I am recently attending the CHI conference at Boston.
I strted my day of multiple interesting sessions with the there is this bunch of people at Stanford’s Computing Science Department (the guy who presented was Neel Patel) who are collaborating with college students in India (Dhirubai Ambani Institute) to come up with voice based user interfaces. Their paper won an honorable paper mention (one amongst the 32 that were given this honor, out of the 694 that were accepted). They have implemented the system in Gujarat and working with farmers and testing the usefulness of touchtone based interactions versus speech based interactions. I thought it was pretty interesting stuff.
The prime focus as we know at CHI is Methodologies. I noticed that there was lot of focus on the presentations on NUMBERS. Almost all presentations (except the Nokia one) was full of data. Perhaps this was a way to stress on the process. However something that was missing was the Human element in the presentations. I definitely would have loved to see more papers with actual users talking or actual users feedback than just numbers. Also although I did not come across any interesting new methods so far, people were interested in exploring (and are infact exploring) in research and application of the existing methodolies to new domains.
So, some of the papers also are exploring for children as a potential user group. So there were issues of education being discussed and also panel discussions on children. How could one design digital games as an educational tool for rural children, based on analysis of 28 rural children outdoor games, was another interesting paper. (This is being centered at U C Berkley) Though was a little dissappointed at the presentation. Perhaps will understand better when I read the paper. This interests me further due to my association with my interest in the child education projects across worlds.
Accessibility and designing systems for people with some accessibility issues (like being deaf, blind) also gathered attention during the conference. We actually got a university alum who was on a wheel chair and got his perspectives on the conference and also the papers. The session is tomorrow. I will see if there is something interesting there.
A striking thing about the authors of the papers were the collaboration. A LOT of the papers had people collaborating from people across universities and across countries. This definitely looked like a positive sign and more hope for further such work and just gives an indication about how small the world has become with online tools, and other means of collaborating.
Tomorrow promises to be another fruitful day!
I am excited.
