Ivan Allen College Well Represented at Human Factors in Computing Conference

Posted April 27, 2018

The Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts was well represented at the just-concluded 2018 edition of the premier conference for human computer interaction, the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Faculty and students were involved in at least six of the papers presented at the conference, also known as CHI, which ended April 26, 2018.

The papers included The Problem of Community Engagement: Disentangling the Practices of Municipal Government, which won honorable mention from organizers for being in the top 5 percent of all papers presented for the conference. Eric Corbett, a Ph.D. student in Digital Media in LMC, co-authored the paper with Christopher Le Dantec, an associate professor in the School.

Other papers included:

Going the Distance: Trust Work for Citizen Participation, another paper from Corbett and Le Dantec that examines the importance of trust in civic interactions, and how technical solutions to citizen engagement can impact trust in those relationships.

Addressing Network Anxieties with Alternative Design Metaphors, co-authored by Carl DiSalvo, an LMC associate professor. The paper investigates anxieties produced by interactive network technologies, and how those fears might be calmed through design-led inquiries and research through design. DiSalvo co-authored the paper with James Pierce of the University of California, Berkeley.

“Only if you use English you will get to more things”: Using Smartphones to Navigate Multilingualism,” co-authored by Neha Kumar, an assistant professor with a joint appointment in The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing. The paper examines “the factors that shape language choice and use” on mobile devices, according to the authors. Kumar’s co-authors on this paper were Navenna Karusala, Georgia Tech’s Aditya Vishwanath, Adidtya Vashistha of the University of Washington, and independent researcher Sunita Kumar.

El Paquete Semanal: The Week’s Internet in Havana, another paper co-authored by Kumar. The paper presents the results of extensive fieldwork and highlights the human infrastructure that supports the collection of digital information circulated on Cuba’s black market. For more information, see Georgia Tech Research Into Cuban ‘Offline Internet’ Could Inform Future Definitions of Connectivity on the School of Interactive Computing website.

Stitching Infrastructures to Facilitate Telemedicine for Low-Resource Environments, also co-authored by Kumar, presents a qualitative examination of a telemedicine program in India and the factors that have helped make it a success. Kumar co-authored the paper with Georgia Tech’s Michaelanne Dye and Amy Bruckman, David Nemer of the University of Kentucky, and independent researcher Josiah Mangiameli.

For more information, see GT@CHI, which details Georgia Tech’s extensive involvement in the conference.