Want HRI Conference DOIs and Videos? Just Tap.
It’s been tough this social distancing and working from home. If you’re like me, it’s also tough not traveling, seeing friends, and attending events. Many of the talks, workshops, and conferences we’ve been planning to attend had cancellations. When HRI 2020 (Human Robot Interaction) was cancelled, we decided to spring into action to help connect everyone to all the great conference content using our Progressive Web App (PWA). We collected the DOIs from the ACM Digital Library and paper sessions from the chairs; but we wanted engaging videos for people to watch, share, and discuss. The plan was to put all this into our app!
Jump over to https://programs.sigchi.org/hri/2020 and tap into program, and into a paper and you’ll see two new buttons! An ACM DL button for the paper and a video link which takes you to the author’s recording of the talk for remote viewing. How does this online conference model for HRI work now? You can find out for yourself from the HRI General Chairs.
You should be able to dive easily into the conference program, see the organized sessions, find the papers you want and jump right to the paper and video. Find a paper or session you like? Wanna share it? We’re rendering previews now too on the content pages.
Many thanks to the HRI chairs (James Young and Tony Belpaeme) and their organizing committee. Because when we asked for videos of every paper talk, they put the pedal to the metal. Their authors and speakers also jumped to task and created 592 minutes of video over the course of a few weeks. This includes 56 paper talks, 2 keynotes, and 2 welcome messages while the chairs built the program into our scheduler (called QOALA) for the PWA. The 11.3 GB of video was further transcoded by Kashyap Todi and David Lindlbauer on the SIGCHI Operations Committee Video Team to a more manageable 2.4 GB of HD video at the right aspect ratio. From there, we linked all this content into our QOALA+PWA. I can’t thank enough the video team enough. They created the roadmap and wrote the scripts to allow other conferences to bring in DOIs and videos and worked with PCS to connect it all together. Oh and PCS made some updates for us to help the process in the future. Did I mention we did all this in about a month? It was a huge last minute volunteer effort under pressure; thanks to all! We’re pretty excited about this new process and these new features. We will be rolling them out more broadly in the app for all our upcoming conferences (virtual, mixed, or real).
PS: We’re looking for a designer for the SIGCHI Operations Committee. We’ll post a call soon but if you’re curious, just ping me.
