Authors:
Masitah Ghazali, Murni Mahmud, Eunice Sari
The Kuala Lumpur ACM SIGCHI chapter, myHCI-UX, is now two years old. HCI was first starting to find its place in Malaysia circa 2005–2007, when many Malaysian researchers were returning home after completing their postgraduate degrees in HCI. After many meet-ups of HCI academics and practitioners, support from ACM SIGCHI, and with the urge to make a difference and to contribute back to society, the chapter was officially formed on July 27, 2017.
Prior to 2017, ACM SIGCHI had been giving moral support to various activities and programs. During i-USEr 2016, Eunice Sari from the Indonesia ACM SIGCHI chapter organized the CoCo (Connect and Collaborate) workshop to give insights about the HCI and UX landscape in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia and Malaysia, and how HCI researchers should collaborate to unlock the HCI and UX potential of these two countries. Our current committed members had also been involved in other activities in the greater ACM SIGCHI communities, such as the SEACHI and Asian HCI symposiums, which have been successfully held since 2015 at the annual CHI conferences. Apart from that, some of our members also had the opportunity to be involved in the international CHI reviewing process and in regional initiatives, such as the Japan ACM SIGCHI chapter and Australia’s OzCHI. In addition, our members had been actively participating in CHIuXiD, the Indonesia ACM SIGCHI conference, as presenters and reviewers.
Since the inception of myHCI-UX, we have participated in the ambassador program at INTERACT 2017 in India and at UIST 2018 in Berlin. We also had the opportunity to be part of the annual chapter meeting at CHI 2018 in Montreal to present and share our latest achievements. The year also marks the fifth i-USEr conference, which has been organized by the founding chair, Nor Laila Md Noor, and hosted by the Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) since 2010. i-USEr has gained renown as a conference and a platform for many HCI researchers in Malaysia and worldwide. Well-known figures such as Alan Dix and Torkil Clemmensen have been supporting i-USEr from the start. In addition to co-organizing with other local universities, this year myHCI-UX and ACM also contributed to the success of i-USEr by co-sponsoring the event and successfully bringing in Marcus Foth, under the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program (DSP), as one of the keynote speakers.
Our aim is to disseminate HCI to the public and get involved by becoming mentors to programs in the public sector or industry that require HCI and UX expertise.
myHCI-UX currently has 22 committed members, who pay a minimal fee to assist us in running the chapter. Our aim is to disseminate HCI to the public and get involved by becoming mentors or facilitators to programs or events in the public sector or industry that require HCI and UX expertise. We do hope our small chapter will grow, with more exciting research collaborations and a greater international presence. On this note, we would like to thank the ACM SIGCHI Asian Development Committee members for their belief in us and their continuous financial and moral support.
Authors
Masitah Ghazali is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and a member of the ViCubeLab research group at the University of Technology Malaysia (UTM). Recently, she was appointed as an IT Academic Fellow at the Center of ICT at UTM. She is one of the founding members and is also the current chair of myHCI-UX. masitah@acm.org
Murni Mahmud is an associate professor in the Department of Information Systems at Kulliyyah/Faculty of ICT (KICT), International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). Her research interest is in human-computer interaction, particularly the evaluation of interactive system and user experience. A founding member, she is currently the vice chair of myHCI-UX. murni@iium.edu.my
Eunice Sari is the ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Local Chapters as well as Asian Development Committee Chair for Southeast Asia. She co-founded the Indonesia ACM SIGCHI chapter, the first ACM SIGCHI professional chapter in Southeast Asia. sigchi-vp-chapters@acm.org
For more details, please access to ACM Interactions, XXVI, 4 July – August 2019:http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2019/myhci-ux?fbclid=IwAR1nWGSNXfPS6Pb9647HjidJjbFvYDf1j9MxV2FOQiVp24nbSt7oP_HjQek