A quick update about the upcoming CHI 2012 conference, which is taking place from May 5-10th in Austin, Texas. A total of five members of LiSC are heading to the USA next month 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.

Click here for a brief summary of why we are going

Conor is a co-organizer of a workshop on “Interaction Design and Emotional Wellbeing”, which will be held on Sunday the 6th May. There has been huge interest in this topic, with the workshop itself over-subscribed and many heavy-hitting internationally recognized researchers signed up to attend. Fittingly, both Shaun and Sue have papers accepted to the workshop.

Derek “DF” Foster had a full paper based on his PhD work accepted to the main track of the conference. The paper is entitled “’Watts in it for me?’ Design implications for implementing effective energy interventions in organizations.” The paper describes a grounded theory analysis of data collected from a number of focus groups throughout the past year.

Sue is also presenting a full paper in the main track of the conference. Her paper entitled “I can’t get no sleep: discussing #insomnia on Twitter, describes a mixed-methods analysis of tweets on the topic of insomnia. This work is part of the EPSRC-funded ENACT project currently underway at LiSC.

Ben is continuing his success in publishing provocative papers in the alt.CHI stream of the conference. His paper entitled “Exploring mischief and mayhem in social computing or: how we learned to stop worrying and love the trolls,” is sure to draw a big crowd. This work is based on his recently completed PhD.

Shaun is on the organizing committee of the Animal-Computer Interaction Special Interest Group meeting, which is intended to examine animals as technology users and co-participants in technological interactions, in the context of human-animal relationships and animal engagement with technology in different settings.

Ben will present a Work-in-Progress paper entitled: “Get Lost: Facilitating Serendipitous exploration in Location-Sharing Services.” We will post this paper online shortly. Ben also has a paper accepted to the “Cool aX Continents, Cultures and Communities” workshop, as does Derek. Andy has a paper accepted to the “Personal Informatics” workshop. We will add further details of these workshop papers shortly.

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 Austin!