My experience at CHI-2013

CHI was a wonderful experience for me. Different panels, workshops and special interest meetings provided me an opportunity to update myself with the current research topics and works in the areas of design, HCI and social computing.

I attended the workshop on “Why was the Game for Children not a Success?” where I was a part of discussion on the developing cycle of proposing a new system for children with different interests. The end product of the workshop discussion was a poster with all the key points raised at the venue. Along with this, I attended a tutorial in the main conference on “UX evaluation methods” where I got to learn new methods for analyzing data collected through interviews and qualitative analysis. The methods mentioned there will be very useful for me to conduct a user study for my research work.

During the main conference, I found the interactivity session as the most interesting and learning exposition where I particularly liked the works on multi-modal interactions. Furthermore, I specially liked the Special group SIG meeting on Inter-disciplinary research where different aspects of multi-domain research were discussed. The focus was on the initiation of such research by including the view-points of researchers of individual inclusive disciplines and the evaluation of the proposed systems. The solution to initiation and analysis, discussed in the group, were conducting different workshops and discussion groups to incorporate methodologies followed by individual disciplines along with evaluating the proposed system separately with techniques followed by individual disciplines.

To add more, Student Research and Design competition also gave me a wonderful chance to look at the new research ideas and update myself with the edge cutting technologies. Moreover, I got a chance to meet the practitioners and researchers in the area of my interest. I discussed my ideas and opportunities of PhD with Dr. Hassenzahl, Dr. Floyd Mueller and Dr Joseph Kaye.

Although it was challenging for me to sort out panels of my interests from so many parallel multi-disciplinary sessions, I had an amazing experience at CHI. Now, I have multiple ideas to work on during my PhD. I am confident that some of the contacts I made at the conference will help me to organize my thoughts and pursue a PhD in near future. I am now looking forward to further interactions with them. It thus has proven out to be an eventful occasion for me. I am now looking forward to the opportunity to attend CHI 2014.