With some money reserved from my Ph.D. travel fund, a free conference pass by virtue of being a student volunteer, and more help on the way from Santa, I committed this week to attending CHI by grabbing a small single room in Florence for the early April conference.
Since it is freakin’ Italy, I’m going to try to pad the trip a bit on either end and get some site-seeing in. My long-lost foreign exchange student sister, Sabrina, lives somewhere on the Boot, so that reunion is definitely on the agenda. During the conference proper, though, there are few other things that piqued my interest.
SUNDAY, April 6—Participating with Richie in a workshop, “Surrounded by Persuasive Ambient Intelligence.” We are going to present our Twitter display prototype and [crossing fingers] some data showing how it has changed behavior in the interim.
MONDAY, April 7—Socio-Cultural Impact, featuring papers on virtual currency, faith and ambient social TV; alt.chi, Human-Robot Interaction and Trust and Security, the latter featuring our own (departing) Markus Jakobsson and Erik Stolterman presenting “Love and Authentication;” Green Day, featuring the Sustainable Interaction Design Research Group at IU presenting, “Sustainable Millennials: Attitudes towards Sustainability and the Material Effects of Interactive Technologies,” and sadly conflicting with Visual Synthesis.
TUESDAY, April 8—Early double-starred session for me is Data Collection, featuring a paper from the Microsoft Game Studios on tracking user experience in complex systems; Design in Dignity; Friends, Foe and Family, in particular some discussion about social roles.
WEDNESDAY, April 9—Online Social Networks; Shared Authoring; Randy Pausch is also having a special session, which ought to be interesting given his Last Lecture.
THURSDAY, April 10—Drat the scheduling! Competing with the student design competition are Eli Blevis’ panel on Sustainability and HCI, Social Presence and Visualizations. The one course I want to take is Jon Grudin’s History of HCI.
There are no papers, notes or doctoral presentations on my agenda, but I do still hope to submit some works-in-progress and other things to help make the long overseas trip worthwhile.
