As you know, I attended the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI) which took place in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

I arrived in Atlanta on Friday, 9^th of April. After driving from Klagenfurt to Munich, and flying from Munich through Frankfurt to Atlanta, I finally arrived. On Saturday and Sunday several workshops took place. Since I didn’t attend any of them and just registered for the main conference program, I had time to get a feeling of Atlanta by walking around in different neighborhoods, visiting the CNN headquarters, the Georgia Aquarium, the Dr. Martin Luther King, jun. museum and many other interesting places – together with my advisor Mathias Lux, who also attended the conference.

On Monday, 12^th of April, the actual conference program started. It was very interesting. Besides listening to exciting presentations and new ideas, learning a lot concerning researching, designing studies and experiments etc., I also had the chance to network and meet new people. I talked to people of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Skype, and Microsoft Research just to mention a few. Conferences like this one really provide the possibility to expand one’s network, share thoughts and have interesting discussions. Although a big conference like ACM CHI with 2300+ attendees has a lot of “closed networks of people and communities”, it is still interesting to see the dynamics and activities that are existent.

On Wednesday, 14^th of April, we had our big day: the poster presentation about our paper “A Classification Scheme for User Intentions in Image Search” was on. We set up the poster in the morning in a huge exhibit room. Afterwards, between 10.30 and 11.30, we had the possibility to present our poster and talk with other researchers about our work. Together with Mathias Lux (main author of the paper) and Oge Marques from Florida Atlantic University, who traveled from Boca Raton, Florida to Atlanta on Sunday evening, we got a lot of input for our future research.

Thank god I already traveled back home to Austria on Wednesday (I arrived on Thursday), since the ash clouds of the burst of volcano Eyjafjalla on Iceland induced the cancelation of all transatlantic flights.

I’ll provide you a final report of the journey and the interesting conference in the next couple of days.

Have a good time!

Best,

Christoph