New to the SIGCHI EC
Please join us in welcoming these seven new members below to the SIGCHI Executive Committee, recruited in response to the open calls we conducted early in 2023. Some background first. Two new VP roles were created as a result of our recent amendments to the SIGCHI bylaws, and we recruited Hao-Chuan Wang as our new VP at Large and Dhruv Jain as our first VP for Accessibility. Our Equity and Partnerships roles needed some support given our current chairs’ engagements, so we brought on Katta Spiel and Keith Instone as co-chairs. Naveena Karusala took on the role of new chair for Community Support, from Luigi De Russis who became our VP Finance some months ago, and Catia Prandi took on Volunteer Support, with Priya Kumar having stepped down earlier this year. We also decided we needed a Web Chair, and this role will be fulfilled by Abhinav Thukral!
Hao-Chuan Wang, VP at Large
Dr. Hao-Chuan Wang, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science in University of California, Davis, has worked on the design and evaluation of collaborative and communication tools to support team diversity, non-verbal communication, online education, peer production and collective intelligence. He also studied extensively how these tools can be designed to address large-scale societal issues, such as bridging cultural and language gaps between global co-workers, and support expert-novice knowledge sharing to ensure the wellness and sustainability of work practices in remote and hybrid work. Before joining UC Davis in 2018, he was an Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Information Systems and Applications at the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (NTHU), and an affiliated researcher with the NTU IoX Center, National Taiwan University.
In his position as the SIGCHI VP at Large, he will be working with the EC and SIGCHI committees to address the challenges associated with mentoring at a large scale, considering ways to better share the best practices in HCI publication and participation covering critical aspects such as paper review, writing, citations, ethics, publication workflow and community engagement. He will be working with the community to extend the effort to curate, archive, and structure community mentoring resources in the format of shareable short videos, increasing community members’ awareness and engagement in the best practices.
Dhruv “DJ” Jain, VP Accessibility
Dr. Dhruv Jain is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, with affiliate appointments in the School of Information and Michigan Medicine. His research lies in accessibility, and investigates AI and HCI methods to build deployable accessible systems. He completed his PhD from University of Washington, masters from MIT Media Lab, and has worked at Google, Apple, and Microsoft Research.
DJ has served as Accessibility Co-Chair of three HCI conferences, where he was instrumental in improving visual accessibility of media and print materials as well as setting up open-captioning for deaf and hard of hearing people and non-native English speakers. In his new role as VP for Accessibility, he aims to continue SIGCHI’s efforts in improving the pipeline to generate accessible PDFs as well as introduce new efforts centered on improving audio accessibility of posters and easing access to interpreters and captioners for hybrid conferences.
Katta Spiel, Equity Co-Chair
As a Hertha-Firnberg Scholar at TU Wien, Dr. Katta Spiel researches marginalised perspectives on embodied computing through a lens of Critical Access. Their work informs design and engineering supporting the development of technologies that account for the diverse realities they operate in. In their interdisciplinary collaborations with neurodivergent and/or nonbinary peers, they conduct explorations of novel potentials for designs, methodologies and innovative technological artefacts. They want to bring this perspective from the margins into SIGCHI particularly by attending to how we can appreciate the diversity of people and marvel at what we might learn from those who are not always already the loudest. With their interest in infrastructural conditions for change, they intend to take a closer look at understanding how our/SIGCHI’s policies act in working towards (or against) this goal.
Keith Instone, Partnerships Co-Chair
Keith Instone has been a SIGCHI member since he started his career in 1988. While a researcher at Bowling Green State University in the 1990s, he was an active ACM and SIGCHI volunteer. As SIGCHI’s Information Director, he created the first few CHI conference websites, which included early attempts at publishing the proceedings online. In 1998, he was given a Distinguished Service Award.
Over the past 25 years, he has been working in industry and helping establish and grow various HCI-related industry communities (using framings of usability, information architecture, interaction design, user experience, and more). The CHI 2005 Development Consortium is one example where he worked with SIGCHI to convene representatives from a variety of related organizations to explore partnerships. His consulting has included helping new UX-related university programs collaborate with industry.
Taking a leadership role on the Partnership committee is coming full circle for Keith. He is returning to his disciplinary roots, sharing his industry connections and practitioner knowledge to help us create a future where our scientific understanding of how humans use technology shapes the digital world our descendants will be living in.
Naveena Karusala, Community Support Chair
Dr. Naveena Karusala is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society. Her research looks at the intersection of care, labor, and emerging technologies, spanning domains such as health, social work, and safety.
Naveena started volunteering for the SIGCHI Community Development Fund Committee in 2020, supporting efforts to get community feedback and iterate on SIGCHI’s travel awards to design the Gary Marsden Travel Awards. She also formed the Futuring SIGCHI Committee, which supports its early career members in conducting pilot projects that expand the horizons of the SIGCHI community. Now on the EC, she will be focusing on how SIGCHI can create more opportunities for grants, supporting the development and sustainability of Futuring pilot projects, and understanding ways that existing support mechanisms can be ever more responsive to community needs.
You can find more information about Naveena on her personal website or reach out on Twitter.
Catia Prandi, Volunteer Support Chair
Catia Prandi is a Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI) of the University of Bologna (Italy). She is also a faculty fellow at the Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI/LARSyS), Portugal, since 2016. She is a member of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter. She has been involved in several SIGCHI conferences as a reviewer, being actively involved in the program committee and organization of some of them.
In her research, she is interested in understanding how to engage diverse communities in designing and taking advantage of technologies for social good, analyzing aspects such as inclusivity, accessibility, and sustainability. On the EC, she wants to put the same passion into augmenting volunteers’ efforts and energies, supporting the existing community, facilitating its growth and diversity, and attracting early career researchers. If you are interested in volunteering, don’t hesitate to contact Catia! She will happily share all the opportunities to become an active member of our rich, passionate, and diverse community!
You can get more information about Catia on her institutional web page.
Abhinav Thukral, Web Chair
Abhinav received his Master’s degree at the Human-Computer Interaction program at Georgia Tech. He is now joining Lucid as a UX Designer. Prior to this, he worked for over 7 years as a design and full-stack engineering consultant, developing websites and applications for start-ups and organizations globally. As the Web Chair, Abhinav aims to improve the web presence of SIGCHI, making SIGCHI’s information and communications more discoverable and accessible to others.
While at Georgia Tech, Abhinav conducted research with the Ubiquitous Computing Group. He has also conducted HCI research at IIIT Delhi, India, and EPFL, Switzerland. You can get more information about Abhinav on his personal website.
