About Summer School

We are happy to announce a summer school on “Research Methods and Approaches to Text Entry and Other Interaction Techniques” from May 21-25, 2018.

Despite major advances in interaction techniques and context aware computing, text entry is still at the core of our interaction with interactive devices. The text entry research community has advanced considerably in recent years, but there is still a long way to go before we have smooth, fast and consistently accurate entry across various devices from large tablets to smartwatches. Further, while much research has been done for text entry in alphabetical scripts, such as the Latin script, and particularly for English, relatively less research has been conducted on text entry in other writing systems, such as Abugidas (scripts from the Indian sub-continent), Abjads (scripts from West Asia), or the Logographic scripts (from East Asia). In a similar way to text entry, many emerging topics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research involve conceptualising, prototyping and evaluating novel interaction techniques. In order to conduct research in these topics, the selection of appropriate research methods and rigorous user testing are crucial. At times, new researchers tend to overlook crucial aspects while conducting research, because of which even interesting designs do not mature sufficiently. Furthermore, problems in modelling, user study design or statistical analysis often lead to wasted effort as the results become unpublishable.

An important goal of this summer school is developing research capability. This summer school will provide new researchers with a systematic overview of the common research methods. It will enable experienced researchers to refine their skills, and learn new, alternative methods used in the area. Through lectures, practical case studies and hands-on activities, this summer school will focus on the protocols used in experimental research, the principles of designing and executing experiments, and techniques for hypothesis testing. The participants will have an opportunity to present their ongoing research and get feedback. We also expect that the summer school will trigger collaboration across universities and research groups.

Call for Participation

The summer school is open to students and researchers from both industry and academia. Please submit your application to attend the summer school through the online application form. This form requires applicants to submit a statement of purpose (up to 400-words) summarizing their current and future research interests.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship from ACM SIGCHI, we are able to sponsor attendance awards for a limited number of full-time students. These awards will cover the registration fee and up to ₹20,000 towards accommodation and travel. These awards will be granted on a discretionary basis depending on need and expected benefit of attending the summer school. Please highlight your need for support on the application form.

The attendance awards will be decided based on the relevance of the SOP to this summer school, their impact potential and their need for financial support. We will make an attempt to get as wide a geographical distribution as possible among the students.

Please note that this support is available only to those who are active SIGCHI student members before the summer school. If the selected student is not a SIGCHI member, he/she must become a member prior to the event.

Registration

Registration Fee₹15,000
Application Formhttps://goo.gl/forms/7Evy0cMTROp1Op2F2

Important dates

Application deadline 1March 18th, 2018
Notification of acceptance for round 1March 25th, 2018
Application deadline 2April 10th, 2018 (if needed)
Notification of acceptance for round 2April 20th, 2018
Summer SchoolMay 21-25, 2018

Ministry and Government clearances

Ministry and Government clearances that may be required to apply for visa:

Clearance from Ministry of External Affairs has been received, clearance from Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of HRD and Government of Maharashtra is awaited.

Course Contents

Detailed schedule will be updated to the summer school webpage closer to the event.

Research Methods

  • Formulating research questions, principle approach to designing controlled user experiment, within-subjects vs. between-subjects designs, counter-balancing, single factor and factorial design, dealing with the variables, concerns about internal and external validity
  • Design engineering, solution-neutral problem statements, functional decomposition, requirements, conceptual design, embodiment design, detailed design
  • Crowdsourcing methods for data generation and interface evaluation
  • Best practices for data logging, experiment protocol, defining experimental tasks, scientifically approaching user performance and user error analysis
  • Fundamental inferential statistics, hypothesis testing with parametric and non-parametric procedures, advanced statistical methods for analyzing data
  • Reporting empirical findings, academic paper writing, with special emphasis on presenting non-English interfaces
  • Fundamentals of mathematical modeling for HCI problems
  • Best practice for engaging users in design and long term studies

Text input research for Asian scripts

  • Evolution of text input methods so far and possible future directions
  • Research on new text input interfaces and unfamiliar text entry methods
  • Discussion about text input research for Abugida, Abjad and Logographic scripts
  • Modelling techniques for text input such as language modelling, tap modelling, and other natural language processing approaches

Emerging interaction techniques

  • Evaluating research on speech and multimodal interfaces
  • Interaction techniques for augmented and assistive technologies
  • Case studies and best practices for conducting research on emerging interaction techniques, interactive systems and interfaces

Sponsors