Schlagwort: meeting

TPC meetings in Atlanta, Palo Alto and Boston

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December was filled with travel – twice to the US and several trips in Europe – and for the first time in two years I did not really get around to write my blog…

I am still wondering what technology we require that could make physical meetings less important. Video conference is getting better and I use it a lot – but it still does not facilitate a discussion between 30 or more people well. Besides the work that is in reviewing I really emjoy that part of my job – I find it really exciting to see so much (somehow) novel work in a very short time.

Academics often complain about a lot of travel – but sometimes we need a reality check. Walking around Atlanta airport and seeing the large number of soldiers I felt that I should not complain about my travels… At the same time I asked myself what we will have first: „remote only“ wars or „remote only“ critical business meeting.

In the first two weeks of December I had the privilege to be the CHI, Pervasive and PerCom program committee meeting. Having seen more than 100 papers being discussed made the effort in reviewing worthwhile. The overview of the field one gets is amazing. And with the insight view I am looking forward to three very interesting conference programs to come in 2010. By the way Geraldine Fitzpatrick (this years paper co-chair at CHI) has move to the Vienna University of Technology.

Besides the PC meetings there was some time to visit labs. In Palo Alto at Nokia Research we were shown a communication appliance that is designed to facilitate remote interaction and communication around a book. Looks interesting and they promised there will be a paper about this soon.

In Boston I went to the new MediaLab building (and met Leah Buechley and Joe Paradiso) – really exciting – research between boxes. Seeing some a Leah’s work motivated again to look more into wearables. If you are curious too, have a look at Lilypad Arduino [1] and at the 2008 CHI paper [2].

[1] Buechley, L. Lilypad Arduino | build something. http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/LilyPad/build.html

[2] Buechley, L., Eisenberg, M., Catchen, J., and Crockett, A. The Lilypad Arduino: using computational textiles to investigate engagement, aesthetics, and diversity in computer science education. In CHI ’08: Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 423-432.

Faculty meeting in Velen

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Friday and Saturday we came to Velen (Hotel SportSchloss Velen) to discuss mainly administrative and strategic issues – and there are plenty. The place is amazing and I was annoyed with myself for not bring my SLR… Nevertheless I took some photos with my N95.


Such meetings highlight for me that the German scientific system is undergoing a major change – with many opportunities and risks. A lot of political constraints are pushed onto the university – many seem to be just copies of other systems that are working less than perfect (e.g. bachelor/master, research evaluation, etc.). Being optimistic and seeing the creativity of my colleagues I think we will find interesting and successful solutions.

Towards interaction that is begreifbar

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Since last year we have in Germany a working group on graspable/tangible interaction in mixed realities.
In German the key term we use is “begreifbar” or “begreifen” which has the meaning of acquire a deep understanding of something and the words basic meaning is to touch. Basically understand by touching – but in a more fundamental sense than grasping or getting grip. Hence the list of translations for “begreifen” given in the dictionary is quite long.
Perhaps we should push more for the word in the international community – Towards interaction that is begreifbar (English has too few foreign terms anyway 😉

This meeting was organized by Reto Wettach at Potsdam and the objective was to have two days to invent things together. The mix of people mainly included people from computer science and design. It is always amazing how many ideas come up if you put 25 people for a day in a room 🙂 We followed this week up on some of the ideas related to new means for communication – there are defiantly interesting student projects on this topic.

In the evening we had a half pecha-kucha (each person 10 slides of 20 seconds – in total 3:20, the original is 20 slides) http://www.pecha-kucha.org/. It is a great way of getting quickly to know about work, research, ideas, and background of other people. It could be format we could use more in teaching a perhaps for ad-hoc sessions at a new conference we plan (e.g. http://auto-ui.org) … prepared my slides on the train in the morning – and it is more challenging that expected to get a set of meaningful pictures together for 10 slides.

Overall the workshop showed that there is a significant interest and expertise in Germany moving from software ergonomics to modern human computer interaction.
There is a new person on our team (starting next week) – perhaps you can spot him on the pics.
For a set of pictures see my photo gallery and the photos on flickr.

Will we have face-2-face PC meetings in the future?

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On Thursday morning I flew to Boston for the CHI 2009 PC meeting. The review and selection process was organized very professional and efficient. We discussed all papers in one and a half days – and I think an interesting program came out and I learned a lot about what values my colleagues see or see not in papers. On Friday afternoon I flew back to the UK for the Pervasive 2009 PC meeting in Cambridge (with the same crew on the plane).

Nevertheless the question remains how sustainable is it that 100 people fly to a face-2-face meeting. In what way could we do such a meeting remotely? Video conferencing still does not really work well for larger group discussions (just collecting experience here in Cambridge during the Pervasive PC meeting)… Can it be so difficult to make a reasonable video link between two meeting room? How could we recreate the social aspects (like a joined dinner or walking back through the city with Gregory) as well as side conversations in the meetings? We probably should try harder – It cannot be that difficult – there have been massive amounts of work in CSCW research? Perhaps we should try linking two rooms at different universities as a group project next term? 

Emmy Noether Meeting in Postdam

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From Friday to Sunday I was in Potsdam for the yearly Emmy Noether meeting organized by DFG (German Science Foundation). The Emmy Noether Program seems to me one of the most attractive funding options for early career researchers I know of (world wide).

This year I was in the preparation team for the meeting and was co-organizing one workshop where we discussed experiences with research funding in other countries and what ideas for improving current programs we can see. The workshop was on how we can benefit from having students rather than seeing them as “teaching load” – especially in computer science (I organized it with Andreas Butz).

The meeting is always very interesting as it brings together people, funded by DFG in the Emmy Noether Program, across all disciplines. In the political evening we had a keynote by Professor Hans Weiler looking at the current problems of the German systems („Eliten im Wettbewerb – Die deutschen Hochschulen und die internationale Konkurrenz“ ) – one message I saw in the talk is that Germany is very efficient – looking how little money is spend in education and research the outcome is surprising. (But this is only a positive message if we do not want to play a leading role in the world of science and technology). It became very clear that the overall system lacks massively in funding. The additional funding that is provided by the German Government in the widely publicized call for elite universities (Exzellenzinitiative) is 1900 million Euros over 5 years (about 5€/citizen/year)– impressive? Not really – this less than the amount projected for the “Yale Tomorrow” campaign – a 5 year program in fundraising by a single University in the US. And Stanford University has even a bigger campaign as Prof. Weiler told – and there are a few other Universities in the league in the US…

Mensch und Computer program committee meeting in Lübeck

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Yesterday night I flew to Hamburg and traveled on to Lübeck – a quite nice town in the north of Germany – for the program committee meeting of Mensch und Computer 2008. This morning I got up a little earlier to walk around the city – as it was my first time visiting. The building I could see when walking into town however was oddly familiar, after some moments I recalled that it is the Holstentor which was pictured on the 50DM note (DM = German Mark – the money used in Germany till 2001 before we exchanged it for the Euro ;-).

In the meeting we discussed a large number of submission made to Mensch und Computer 2008. It seems there are quite an interesting number of papers in the program which make the conference worth while. We will also run the second edition of our workshop on Automotive User Interface and Interactive Applications. The automotive workshop we ran 2007 in Weimar was with about 30 participants very successful.

Meeting on Human Centered in Vienna

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Ina Wagner, Volker Wulf and Kjeld Schmidt organized a meeting to get together people from all over Europe that work on human centred computing. We had interesting discussions what is specific and distinct European human centred computing and how well it is represented in organizations such as the ACM.

Some years ago there has been significant support in this area of research on a European level – namely I3 and the disappearing computer initiative. Currently many of us feel that the value of user centred research is not supported enough and hence innovation happens somewhere else which can lead to massive disadvantages for European industries. One central issue is that we need more to communicate value of user interface research.

The need for user interface research is undoubtedly accepted. One example is the ISTAG report of 2001 that tried to look into 2010 – a future that is now not too far anymore. Looking at the challenges stated in this report it becomes clear that most of the technical issues are solved but this does has not lead to a breakthrough with regard to the visionary scenarios. But towards the challenge „natural interfaces“ we have still a long way to go. If we really want to get closer to those scenarios of ambient intelligence that are human friendly we really have to push on interaction and user interfaces – hopefully decision makers on a European level will get it 😉

Application Workshop of KDUbiq in Porto

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After having frost and snow yesterday morning in Germany being in Porto (Portugal) is quite a treat. The KDubiq application workshop is in parallel to the summer school and yesterday evening it was interesting to meet up with some people teaching there.

The more I learn about data mining and machine learning the more I see even greater potential in many ubicomp application domains. In my talk “Ubicomp Applications and Beyond – Research Challenges and Visions” I looked back at selected applications and systems that we have developed over the last 10 year (have a look at the slides – I, too was surprised what variety of projects we did in the last years ;-). So far we have often used basic machine learning methods to implement – in many cases creating a version 2 of these systems where machine learning research is brought together with ubicomp research and new technology platforms could make a real difference.

Alessandro Donati from ESA gave a talk “Technology for challenging future space missions” which introduced several challenges. He explained their approach to technology introduction into mission control. The basic idea is that the technology providers create together with the users a new application or tool. He strongly argued for a user centred design and development process. It is interesting to see that the concept of user centred development processes are becoming more widespread and go beyond classical user interfaces into complex system development.

Video conferences – easier but not better?

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The Pervasive 2008 TPC meeting on Saturday was held distributed over 3 continents and linked via video conference. In Germany we had a really good time slot (12:00 to 20:00) – Australia and California had a really late/early day.

The meeting worked well over video and considering the saved travel time it seems this is a acceptable alternative to a full physical meeting. It was interesting to see that the video conferencing quality did not really improve much over the last years. We ran the TPC meeting for Ubicomp 2003 between the UK and the USA also with a video conference system. And my first projects (in 1996) I worked on as a student researcher at the University of Ulm were on video conferencing, too.

It seems that over the last 10 years it has gotten much easier to set a conference up and interoperability seems less of issue, but the quality is still poor (even with the professional systems). I wonder if we should look with a master thesis into the topic again – all the topics like high quality AV, context-awareness, sharing, informal exchange, side channels, etc. appear still not to be there yet… or is the setting we used (google docs for sharing, edas as document repository, skype for side channel communication, and a professional video conference system) the natural way this develops?