Director’s Letter
By: Niklas Elmqvist
Tags: University Of Maryland, Research, Hcil Symposium 2020

Introducing the 2020 HCIL Symposium on May 28, 2020.

Photo by Oskars Sylwan on Unsplash.

Let me begin this letter by sending my warmest wishes for the health and harmony of all of us in the HCIL community. These are trying times, and there are few parts of our society that have not been touched by the global COVID-19 pandemic in some way or another.

The HCIL Symposium is obviously no exception. I never thought I would preside over an HCIL Symposium that is all virtual, but here we are. As the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread over the globe this spring, it quickly became clear that even our 37-year old tradition of holding a celebration of the HCIL’s research would be no match against a virus too small to see.

But never have I been more proud of the HCIL than when in March 2020, in perhaps the darkest hour of the unfolding coronavirus outbreak, I polled our HCIL faculty members on whether we should still host the 2020 symposium, and the response was a resounding “YES!” Together we decided to make the symposium entirely virtual and to abolish the usual registration fee so that the event would be open for all to take part.

Last year, the symposium was co-located with the 2019 iConference and took place in April. This year, we resume our regular time slot at the end of May after the UMD semester has ended. Furthermore, while last year the event was hosted in the UMD Marriott, we planned to hold the 2020 symposium in the brand new Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering on the UMD campus. Of course, in the end, we are not hosting the symposium in any brick-and-mortar building at all, but instead entirely online. C’est la vie! We hope to be able to host in the Iribe Center in future years.

While it may seem odd to announce good news in times such as these, it may actually be precisely what we all need. First, I want to welcome our very own Ping Wang from the College of Information Studies as a formal HCIL faculty member. We also have Caro Williams-Pierce and Naeemul Hassan joining us as new HCIL faculty members. Furthermore, I’m thrilled to report that Catherine Plaisant was recognized with the 2020 ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award. Furthermore, David Weintrop received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. And finally, second-year Ph.D. student Emma Dixon received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Look for the companion news roundup that lists all of the awards and news for the HCIL for 2019–2021.

I also want to thank our many supporters. For our external industry sponsors, Adobe was able to fund us yet again, as were Google, Dell, OneAmerica, and Optimal Solutions Group. I am also happy to say that the UMD campus came together for the HCIL, including the Department of Computer Science, the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS). Thank you again!

Let me close this letter with the sincere wish that by continuing our 37-year tradition — a tradition longer than most HCI conferences — we may help shine a small beacon of hope against the impending darkness. A hope that knowledge and science and design and diversity are still values to uphold. That at the end of all this, once the clouds have lifted and the virus has departed our shores, the HCIL will still be here, working hard to make technology more accessible and available and useful to all.

Welcome, and we hope that you will enjoy what we have prepared for you!

Sincerely,

Dr. Niklas Elmqvist

Director, Human-Computer Interaction Lab

Professor, College of Information Studies

Affiliate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Member, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

University of Maryland, College Park