By HCDE PhD students Keri Mallari and Neilly Tan 

Keri Mallari

Keri attended and presented her first CHI paper during the virtual conference. It was a great opportunity to learn about fellow presenters’ works and also an opportunity to engage with potential collaborators. The multiple presentation times were a great way to engage with different communities across different time zones. After each presentation, we also had an opportunity to chat in virtual roundtables with audience members for further discussion about our work. Overall, it was a great opportunity to share my work and learn about research in the same domain.

Neilly Tan

Neilly attended the Human-Data Interaction CHI workshop (my first CHI workshop!). The organizers and attendees were primarily from Europe/ the UK, so despite the 5am wake up time, it was a great opportunity to connect with other researchers in this field across the globe using the fun, interactive meeting platform called gather.town. The insights I gained from the workshop were able to further my research as we were able to cultivate a group design manifesto from our group discussions. 

From our experiences of attending workshops and presenting papers, we were able to meet other researchers in our fields, which was extremely beneficial as early career researchers. We were also able to celebrate our ongoing and completed projects at HCDE with other HCI researchers. Overall, attending CHI was an extremely beneficial opportunity that expanded our knowledge and opened up possibilities for future collaborations.