The St Andrews Human Computer Interaction research group is involved in the organisation of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2013, UIST 2013 and ITS 2013, the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2013 conferences. Today a number of important things happened worthy of note and thanks. We are organising UIST with our colleagues Microsoft Research in Cambridge and ITS with our colleagues in the University of Helsinki.
The program for UIST 2013 went online. Our PC chairs Ivan and Takeo along with our general chairs Shahram and Aaron put this together. Our own Per Ola Kristensson was a member of the PC along with 30 others from around the world. Miguel Nacenta from SACHI has a paper in the final program. He will be posting more details on this paper and demo closer to the conference date.
The registration for UIST 2013 and for ITS 2013 opened today. Our own Jakub Dostal is one of the ITS and UIST registration chairs along with Merve and they have been hard at work getting this system up and running, ready for today, and the months leading upto the conference.
Miguel Nacenta is the local chair for UIST 2013 and he has been putting in enormous effort with the local arrangements from what the hotels should be, to how the student innovation contest can operate in the Kinkell Byre.  Per Ola Kristensson is the local chair for ITS 2013 and has likewise been very busy looking after many aspects of the program from getting our USB keys to ensuring the WiFi holds up. Per Ola is also busy as demonstrations co-chair with Scott from Microsoft for UIST 2013. This UIST demo event will be held in the Hall of Champions at the Old Course hotel. These aren’t things academics should be spending their time on but it’s what’s called of us when we agree to host a conference as a service to our research community. Miguel has put together a wonderful website with details on how to get to St Andrews for ITS and UIST. It’s a website released today and I know we in SACHI will be using for many years to come!
Finally, our own Uta Hinrichs who along with Eve are the student volunteer chairs for ITS and UIST. Thanks also to our local student volunteers who are already busy making the program layout, arranging shipping of incoming sponsor material etc. Of course, there are many other people from reviewers to other chairs to thank but I’ll leave that for a future post. For now, this post is to thank all of my local colleagues for their efforts in organising ITS and UIST this year.
It might take a village to raise a child but I can tell you it takes a research group with connections to the global research community to host two international conferences!