Nope, I didn’t get into the CHI doctoral consortium (). Got that expected unhappy news Tuesday afternoon. I’m still going—after all, IU has five student teams participating in the student competition—and have some small hope for moving up the food chain to land a student volunteering gig (and the comp-ed conference fees). However, here is a peer who was accepted.
The author, Fabien Girardin, is blogging about his Ph.D. thesis on “collaboration in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments.” He’s studying at a school in Barcelona. (Maybe Fabien will post a preview of the DC submission, soon, so we can read more than the abstract.) I dont’ know the guy, but he’s exactly the kind of person I was hoping to know.
I’ve got my work cut out for me if I want to get up to this level for one of the next two CHI consortia. Girardin has quite a track record that includes forming an emerging tech consulting company and academic inspiration from our own Yvonne Rogers at last year’s Ubicomp. He also has some interesting project work on a multi-site pervasive game—CatchBob!—a mobile game for running psychological experiments.
For me, the opportunity to join the doctoral consortium was less about the nice stipend ($1200 and free admission!) and my own work (feedback would have been great) than a chance to interact with 14 other people like Fabien. I’ve enjoyed this first Year of the Seminar because it has been an opportunity to mix and match concepts prevalent in the separate domains of human-computer interaction, social informatics and complex systems. I would expect the same kind of serendipitous insights to come from mixing work on ubiquitous tech and online community, and whatever else is going to happen that weekend. Maybe I’ll get my CHI fix by organizing an unconference while in San Jose.
As for my own submission—”Media Obstacles to Social Capital“—I’ve already found a dozen papers through seminar work and other searches that will help shape this project. It’s also possible the work was forced into a hole of a different shape, and CHI isn’t the best place to aim it. There are other doctoral consortia in the world. Feedback is welcome.
Congratulations, Fabien and your 14 unknown colleagues. I bet you’ll have a great experience.
