Review of the HCI Conference Copenhagen

Just this week roughly 2940 HCI experts plus me (hello) descended unto Copenhagen for the 2023 edition of the "HCII". This year's event was very well organized as usual. The conference was hybrid which meant that 50% of the participants attended online. The glue of the conference was the poster area. In it, one could eat Danish pastries, hang out at tall black tables, see the booths, and savor a surprisingly not-typical-conference flavory organic coffee. See more below...

The poster area is always a great place to serendipitize your career. Here, above, a few researchers interested in ethics in ai coalesced spontaneously in front of a poster by a Finnish researcher... at some point, someone emailed the author and prompted him to show up in front of the poster to explain in person... Fair enough, 5 minutes later a finnish PhD candidate appeared ( the tall guy in the photo). Of course, when one lets 200 posters bloom... there is always someone with a sense of hummour...

My highlight for the conference was Mr. Jay, from los Alamos lab. Jay carries amazing chocolates at every conference, call it: chocolate diplomacy. And he will let you taste one when you meet him, but only after a good discussion. These are not your average chocolates by the way, they are made with real cocoa butter and they weigth a lot in your hand... Jay said it is a great way to network.

The conference used the Whova platform, this is one of the least annoying platforms out there. So I highly recommend it.

Reflection note

All in all the conference was very useful because it was so interdisciplinary... I learn a lot of things that we are already incorporating to research in our own lab at United Arab Emirates University , for example at the human factors sessions for air flight we learned how the German Aerospace Center (DLR) uses the TXL NASA test in their research and gave us a lot of tips on how to incorporate it to our recent work.

We also learned about the state of design thinking for audio design of spaces from Taiwanese researchers... during the design thinking session.

During an AI-dinner organized by Benedict Hartmann , I meet some Chinese researchers who showed me how to use automatic translation with Bluetooth earpods... Well, it was not like that... the Chinese researchers was wearing the earpods during the whole dinner... and I thought... omg what poor manners! but then I learn that his English was very not there and that he was listening to a realtime translation of all the conversation thru his earpods... I surprised myself beign so judgy afterwards...

These are just a few of the insights that are simply not possible to learn outside an in-person conference. I guess that as long humans are humans, conferences will have a place beyond journals or networks such as ResearchGate. What was your conference highlihgt? Share in the comments.

Links

hybrid platform ==> https://whova.com/

proceedings ==> https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-35696-4_2