by Mohamed Khamis, University of Glasgow
26 June 2020
The SICSA PreCHI day is an annual event where researchers from SICSA institutions present their latest contributions to the premiere conference on Human-Computer Interaction: the International ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction – or simply CHI (pronounced ‘kai’).
The PreCHI day serves two purposes: It is a chance to celebrate the success of SICSA institutions at CHI, and it helps create a strong HCI community in Scotland. Attending the SICSA PreCHI day allows HCI researchers to network and establish collaborations; learn what other HCI researchers in Scotland are working on, give their CHI work more exposure, receive feedback on their work and their CHI presentation, and of course also have fun :)
The SICSA PreCHI day 2020 was organised by Florian Mathis, Patrizia Di Campli San Vito and Mohamed Khamis and it was planned to be in Glasgow. Due to COVID, we held it online and offered participants the chance to present their papers, enjoy live discussions, and even network in a virtual space that Florian Mathis created on Mozilla hubs for the event! Below is a selfie taken by five attendees of the SICSA PreCHI day.
Figure 1. We used Mozilla hubs to create a virtual space for the SICSA PreCHI attendees to network and socialise.
The SICSA PreCHI day consisted of two major components: 1) Presentations followed by discussions (both on Zoom), and 2) Networking, videos, and poster presentations in virtual breakout rooms (took place on Mozilla Hubs).
Achievements of the SICSA HCI community
This year, we received 11 CHI 2020 papers from SICSA institutions to be presented in the PreCHI day. We also had two poster presentations and multiple videos playing in the virtual space. Two of the papers received the best paper award (top 1% of ~3000 submissions) and one received the honourable mention award (top 5% of ~3000 submissions). This means that 18% of the papers presented at SICSA PreCHI day are among the top 1% of the submissions CHI 2020 received from all over the world, and >25% are among the top 5%.
Eleven CHI papers from SICSA institutions on various HCI topics
The eleven papers were presented in three sessions. Below are the session titles, the paper titles, and the SICSA institutions that are affiliated to the papers.
1. Extended Reality, Visualisation, and Product Design (4 papers)
a. Acoustic Transparency and the Changing Soundscape of Auditory Mixed Reality (DOI)
• University of Glasgow
• University of Strathclyde
b. Cheat Sheets for Data Visualization Techniques (DOI)
• University of Edinburgh
• University of Glasgow
c. Virtual Field Studies: Conducting Studies on Public Displays in Virtual Reality (DOI)
• University of Glasgow
d. Exploring The Future of Data-Driven Product Design (DOI)
• University of Edinburgh
2. Privacy and Security (3 papers)
a. Understanding Privacy-Related Questions on Stack Overflow (DOI)
• University of Edinburgh
b. The Role of Eye Gaze in Security and Privacy Applications: Survey and Future HCI Research Directions (Honourable mention award) (DOI)
• University of Glasgow
c. What is this URL’s Destination? Empirical Evaluation of Users’ URL Reading (DOI)
• University of Edinburgh
3. Smart homes and Accessibility (4 papers)
a. Household Surface Interactions: Understanding User Input Preferences and Perceived Home Experiences (DOI)
• University of Dundee
b. Emoji Accessibility for Visually Impaired People (DOI)
• University of Dundee
c. Designing Clinical AAC Tablet Applications with Adults who have Mild Intellectual Disabilities (Best paper award) (DOI)
• University of Strathclyde
• University of Edinburgh
d. A design engineering approach for quantitatively exploring context-aware sentence retrieval for nonspeaking individuals with motor disabilities (Best paper award) (DOI)
• University of Dundee
Discussions and Recording of the Event
The attendees enjoyed interesting discussions after each presentation. The full day was recorded and can be viewed here.