Bernie Zang

Ha HA!

Some students and faculty from IST have united to start some discussion about game research at Penn State.  We’ve started a forum at weeklygamers.berniezang.com. Check it out.

CHI was an amazing experience. Yes, yes, it was in Florence, but beyond the amazing location, the conference itself was incredible and quite overwhelming. As a student volunteer, I got a chance to meet some very cool students studying some amazing topics. I was pleasantly surprised at the diversity, both culturally and academically, of the people.

Of the sessions, I found that the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were the most valuable to me.  These sessions focus on particular topics that are valuable to the CHI community.  For example, I participated in 3 SIGs: Usability, History of HCI, and End-User Programming.  Rather than just have a string of individuals presenting their own work, there was discussion and feedback.  Since I’m a newcomer to the CHI world, the sessions gave me a chance to absorb some of the more cutting edge topics people were working on, and also ask some questions.  The format was much more intimate than paper session; everyone had a chance to speak, and give their 2 cents.  Some of the people I had a chance to interact with I had met at other events, while others I have only read about.  At no point was anyone overly critical and even my rather naive questions were answered with patient.

One particular person I was truly impressed with is R. Henry Lieberman. I had read his work in the past, and just getting to talk to him was amazing. He has the uncanny ability to look at problems and different types of research from angles that others wouldn’t even consider.

When I had a chance to talk about my own research, everyone had great things to say and gave some of the most thoughtful comments.

Another group of people that made a good impression on me were the people from Microsoft.  Every time I visited their booth they had great people to chat with.  All of them had great energy and were very passionate about their work.  It was very eye-opening since most of my past experience were from people looking down at Microsoft. Interestingly, Google’s presence at their booth was very lacking.  There were quite a few recruiters, who, while very fun to talk to, weren’t able to answer some of the questions I had about life at Google and give me a more in depth idea of the work they are doing.  Another group that I didn’t see was Yahoo.  I did get a chance to talk to Aviva Rosenstein about some of the work they do.  From just interacting with these reps, I really want want to work for Yahoo or Microsoft.

Overall CHI was an incredible experience.  If this is how all conferences go, I really need to get my stuff together and write some more papers.

It looks like I’m going to Florence in April for the CHI 2008 conference. My work-in-progress got accepted, and since this is most likely my main publication for my tenure as a graduate student, I get to take the trip to present my work. Not only is the conference one of the most prestigious in the area of HCI, but it also gives me an opportunity to rub elbows with some of the researchers I’ve been reading about.
Here’s a copy of the abstract I submitted: PDF