About the HCI Conference Series

This was the first time I attended this event. In 1999 my colleague Sundar from RSC had participated in the HCI while it was held in Munich - we had a joint paper then. In 2001 my colleague Joshua McGee presented our joint paper at the HCI conference in Geneva. In 2003 I had submitted a paper, but due to a short-term arranged at my employer at that time, I was not able to travel - what a pity! And now in 2007, this was the first time for me to attend this conference. Its positive side is at the same time also its negative side: the vast array of topics makes it possible to get a great overview of current trends and developments in the whole Human-Computer Interaction area, from automated system intelligence to user ergonomics. This also means that a participant can only attend a fraction of presentations, which is unfortunate as there are plenty of interesting talks and topics. The relatively benign review process also means that papers of a lower quality are accepted.

Overall, I think that the approach of the conference organisers is right: being inclusive and making this conference to a networking event, where the whole HCI community is welcomed. This allows to get contacts to many different experts and learn about the many different aspects of current HCI research.

First day at HCI Conference

This HCI conference is huge. This has the advantage to be able to get in contact with many people in the field. Of course, this also has the disadvantage that one cannot attend all of the many parallel sessions. There are usually 24 parallel sessions - full of interesting talks. I guess, I will have to study the DVD with all the papers later, to get the most out of this conference. Unfortunately I did not bring a DVD reader with me - is not built-in in my light laptop. The morning sessions included topics of interfaces, AR/VR, human-robot interaction, and many other related issues or ergonomics and human factors.

There were also several exhibitors: Tobii showed their eye tracker, a few companies showed some demos of automatic interaction through face tracking, and several publishers displayed their current program. In the foyer there were 370 posters - some of the poster wall, howerver, were empty, due to the presenters not being present.

One of the afternoon sessions was chaired by my friend Marc Fabri, about "Emotions in HCI". Interesting perspectives and investigations. Also Marc himself gave a talk about his PhD work on emotional avatars. One software glitch: the laptop just displayed the avatar head - no GUI of the messenger app showed up. Looked still quite nice, these two heads just nodding around on the desktop - there must be an application for this!

The last session this day was chaired by Prof. Andreas Holzinger, about Future Interfaces in Technology-Enhanced Learning. Quite a relevant topic, also considering our Leeds Met focus on eLearning. I gave there the 2nd talk: it had actually been prepared by my student Johannes Christian, but he was unable to attend the conference. The session went well, everybody kept their 15 min time - Andreas made sure that the session ended in time, as he had to go on to a board meeting right after the session.

Opening of the HCI 2007 International Conference

On Tuesday evening the 2007 HCI International Conference opened with a keynote session, chaired by Michael Smith. After a welcome address by the President of Tsinghua University and by the HCI chair Prof. Constantine Stephanidis, who advertised the 2009 HCI conference in San Diego, the keynote speaker Prof. Takeo Kanade from CMU in Pittsburgh gave his keynote speech. I knew him since the mid 1990s from his work on robotics, as I once visited CMU in 1995 when I still wa working on autonomous road vehicle systems. He talked about several of the projects he was involved in, ranging from "Matrix"-style image capture for sports (EyeVision, for CBS Superbowl) to motion capture and ergonomics studies. His latest interest is in "Quality of Life Technologies" for elderly and disabled.
His talk was followed by a brief overview over the HCI activities by Microsoft Research Asia, given by Jian Wang, head of the MS Research Asia lab in Beijing.

After that, Chinese artists performed dances with lion and dragon costumes, and the audience could eat at a buffet dinner.





The music there was quite loud at times, which made it difficult to conduct a conversation. Nevertheless I met a couple of colleagues, among them Marc who had arrived a few days earlier and had already seen some of the great sights of Beijing. I also met Prof. Holzinger, the chair of the FUITEL session where I would give the first talk (which is actually the talk of my student, Johannes Christian - he did all the work and prepared the vugraphs, so I should give him credit here!).

Later in the evening I did more work on the presentations. Should have done this before travelling... but there had been not much time these past weeks.