Interactions

Notes on running an online academic conference, or how we got zoombombed and lived to tell the tale

Posted: Tue, May 12, 2020 - 10:11:09

Due to the coronavirus, the biggest conference in our research field (the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) was canceled in April, just a few weeks before it was scheduled to be held in Hawaii. As the Nordics have a strong research community in this area, it was logical to put together an online event for local…

The emerging need for touchless interaction technologies

Posted: Wed, May 06, 2020 - 1:47:42

With the spread of Covid-19, the world of interaction technology research has completely changed: The pandemic has created a higher demand for technologies that allow us to avoid touching devices. Before the pandemic, the world had a harder time understanding the importance of touchless technology, and even then it was not imagined in this context. The gesture-based technologies and hand…

Design thinking around Covid-19: Focusing on the garment workers of Bangladesh

Posted: Tue, April 28, 2020 - 9:57:47

What’s going to happen to these garment workers? It was a question from my young colleagues Rahat and Kimia. We were working with garment workers in Bangladesh, where the garment sector is one of the leading economic sectors, with around 4 million workers involved in over 5,800 factories [1]. But it was more than work. During our qualitative studies in…

Sustainable practices for the academic business sector: Publish in journals such as ToCHI

Posted: Fri, April 24, 2020 - 3:15:06

ACM Transactions on Computer–Human Interaction (ToCHI) is the premier ACM journal for HCI research. Founded in 1994, the journal has been publishing research at the cutting edge of HCI every second month since 2013. Since taking over the helm at ToCHI in November 2018, we have started to see a number of changes, from the number and types of papers…

Workshops are now required to be conducted remotely—is this a bad thing?

Posted: Thu, April 23, 2020 - 2:22:55

There's a palpable sense of anxiety in the recent global shift to home working. Both bosses and workers are feeling the loss of the benefits of in-person gatherings, such as meetings, workshops, and casual chats. In the UX industry, the loss seems all the more urgent. Some have argued that design and research workshops are irreparably hobbled by the requirement…

Sitting with Hakken

Posted: Tue, December 03, 2019 - 1:02:38

The last time I met David Hakken was at his office. We both knew it would be the last time we would meet. He was very calm. It felt very comforting sitting with him in his office. He told me he did not know how long he had to live. And that the next course of treatments for his cancer…

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…

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…