CHI Student Chapters & Chapter Subgroups
September 2001 Local SIGs column
Among SIGCHI's many local chapters are 4 student chapters: 1) WatCHI (at the University of Waterloo in Canada); 2) Universidade Fernando Pessoa SIGCHI (in Portugal); 3) LowellCHI (at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in the U.S.); and 4) GMU SIGCHI (at George Mason University in the U.S. state of Virginia). A couple of the other CHI chapters have student subgroups: 1) BayCHI (the San Francisco Bay Area chapter); and 2) sigchi.dk (the prospective chapter in Denmark). And people at several additional educational institutions and existing CHI chapters are considering forming student groups.
What do these student groups do? Why do they exist? What are some of their challenges? Representatives of the student groups identified above met at CHI 2001 to share their answers to these questions. This column provides a look at these groups via the words of those representatives.
As is true across all CHI Local SIGs (see the January 98 column, "Diversity within Unity: the Purpose of a Local SIG"), the goals and activities of student groups vary considerably. Creation of a community of students and faculty across diverse programs and institutions; learning about and engaging in the work of HCI professionals; and increasing awareness of HCI issues are among the different student group objectives.
Here is more about each group:
WatCHI (by Anne Kimberly Gay & Olivier St-Cyr)
Henry Chen, in collaboration with faculty member Tom Carey, founded the WatCHI group, and it is now something like three years old. The primarily goal of WatCHI is to pull together students and faculty members who share common interests in HCI. The University of Waterloo offers several courses in HCI, spread-out across many programs. We needed a way to regroup people from the many different programs, and a CHI student chapter seemed to provide the answer.
Today, WatCHI has over 40 members, including students and faculty members. So far, most members of WatCHI have been in the Human Systems groups of the Systems Design Engineering Department, but we sometimes attract students from Kinesiology, Management Science, Computer Science, as well as Cognitive Science. We hope to recruit students from other faculties and programs, including students in psychology, mathematics, and graphics & design. Although HCI is growing at the University of Waterloo, more effort is needed to integrate and share knowledge on HCI.
The WatCHI executive is made up five people: a Chair, a Vice-Chair, a Secretary, a Webmaster, and someone in charge of publicity. The executive meets four to five times every semester (fall, winter, summer) to plan and structure activities proposed to members. We have not had a lot of luck getting undergraduate students involved in the executive committee (though they do come to events); this may be partly because Waterloo has a co-op system that takes undergrads off campus every third term or so.
Having grad students as your executive has its own problems. Since most of us are master's students, the exec turns over every two to three years. We have an election every fall where anyone in attendance can vote.
We are not an official student group as far as the student government is concerned, because that would have meant we had to run all our funds through the student government finance system. We do not charge a membership fee, so mostly our funds are paid out of pocket or by our faculty advisor.
On average, three to four activities are put together every semester. We are lucky to be in a hi-tech area where there are a lot of Waterloo-associate companies eager to maintain a relationship with the student body. We invite companies to give presentations on methods and projects, as well as conduct recruiting activities for HCI positions. We have also organized tours to labs in companies and also with the Canadian defense people.
We sometimes get groups together to attend ToRCHI events in Toronto, as well as conventions and expos (ocassionally, we help the ACM to staff a booth at such things). This year, on a project with the LT3 (Learning and Teaching Through Technology) center, we added a list of HCI-related courses and professors on campus to our website.
We also run purely social events. One summer, we tried having a coffee break in the afternoon once a week, but that saw low attendance. Bowling or Pub Nights get a higher turnout and are a nice setting for people to talk about their projects or meet human factors experts who are visiting.
We have also had workshops and more specific presentations given by WatCHI members. One of the more exciting events we hosted was CHI 99.5; many of us had attended CHI '99 in Pittsburgh PA USA, so we re-presented panels or talks that we had attended there in a series of short presentations.
To announce all of these events, we use a group mailing list through groups.yahoo.com (formerly egroups). This is nice, because it also gives you a space to post files and post events on a public calendar. The mailing list also gets a lot of traffic about ToRCHI events, job postings, and HCI-related activities on campus, such as workshops at the LT3 center or projects on www.telechi.org, which is hosted locally.
Universidade Fernando Pessoa SIGCHI (by David Ribeiro Lamas)
The main goal of our chapter is to increase HCI/ergonomic issues awareness both in academia and industry by sharing our thoughts by either writing and publishing in local newspapers and magazines or by bringing these issues into management meetings to show sponsors how they relate to business success and profit.
Another important goal of our chapter is to help members keep up with the field's evolution and progress by sharing proceedings and tutorial notes from CHI, CUU, and IUI conferences.
We started about three years ago, and our main problem is to keep people in the group. As a student chapter, most of our members come and go, and we do not yet have the means to keep in touch. We're planning to set up a web forum where people will be able to come back and keep in touch, at least, electronically. We have the machines and software, but we are struggling with people's time in order to build it.
During the 2000/2001 academic year, we had about 10 in our group. Most of us either teach or study computer-related subjects. Some of us work in industry, which in Portugal is mainly represented by SME (small to medium enterprises) that don't have the size or structure to accommodate specialists like HCI technicians.
GMU SIGCHI (by Sheryl Miller)
GMU SIGCHI was founded in the Fall of 2000 to meet the needs of students wanting to share and learn about experiences of HCI professionals. The chapter is composed of both graduate and undergraduate students, and there are no dues. The chapter is drafting a constitution that will assist it in gaining financial suppport from the university. This funding will make it easier to host professional and social/networking events. In the meantime, the chapter is considering soliciting financial support from local HCI industries.
The goal of the chapter is to offer practical, career-oriented information and support to its members. Last fall, the chapter created a tutorial series that began with a web design tutorial presented by the chapter president. More such events are planned. The chapter is also undertaking an effort to build a database of internship opportunities for HCI students.
Since last fall, the main focus of the chapter has been the CIFter study, a comprehensive web evaluation project sponsered by NIST. GMU SIGCHI is one of several groups of HCI professionals who will conduct various web site evaluations. The work is currently underway, and the chapter expects to report its findings in the fall.
BayCHI's Student BOF (by Carolyn Gale)
The BayCHI Student BOF (Birds Of a Feather group) is an umbrella organization for student HCI research/service groups and all other individuals who are interested. Our goals are:
- to provide specialized BayCHI services and events to students throughout the San Francisco Bay Area;
- to promote awareness and support of HCI to academic institutions that do not have formal HCI programs.
We currently have 50-60 folks on the email distribution list, mostly students from the University of California Berkeley and Stanford University. We are actively trying to recruit interest in many of the other 50+ colleges and universities in the Bay Area.
The real impetus for the BOF began in April 2000, with a chance meeting of myself and the chair of a student group at Stanford called the Alliance for People and Technology. We brainstormed several ways that BayCHI could help this group, as well as expand its reach to other student groups in the Bay Area. In the end, the members of the Stanford group transitioned over to the BOF.
Our kickoff meeting was held in October 2000 in San Francisco, consisting of a panel which discussed the dilemma encountered in the transfer and dissemination of academic research in industry. Roughly 55 participants attended -- again, mostly students from UC Berkeley and Stanford.
We have held two meeting since then. One was a presentation by Ben Shneiderman at Stanford; the other featured project presentations from Pamela Hinds' "Contextual and Organizational Issues in HCI" course at Stanford. We plan to hold meetings quarterly.
The biggest constraint on the BOF's activities is geography -- the San Francisco Bay Area is rather large, and traffic and questionable public transportation makes it difficult to find a central location to hold meetings.
sigchi.dk's student chapter (by Christian Hagel-Sorensen and Jakob Bruhns)
The student chapter of the Danish SIGCHI started informally at a normal sigchi.dk meeting. Afterwards, some of the students present got together. Several had the idea that some kind of contact between the students within HCI/Usability in Denmark would be a good thing. After that, we held an initial meeting to brainstorm ideas about what a student chapter could and should do.
Since the ordinary arrangements by sigchi.dk are normally also relevant for students, our main goal has not been to copy these. Rather, we have tried to strengthen the contact and networking aspects between the students of sigchi.dk and to make our arrangements specifically relevant for students.
We have held two events so far: a regular talk on Interactive Television and a visit to Nokia's usability lab in Copenhagen. The latter was done to hear about the work of HCI professionals and to open up contact between students and Nokia.
In the greater Copenhagen area, there are at least five universities where you can study HCI-related subjects. We want to bring the students from all those places together to form study groups and to share knowledge about courses and litterature. Our ambition is to be country-wide, but so far we have not had much success getting in contact with students from the other universities in Denmark.
Our problems have mostly been practical. We have realized that it always takes longer than expected to plan and execute an event. We've also wanted to set up mailing lists and a discussion forum, to maintain a simple way of informing and discussing subjects relevant to students. However, we have not had the technical/server capacity to do so yet.
LowellCHI & Additional Information
Guillermo Zeballos (who represented LowellCHI at the CHI 2001 meeeting) was unable to provide text describing LowellCHI before this column needed to go to press. However, as described on the LowellCHI flyer disseminated at the CHI 2001 Local SIGs booth, "LowellCHI is committed to serving the UMASS Lowell campus as well as the general CHI community in the Merrimack Valley / North Boston area. You don't need to be a student to participate. We provide a forum for informative discussion on a variety of areas, in a personal, informal format with visiting guest speakers."
Additional information about all of these student groups and about how to form a CHI student chapter is accessible via SIGCHI's Local SIGs website (www.acm.org/sigchi/local-sigs).
Richard I. Anderson, Local SIGs Chair
