Blogs



Reflections on mental health assessment and ethics for machine learning applications

Posted: Fri, November 01, 2019 - 11:33:18

As part of the ACII 2019 conference in Cambridge (U.K.), we ran a workshop on “Machine Learning for Affective Disorders” (ML4AD). The workshop was well attended and had an extensive program, from an opening keynote by UC Irvine assistant professor of psychological science Stephen Schueller, to presentations by authors of accepted workshop papers, to invited talks by established researchers in…

Synthesizing family perspectives on health: Using fun activities to stimulate health conversations

Posted: Mon, October 07, 2019 - 3:02:05

Many families have difficulty carrying out healthy behavior practices in their household. Since conversations about health and well-being are infrequent within families, it becomes more challenging to cultivate those practices [1]. The Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Penn State University (PSU) sees this as an opportunity for experience design and is looking into how and what family members come to…

Finsterworlds: Bringing light into technological forests through user empowerment

Posted: Tue, August 13, 2019 - 2:12:03

I am really fascinated by novel technology. This had already started in kindergarten, but when I studied computer science I read Mark Weiser’s seminal paper “The Computer for the 21st Century.” This paper awoke my fascination for HCIand Ubicomp, so I decided to work in this field as have many other fellow researchers. Even though Weiser’s paper was so much…

The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures: An interview with Ben Shneiderman

Posted: Mon, August 05, 2019 - 3:10:09

Few people in visualization research have had careers as long and as impactful as Ben Shneiderman. I caught up with Ben over email in between his travels to get his take on visualization research, what’s worked in his career, and his advice for practitioners and researchers. Jessica Hullman: How would you answer the question: What is visualization research? Ben Shneiderman:…

Creativity limited by technology: Lessons from the past for virtual reality as a re-trending topic

Posted: Thu, August 01, 2019 - 2:07:25

I wrote this blog to remind young researchers who are surrounded by technology trends that, in the future, these technologies will change their form or may no longer even be mentioned. However, the holistic ideas behind them might be implemented by re-reading their past to create novel futures. Re-reading is based on inspiration for generating ideas and their analogies. Sources…

CHI-ldren: Two kids’ impressions from CHI 2019

Posted: Tue, June 04, 2019 - 1:55:36

Hello! Our names are Julianna and Nicholas Kun. We went to CHI 2019 with our dad. We are 11 and 8 years old and would like to present to you a few impressions we got from the conference! We really enjoyed the VR demos. One of them was a VR swing, where you were on a physical swing while wearing…

Reflections on the first ACM SIGCHI-Sponsored Summer School in Saudi Arabia

Posted: Wed, May 29, 2019 - 11:30:14

Between August 27 and August 30, 2018, in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, the ACM SIGCHI-Sponsored Summer School on Research Methods took place. The school received ACM sponsorship from the SIGCHI Summer/Winter Schools Program (2018) as a means of generating additional funding from King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST). It was a highly successful event that created a…

Leonardo da Vinci – the great procrastinator

Posted: Wed, April 17, 2019 - 5:15:47

Among being organized, possessing strong communicative skills, having an ability to interface with people, and being able to be creative under pressure, the ability to meet a deadline with a satisfactory outcome is a cornerstone of current work life. Continuous procrastination is the opposite of keeping deadlines. A consistent ability to meet deadlines signals something profound about a person’s professional…

Should usability testers be certified?

Posted: Wed, April 03, 2019 - 11:01:26

Should usability testers be certified? Yes. Or rather: YES! Let me ask two counter questions: Would you trust a doctor who was not certified? Would you want to fly with a pilot who was not properly certified? Just like me, you hopefully want usability work, especially usability testing, to be taken seriously by your stakeholders, in particular your development team…

CSCW Research @ Latin America

Posted: Thu, March 28, 2019 - 2:20:17

After participating in SIGCHI Across Borders events, we proposed and ran a workshop in CSCW 2018 to (i) identify where CSCW and social computing research was being conducted in and about Latin America (LatAm), (ii) characterize its common themes and methods, and (iii) envision a shared agenda that could make LatAm-centered CSCW research more visible and impactful to the international…