By Kevin Feng, HCDE PhD student
This year’s IUI is particularly meaningful to me as it is the conference at which I presented my first project of grad school where I was the only (and lead) student author. This project started at the beginning of my first rotation in Fall 2021. My advisor David McDonald and I set up the study during that quarter, and we slowly recruited and conducted our studies with participants throughout the year and into the summer, submitting the paper in the fall, just over a year since the project studied. This means I got ample time to immerse myself with the related work, think about how to frame my contributions, and outline directions for future work. Overall, it was a project I am pleased with and learned a lot from, and I was glad I could present it at IUI.
IUI is a conference at the intersection of HCI and AI—their tagline is “where HCI meets AI.” Traditionally they’ve been quite AI focused, and even though my project does center around AI, David and I had slight hesitations about submitting there at first. This was because previous IUI papers typically had a large focus on technical AI implementation and tooling, whereas our work investigates AI from an interaction design perspective and discusses AI quite differently from technical AI works. However, the community has been showing some signs of expanding to more interdisciplinary approaches, and we were glad to see evidence of that upon acceptance of our paper. The conference itself was small and single-tracked, which was quite enjoyable as it allowed for easy community-building. I got to meet and personally talk to many of the authors, and got to know many of them well through social events in the evening. The single-tracked nature of the conference also meant that all the presentations happened in one room with everyone in it. This was quite similar to SOUPS, a security + HCI conference I attended last summer, but the main difference was that since SOUPS is attached to a larger conference happening right after it, it felt like the heart of the community wasn’t present at SOUPS, making it more difficult to foster closer connections with other conference goers. IUI felt standalone with its own independent community.
As for the presentations themselves, I enjoyed seeing the wide range of work in the human-AI interaction space. Some of them were more traditional AI with HCI considerations, while others—like mine—were more grounded in HCI but informed by AI capabilities and behaviour. The intersection of HCI and AI is growing larger and larger, and I can only see the relevance of IUI and its research increasing in the future.
It also helped that the conference was in a fantastic location—Sydney, Australia. It was my first time in Sydney and had an amazing time getting to know the city. The food is delicious and diverse, it is bustling with culture and events, and the city has many well-designed outdoor spaces for people to mingle that I rarely saw in the US. Being its own continent, Australia also has plenty of unique flora and fauna that I got to experience through the city’s many parks, the internationally renowned Royal Botanical Gardens, and going to the zoo.
Overall, I’m grateful for the HCDE travel fund for allowing me to travel to present my work to a vibrant community I hope to continue being a part of in the future, while also experiencing the wonders of Sydney. There is no replacement for the experience of attending a conference in-person, and this trip would not have been possible without the support of the department.
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The Mary B. Coney Endowed Fund, named in honor of Emeritus Professor Mary Coney, supports HCDE students by funding costs associated with travel to conferences and international workshops. Your support of this fund enriches the HCDE student experience and enhances HCDE's influence in the field.