of writing there were 11 official local SIGs of whom 5 have their own web pages (these are shown in bold) but more are coming on-line shortly. Look for your local group on the web soon.
Dave Rowley, the BayCHI chair says: "BayCHI has been using the web for over a year to provide information about BayCHI, our upcoming speakers, BayCHI social events, and other useful tidbits. Shortly after the CHI '95 "local sigs challenge", we provided the only truthful documentation of the rock climbing event, complete with pictures (Kate: See SIGCHI Bulletin, October 1995 for a full report of this event and TorCHI below for a different interpretation).
Not only do we publish the abstracts and biographies of upcoming speakers, but we also maintain an archive of past speakers. We provide vignettes from the BayCHI job bank and information about the Consultant's Directory (both services available to members). In 1996, we plan to expand our offering to include write-ups taken at BayCHI meetings. Beyond the web (if there is such a place), we have recently published our first Membership Directory. The BayCHI Membership Directory contains 100 pages of member names and information, including a member index by organization."
http://www.utdallas.edu/orgs/sigchi/LSCHI.html
Lonestar CHI was established in December 1992; its web page was created in November 1994. This page includes full name and address of some of the key officers as well as links to job listings, an on-line newsletter and a CHI'96 workshop. This is a good page to visit if you want pointers to CHI related resources including listings of newsgroups and links to useful bibliographies
http://www.xensei.com/gbsigchi/
You can initiate membership applications, renewals or a change of address right from this page. This is a great page to visit if you are looking for a job or have a job and are looking for someone to fill it or if you want a rundown on the latest conference dates. Also note that this page contains links to all the other local SIG pages as well as a link to the main SIGCHI page.
http://www.xmission.com/~larry/nuchi.html
Check out this page for up to date listings of upcoming meetings including directions. This is a good page to visit if you want to check our previous meetings and seminars for they include links to 2 highly successful seminars they ran as well as links to their current and earlier newsletters which date back to April 1994.
http://www.dgp.utoronto.ca/HCI/torchi/home.html
TorCHI is based in Toronto but covers an area which includes Guelph, Waterloo, St. Catharines, Peterborough and other nearby locations in Ontario. You can join this group by filling out a membership form available from this page and get information on upcoming and past meetings and seminars. Visit this page for links to both HCI as well as CSCW bibliographies and conferences.
William Hunt, past chair of TorCHI writes: "The ToRCHI web pages have been used for providing general information about ToRCHI and related human-computer interaction information to existing and potential members about our monthly meetings and yearly seminars. For each meeting or seminar, we provide an abstract, biography, and a review of the talk given. By the time you read this in the Bulletin, there will be information about our members, including the work activities, and interests of each participant. And most important, you can see the self-evident truth about the ToRCHI victory at the 1995 CHI challenge, complete with previously undisclosed photos."
One of the groups who expects to have a web page sometime soon is Puget Sound in Bellevue, Washington. In the meantime, Kent Sullivan, the new chair of the group, wrote to let me know of some of their recent meetings. In October, Eric Horvitz from Microsoft Research's Decision Theory Group gave a talk on Harnessing Automated Inference to Enhance the Computer-Human Interaction in which he presented his work in using decision-theoretic reasoning techniques to enhance user interfaces in aerospace and medical applications. Eric took the audience step by step through the process of adding decision-theoretic reasoning to a system and explained the many variables involved. He started by explaining decision making through probabilities and then showed the effects of uncertainty in decision making. Finally he added the concept of time criticality and how it is figured into the equation.
The example Eric used throughout his talk was the Vista project, which was an effort to build an intelligent interface to assist NASA Mission Control flight engineers in monitoring the parameters of the propulsion system of the shuttle. The Vista example highlighted many of the problems interface designers are faced with every day. The problems include how much information to show the user, when to show the information, and where and how to display the information.
For more information on Microsoft Decision Theory Group, see the following Web site: http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/dtg. For more information on Eric Horvitz and his work specifically: http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/horvitz.
Kate Ehrlich
Local SIGs Chair
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