EWHCI'94
Authors: Price Blaine , Blumenthal Brad , Leventhal Laura 
Published: January 2007

The fourth annual East-West Human Computer Interaction conference was quite a surprise, at least for veterans of the earlier EWHCI conferences. The first author attended the first conference (which was held in Moscow the week before the coup which saw the break-up of the old USSR) and served as logistics chair for the second conference (also held in St. Petersburg) and he found this most recent conference showed unbelievable improvements in the overall organization, location, and technical quality of the presentations. Logistics problems which would have taken hours to solve in previous years were either non-existent or taken care of behind the scenes by Juri Gornostaev and his team from the International Centre for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI). St. Petersburg itself has also become a world-class city and was hosting the Goodwill Games during the conference period. None of the problems of 2 years ago were encountered as restaurants were plentiful, shops were well-stocked and the media hype about crime proved to be unfounded.The conference itself was actually held in the suburbs outside St. Petersburg in a village called Pushkin, about 30 minutes by commuter train from the centre of St. Petersburg. Named for the famous Russian writer who studied here as a boy, the village is also known as 'Tsarskoye Selo' or 'Tsar's Village'. Almost half of the city is taken up by Katherine's Park, a huge landscape garden built by Katherine the Great as the site for her palace. The conference centre/hotel was in Kochubey Palace, a former home for the Russian nobility situated on the edge of the park. This was a perfect conference site with comfortable rooms, fantastic artwork and decor, a peaceful park and gardens for walking, with the village market and restaurants a short walk away, and a cosmopolitan city only a short train ride away.This year's conference was co-chaired by Allen Cypher (West) and Juri Gornostaev (East). As usual, the terms 'East' and 'West' refer to the old political boundaries as opposed to the geographic meaning, since the participants from South Korea, Japan, and the large Australian contingent were considered part of the 'West' for this conference. The rest of the West was represented by participants from the USA and Europe, including Austria, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. Hyper-inflation has caused large cost-of-living increases for Russian academics in the last year and this resulted in decreased attendance from the East, but a large number of Russian delegates did attend from places as far away as Ekaterinburg in the Ural mountains as well as Romania and the Ukraine. The Moscow SIGCHI Chapter provided a grant to encourage Eastern participation while ACM SIGCHI acted as a cooperating society and provided assistance to encourage Western participation.Apple Computer, Inc. was the major corporate sponsor in addition to some smaller Russian companies. Donations from sponsors were used to work towards the conference's primary goal: increasing the effective communication between researchers in the East and those in the west. Translators were hired for both technical sessions and social events in order to help those who needed it. Often the translators weren't necessary as a number of the Russian speakers were not shy about experimenting with English while several Western accompanying persons and participants, including the third author, had taken some Russian lessons before the conference and were keen to try their new linguistic talents.