Author: Noris Mohd Norowi
Event info: Asian CHI Symposium 2019
Asian CHI is a symposium that showcases the latest work from Asia on interactive systems and user interfaces. In 2015, the Japanese first organised the Japanese CHI Symposium while Asia Pacific had its own symposium. The same parallel effort emerged in 2016, but this time, South East Asia (SEACHI) was used instead of the Asia Pacific. The efforts combined in 2017, where the first Asian CHI Symposium was born. It is held in parallel with the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems and has been organized for the third time since its initiation. Its aims are to provide opportunities for young researchers in Asia to connect, share and discuss emerging topics in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field in an interactive and positive environment.
This year, the Asian CHI 2019 Symposium was held on the 5th May 2019 at the Scottish Event Campus, Glasgow, Scotland. This 1-day workshop gathered more than 70 participants in total, with over 50 accepted papers submitted by researchers across 12 different countries, including Japan, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.
Delegates from Malaysia who participated in the workshop were Masitah Ghazali and Haliyana Khalid from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and Noris Mohd Norowi from Universiti Putra Malaysia. The title of their work presented at the symposium were ‘UI Sketching Reskill for UX Researchers’, ‘Designing Technology to Address Distress of TB Patients’ Emotional States: findings from contextual inquiry’, and ‘Mind the Gap: Joining Bezel-Separated Lines in Multi-mobile Systems’, respectively. The three representatives are active committee members of the myHCI-UX society, as well as members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Kuala Lumpur chapter. Their participation at the Asian CHI 2019 was partly sponsored by ACM SIGCHI.
In between the presentation and demo sessions, four distinguished keynote speakers delivered their talks which covered a vast range of topics from intelligent systems for the aging community, to human-drone interaction. The first speaker, Dara Loi of Intel Corporation, reflected on the role that intelligent systems and ambient computing may play in future homes and cities, with a specific emphasis on populations aged 65 and beyond. Key angles which needed to be focused on for the aging population include community and companionship, wellness and care, and independency and management.
The second speaker, Hiroshi Ishii of the MIT Media Lab, presented several designs from his Tangible Bits project. His projects aimed to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information and computation, making bits directly manipulatable and perceptible both in the foreground and background of humans’ consciousness (peripheral awareness).
This was followed by a flying demonstration of a spherical drone that can display images in all directions while being safely navigated in the hall without the use of a propeller by Wataru Yamada from NTT DOCOMO. The new research area, ‘Human-Drone Interaction’ was presented and its potential uses were discussed. Finally, Takeo Igarashi of the University of Tokyo presented the design factors in smart home privacy design. Some of the key factors were data transparency, security, safety, UX and usability, system intelligence and system modality. He also brought up the challenges and conflicts in managing transparency in security, but at the same time respecting users’ privacy.
All work presented at the Asian CHI 2019 Symposium has gone through rigorous reviews and is published under ACM. The articles can be viewed at the ACM Digital Library under the CHI EA ’19 Extended Abstracts of 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems.
Next year’s Asian CHI 2020 Symposium will be held in Honolulu, Hawa’ii, USA. Submissions to CHI 2019 to some categories are still open, and places to both the conference and symposium are still available, so don’t miss out on this opportunity. Aloha, Hawa’ii!!!