In March of 2016 Yuchen Zhao and Aaron Quigley from St Andrews attended the ACM SIGCHI Intelligent User Interfaces Conference in California. Yuchen was attending to present a long paper on a user study about location-privacy recommenders and a student consortium paper while Aaron was attending as the ACM SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for Specialised Conferences.


ACM IUI is an annual meeting of the intelligent interfaces community, i.e. where HCI meets AI. The research community focuses on using AI techniques to improve interfaces.

Zhao, Y, Ye, J & Henderson, T 2016, ‘The effect of privacy concerns on privacy recommenders‘. in IUI ’16 Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. ACM Press – Association for Computing Machinery, New York, pp. 218-227, ACM IUI 2016, Sonoma, United States, 7-10 March., 10.1145/2856767.2856771

This long paper report on a user study about location-privacy recommenders. It specifically focuses on people’s experiences and concerns. The experimental results can potentially help the designers of location-sharing services and privacy recommenders. The student consortium paper is about Yuchen’s PhD research that applies recommender systems to solving usability issues in location-privacy protection.
IUI ’16 provided a great opportunity to the researchers from both the HCI and AI to communicate with each other. As a presenter, student volunteer, and student consortium attendee, Yuchen had a lot of chances to present his research, to help organise the conference with other students, and to consult with senior researchers. The quality of the presented papers is high and the feedback was helpful.
Yuchen’s most interesting session of IUI ’16 was on Recommender Systems (RS). These papers applied RS to helping people with issues beyond online shopping or music recommendation. For example, in the ChordRipple paper, Huang et al. use RS to help novice music students with composing. This suggests that RS might be suitable to address many real life problems not only recommending products!

Prior to IUI Aaron attended a SIGCHI conference management committee meeting and CSCW 2016. In the lead upto IUI he was invited by some of the future organisers to attend IUI 2016. This was the 21st annual meeting of the intelligent user interfaces community, and is one of longest established SIGCHI specialised conferences.
IUI remains a single track conference, which many of the other specialised conferences have had to forgo as they grow in both submission and delegate numbers. IUI, like others, faces this question as the talk and break times are shortened and the time to confer and ask questions is squeezed. However, the single track presents the opportunity for everyone to see every talk which changes the nature of the discussions during the posters, demos and break times. The IUI community is very strong, with many leading figures who cross over between AI and HCI attending.
AI and HCI are in fact two areas of research which need to work more closely together in the future. There are many untapped areas of research and many problems which can only be solved when AI techniques are adapted in use with humans. Likewise, there are many aspect of interaction with computational devices today which are hinder by the lack of any “intelligent interaction” which AI could offer.
Aaron is also the program co-chair for IUI 2018 which will be held in Tokyo Japan and looks forward to enhancing and extending IUI when it’s located there.