UIST Day 1: What happened… and what’s up next!
by the UIST Publicity SVs: Haemin Ryu, April Wang, and Josh Urban Davis
The UIST + CSCW Plenary Panel
This year we had a joint panel between UIST and CSCW featuring leading researchers in the field to review the most influential papers and milestones in past decades. Irene Greif and Wendy Mackay first took us back to the 1980s and introduced the history of the CHI community. Hiroshi Ishii and Jonathan Grudin reflected on the groupware systems and computer-mediated communication research in the 1990s. Then, Karrie Karahalios and Meredith Ringel Morris highlighted several important technical advances in the 2000s, such as multi-touch sensing, smartphones, social media, and crowd computing. They discussed how these changes impacted and shifted the field of CSCW and UIST. Aniket Kittur and Jaime Teevan talked about how AI and data became an important topic for the field in the 2010s. They discussed the idea of fragmented intelligence that harnesses power from humans and machines as well as the challenges and design opportunities. Lastly, Amy Zhang and Niloufar Salehi presented how they envision systems research in collaborative and social computing would focus on in the next 10 years. If you missed the talk, a recording is available.
Selected Paper Session Highlights
In the session on head-mounted projectors for VR, Pascal Jansen from Ulm University presented this interesting dilemma that the Head-Mounted Display user does not want to be isolated from others while immersing in the VR world. Jansen’s team and Wang’s team took two different approaches to tackle this problem, both aiming at externalizing the VR content with head-mounted projectors.
In the Generating, Exploring, and Understanding Design Space of Visual Media session, authors presented their prototypes and research projects such as UMSI, Design Adjectives, and URL2Video. In particular, URL2Video (Automatic Video Creation from a Web Page) showed the result of a user study that effectively extracted design elements from a web page and supported designers by bootstrapping the video creation process. It was particularly impressive when the web page viewer scrolls down the webpage, the short video clips are created by this tool with redesigning the timing and graphical layout for a 12-second video.
The presentation of one of the Honorable Mention Award winners happened today, which is “RealitySketch: Embedding Responsive Graphics and Visualizations in AR through Dynamic Sketching.” RealitySketch introduces a new way to embed dynamic and responsive graphics in the real world by creating an augmented Reality Sketching Interface based on Apple ARKit. The presenter demonstrated a handful of application scenarios including physics education, sports training, and in-situ tangible interfaces. It was a very interesting and exciting demonstration!
Keynote by Afua Bruce
Art of the Possible: Showcasing Data Science Solutions for a Better World
An important takeaway from Afua’s keynote was when she compared the recommendation system of Netflix to data aggregation systems used for potentially treating malaria. This suggested that these technologies were similarly complex, and thus similarly achievable given proper incentive and collaboration between data experts and domain experts working in the field. The motivating message here is that we can redirect our use of data analysis towards greater social good.
Up Next: Day 2 Sneak Peek
Tomorrow we’ve got haptics, new programming-assistance tools, augmented textiles, interaction models, animation enhancements, and more! Also the Lasting Impact Award Announcement, the UIST Vision talks, the Town Hall, and the first Interactive Session: Demos, Posters, and Doctoral Consortium Posters. Festivities start at 7:30 AM CDT sharp!
