A quick update about the upcoming CHI 2011 conference, which is taking place between May 6-10th in Vancouver, Canada. A total of five members of LiSC are heading to Vancouver next week for CHI – the worlds leading HCI conference. If you are interested in the work we are doing and will be at CHI, make sure to get in touch for a chat over a coffee (i.e, a beer) at some stage in the week.  In brief summary of why we are going:

Click here for a list of times and places for our presentations

Before the conference gets going, Shaun will be stopping off at the University of Calgary to give a talk entitled “Fear and Loathing in the Social Network: Delivering Serious Applications through Online Social Media.” This talk will essentially be a round-up of ongoing work at LiSC.

Ben is an organizer of a workshop on social games, which will be held on Sunday the 6th May. There’s a heavyweight line-up of games designers signed up so this should be an enlightening and fun event. Mark also has a paper accepted at this workshop entitled “Are you the farmer? Understanding social game player motivation and sustainability”.

Duncan will certainly be attending the awards ceremony, as a full paper that he has collaborated on has won the “Best Paper” award at the conference. This is a huge achievement and we’re delighted for the team, primarily based at the University of Nottingham Mixed Reality Lab. The award is well deserved, despite the misguided censorship of a certain picture! The paper itself is entitled “Automics: souvenir generating photoware for theme parks.” Duncan is, very productively, also author of another paper being presented entitled “Breath Control of Amusement Rides.”

I (Conor) am presenting a full paper entitled “Practical, Appropriate, Empirically-Validated Guidelines for Designing Educational Games.” This paper has won an “Honourable Mention” at the conference, and I’m hoping that means that I’ll also be invited to the awards night knee’s-up!

Derek is presenting a poster entitled “Power Ballads: Deploying Aversive Energy Feedback in Social Media.” We’re hoping to make this an interactive poster presentation, with plenty of awesome powerballads to keep everyone uncomfortably emotional. Derek and Shaun will also be attending the PINC workshop on Persuasion, Influence, Nudge & Coercion through mobile devices, where they are co-authors on a paper about persuasive technology.

All of the relevant papers will be available in our e-prints repository after the conference has taken place. If you want to get in touch with us at the conference, or if you cant make it and want to get in touch about the papers, then don’t hesitate to do so.

See you in Vancouver!