Nearly 30 faculty and students from the IU School of Informatics will attend or actively participate in a gathering showcasing the latest trends and research in human-computer interaction design
They will join others on hand for the global conference, CHI 2006, meeting in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 22-27 April 2006 HCID is a branch of informatics that studies and supports the design, development, and implementation of humanly usable and socially acceptable information technologies.
The goal of the field is to shape new media and tools that will support human use, augment human learning and enhance communication.
"This is the premier event in this particular field of study and research," says Martin Siegel, executive associate dean and associate dean for graduate studies and research.
"It's also an excellent opportunity to showcase the many interesting ways our faculty, scientists and graduate students are applying their work and expertise." Two teams of IU Bloomington graduate students will participate in an international design competition to demonstrate their problem-solving and design skills.
Team Health View will present simple and subtle approaches to nutrition monitoring.
The team includes Jesse Beach, Christian Briggs, Sam Shahrani and Craig Elliott, who are pursuing degrees in informatics and telecommunications.
Team Chick Clique will show how pervasive technologies can be used to motivate teenage girls to exercise.
The team consists of HCID students Tammy Toscos and Shunying An; and computer science students Anne Faber and Mona Praful Gandhi.
Student design teams from the IU School of Informatics have been successful in past CHI conferences, garnering a first-place finish in last year's competition, and second and fourth places in 2004.
Among the informatics faculty discussing their research or presenting papers at CHI 2006:.
Erik Stolterman, professor of informatics and director of the school's HCID programme at Bloomington, will discuss how human-computer interaction is in need of theoretical approaches that can support research and practice.
Jeffrey Bardzell, assistant professor of informatics; and Shaowen Bardzell, visiting assistant professor in IUB's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation.
They will discuss their research paper Sex-Interface-Aesthetics: The Docile Avatars and Embodied Pixels of Second Life BDSM about the aesthetics involved in the massively multi-user online world at the Sexual Interactions Workshop.
Youn-Kyung Lim, assistant professor of informatics; and Muzaffer Ozakca, an informatics doctoral student, A Study and Review of Ratings on the Internet.
Kay Connelly, assistant professor of computer science; and Katie Siek, computer science doctoral student, will present in the workshop, Reality Testing: HCI Challenges in Non-Traditional Environments.
Informatics graduate student Matthew Weldon will present a work-in-progress poster and paper about audio tools for sport fan interactions.
Weldon was a member of the first-place winning team in 2005.
Informatics doctoral student Justin Donaldson will present on his work, Limestick, a performance controller for laptop musicians.
The project focuses on improving audience engagement through the design and creation of a performer and performance centric interface.
The IU School of Informatics offers graduate programmes in human-computer interaction design at its Bloomington and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campuses.
