UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) is represented across multiple areas of the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference of human-computer interaction (HCI). The conference is being held in a hybrid format April 30 through May 5, with in-person activities in New Orleans.

Nine papers, workshop, or special interest group (SIG) proposals that involve researchers at the College of IST were accepted to the conference.

“It’s an honor to have the paper and workshop and SIG proposals accepted at such a prestigious event,” said Shaowen Bardzell, a professor of information sciences and technology and the professor-in-charge of the HCI faculty group in the college. “The flagship conference of HCI is very selective, and these papers and proposals illustrate the research community’s recognition of Penn State IST’s diverse strengths in HCI.”

College of IST research papers represented at CHI 2022 include:

• “As Uploaders, We Have the Responsibility: Individualized Professionalization of Bilibili Uploaders,” by Yubo Kou, assistant professor, along with collaborators Xianghua Ding, Yiwen Xu and Peng Zhang, all from Fudan University.
• “Cultural Influences on Chinese Citizens’ Adoption of Digital Contact Tracing: A Human Infrastructure Perspective,” by John M. Carroll, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology, and Yao Lyu, doctoral student in informatics.
• “Iterative Design and Prototyping of Computer Vision Mediated Remote Sighted Assistance,” by Carroll; Syed Billah, assistant professor; and Jingyi Xie, doctoral student in informatics; along with collaborators and former Penn State researchers Madison Reddie, graduate research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Sooyeon Lee, postdoctoral research associate at Rochester Institute of Technology; Zihan Zhou, chief scientist at Manycore Tech Inc.; and Chun-Hua Tsai, assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

IST experts also helped to organize or presented position papers at workshops during the conference:

• Shaowen Bardzell, professor of information sciences and technology, was one of nine co-authors of a workshop proposal for “Feminist Voices about Ecological Issues in HCI.”
• Heidi Biggs, doctoral student in informatics, presented a position paper, “Towards a Material Ethics of Computing: Addressing the Uneven Environmental Stakes of Digital Infrastructures” at CHI’s Histories of Data and Critical Environmental Justice workshop.
• Carroll presented a position paper, “A personal journey from word processing to community informatics,” at the conference’s Self-Determination Theory in HCI: Shaping a Research Agenda workshop.

Additionally, Bardzell and Priya Kumar, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, were among a group of 19 co-authors of proposals that led to three of the conference’s special interest groups — facilitated discussions to enable dialogue and deliberation among conference attendees on specific topics: Equity Talks; Exploring Hybrid: A (Hybrid) SIG to Discuss Hybrid Conferences; and SIGCHI Turns 40: Honoring the Past, Celebrating the Present, and Envisioning the Next 40.