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"The HCI community is poised to take a more active role in influencing social policy and in addressing the problems in our communities." note CHI 98 Technical Program and General co-chairs Clare-Marie Karat and Arnold Lund. "Users are becoming more demanding in their expectations of how user interfaces perform." By adding several new areas of focus the Human-Computer Interaction community will attempt to broaden its influence on user interfaces to computer systems. CHI 98, the next annual conference on Human-Computer Interaction, will include the successful program tracks of the past CHI conferences, and will add a focus on three new application domains. Health care and medical informatics, education, and entertainment will all receive additional emphasis during CHI 98. These new areas "are expected to generate significant interest for the HCI community since these areas touch all of our lives," add Karat and Lund.
Traditional coverage for CHI conferences that will continue this year include technical material on the World Wide Web and other hot user interface topics; an opportunity for networking and discovering what is new in the field; and CHIKids, a technical program for children.
"Helping members of the health care community become aware of the important gains from HCI application to health care systems is a critical first step towards making health systems more effective and safe for practitioners and patients alike," notes Janette Coble, CHI 98 Chair for the Health Care Domain. Coble, an usability specialist in Medical Informatics at Washington University School of Medicine, points out that medical informatics "is an area of tremendous importance to all of us, but which has been under represented at CHI, and in the HCI field in general. It is critically important that health care systems of all kinds (from medical devices to patient care delivery tracking systems) be well designed from a user interface perspective." Coble has been involved in development of electronic medical records for physicians, performing prototyping and usability testing on these systems. An invited speaker at CHI 98, Michael G. Kahn, M.D., Ph.D, will discuss a Clinical Information System he developed for deployment at BJC Health System, a 15-hospital health network. His presentation is titled "Keep No Secrets and Tell No Lies: Computer Interfaces in Clinical Care." Kahn, currently at Rodeer Systems, emphasizes that "physicians have special needs for data presentation. Systems must reveal all that is known about patients, including recent changes." Such systems must also display any flaws in the data: that is, they must not tell lies. "Members of the CHI community must participate in the development of these systems to ensure that they show information in the correct order and context, and so that the physician can be alerted to any possible problems in the data."
The Education Domain will be addressed in several ways in the conference. Allison Druin, CHI 98 Chair for the Education Domain and Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, points out that "technology has changed the way we educate people, from graduate school to workplace training to home schooling. In turn, as we each of us are touched by technology in the way we learn in schools, at home, and at work, we need to understand how the world of education should change the technologies we make." It is not adequate to merely use computers in the classroom as just another media, to replace books and filmstrips. New technologies are needed to fit the requirements of education. A legendary figure in computers, education, and user interface design, Alan Kay, will speak at CHI 98. Kay, best known for his pioneering work at Xerox PARC on the SmallTalk computer language and windowed computer interfaces and currently a Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering, has noted that computers can be very powerful tools in the classroom. If used to simulate natural systems or to enable real-time collaboration among students, computers can transform the educational experience in ways that traditional tools cannot, enabling significant experimentation and research.
Rounding out the Education Domain will be a tutorial on the CHIkids Model of Technology Immersion to teach what CHIKids is all about, and how to replicate it; various demos of educational user interfaces; special interest groups for kids to learn how to design Web pages; and finally, a program to reach out to classroom teachers. This year's Development Consortium program will be to encourage the membership of classroom teachers in SIGCHI. Fifteen teachers will be selected from around the world to attend CHI, supported with travel expenses where required and conference registration.
Those in the entertainment business will also have something to look forward to at the conference. With the increasing importance of multimedia software and the Web, user interfaces become both more difficult to design and more critical to the success of a product. There will be several presentations on designing user interfaces for the Web, and a tutorial focusing on television.
Ben Shneiderman will give the opening plenary address. Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and Member of the Institute for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park. Shneiderman is the author of many books and papers including Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. He has consulted for many organizations including Apple, AT&T, Citicorp, IBM, Intel, Library of Congress and NASA. He will discuss where we've been, where we are today; and how to take action in world, and how to influence social policy.
Brenda Laurel will give the closing plenary address. Laurel is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on human-computer interaction and cultural aspects of technology. She is Vice President of Design at Purple Moon, an entertainment company for girls, in Mountain View, California. Laurel has published extensively on topics including interactive fiction, computer games, autonomous agents, virtual reality, and political and artistic issues in interactive media. She is the editor of The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design and the author of Computers as Theatre. Laurel acted as a consultant in interactive entertainment and human-computer interface design for companies such as Apple Computer, Citibank, Fujitsu Laboratories, Lucasfilm Games, Sony Pictures and Paramount New Media.
Originally a small meeting for psychologists interested in making computers easier to use, the CHI conference has expanded to include
CHIkids
Demonstrations
Design Briefings
Development Consortium
Late-Breaking Results
Panels
Papers
Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
Student Posters
Tutorials
Vendor Exhibits
Videos
Workshops
Tutorials for CHI 98 will include several centered around the World Wide Web, such as User Interface Design for the Web, Visual Information Seeking, Web Sites that Work; and many other topics ranging from contextual design and user centered design, to the psychology of multimedia, to learning to draw. Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain will offer three tutorials on learning to draw. Edwards has had good success with previous year's tutorials: "CHI people are good students. They are sharp and learn quickly. Most can learn to draw in two days." She notes that many technical people haven't done much art; when they take her tutorial, they haven't much to unlearn. "First they learn to draw, and then they apply the lessons learned to creative problem solving in other areas."
New for this year are the tutorials focusing on the three new application domains: Computer-Human Interaction and Health Care: Where to Go and What to Do; What Children Can Tell Us about Technology: The CHIKids Model of Technology Immersion, and Designing User Interfaces for Television. There are changes to the schedule as well. According to Andrew Sears, Tutorials Co-Chair "there will be three tutorials Saturday night, and we've added a Monday night tutorial for those who arrive just before the conference."
The CHI conference features a full program of presentations, tutorials and vendor exhibits. Participants come from academia, industry, health care and the arts. This annual conference is the premier worldwide forum for the exchange of information on all aspects of how people interact with computers. CHI conferences are sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM)'s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI).
The theme for 1998 is "Making the Impossible Possible." Approximately 2,500 user interface designers, managers, researchers, designers, educators, artists, writers and students will explore the possibilities of human-computer interaction from April 18-23, 1998 in Los Angeles, CA at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
For further information
Visit the World Wide Web site at:
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi98
Or contact the CHI 98 Conference office at:
703 Giddings Avenue, Suite U-3
Annapolis, MD 21401 USA
Tel: +1 410 263 5382
Fax: +1 410 267 0332
E-mail: CHI98-help@acm.org
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Vol.30 No.1, January 1998 |
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