In October 2018, I received the FBTI Award of Excellence for the Best Bachelor’s Thesis. It is an annual award given to one computer science student in Germany. I want to thank my supervisors Prof. Dr. Anthony Tang (University of Calgary) and Prof. Dr. André Miede (Saarland University of Applied Sciences) for their continuous support during my thesis! Furthermore, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Lora Oehlberg and Prof. Dr. Ehud Sharlin from the University of Calgary!

The ceremony was hold in Wernigerode (Harz, Germany). Thank you very much to all the reviewers, the FBTI and to CEMA for supporting this event.

THAT WAS IT, my first CHI conference! “The ACM CHI’18 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction” (https://chi2018.acm.org/). This year, CHI took place in Montreal (Canada). Over 3000 participants from across the world met at CHI’18. It was great getting the chance to be one of them. Moreover, I also present our paper Perspective on and Re-Orientation of Physical Proxies in Object-Focused Remote Collaboration. Thanks to all the people who came to my talk! I presented the work, but this was truly a team success!!

I am very proud that we got a “Best Paper Honorable Mention Award”!!

(Ehud is missing)

Furthermore, it was great seeing the iLab folks again, and being a part of the student volunteering team! I am looking forward to seeing you again!!

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On the last two days, I attended to the 1th international CHI Science Jam “From concept to poster in 2 days – join us for a human-computer interaction research jam!“. The Science Jam follows the very successful ideas of Game James and Hackathons, where people work in small groups to explore novel ideas. With our team we investigated the topic “Remote Collaboration Ideation”. It was great being part of this group, and we definitely had lots of fun. It was great meeting you all!! Many thanks to for organizing this great event, and all mentors who volunteered!!!!

Organisation:

The sciencejammers at #chi2018! #sciencejam pic.twitter.com/nGxOA9NPHF

— Casper Harteveld (@casperharteveld) 23. April 2018

Read here: http://ricelab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/blog/2018/rema/

Last week, I attended the 13th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction in Chicago, Illinois USA. Many great researchers from across the world attended this conference under the theme “Robots for Social Good”. It was very interesting to see other people’s work and their results from the last year/s. I had some really interesting conversations, and I also presented our latest work (The Way You Move – The Effect of a Robot Surrogate Movement in Remote Collaboration) during a poster session. I was surprised how broad this research field actually is; from work on social and ethical aspects of human-robot interaction all the way up to novel algorithms and implementations. I really enjoyed the variety of publications, and I am very happy that I got the opportunity to attend HRI 2018.

On March 5th, I attended the 1st International Workshop on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for Human-Robot Interactions (VAM-HRI). Congrats to the organizing committee! It was great being there!

That’s a wrap for #VAM-HRI! 30 papers, ~75 participants over the course of the day! pic.twitter.com/IRJXPdA6Qw

— Tom Williams (@williamstome) 6. März 2018

Our paper The Way You Move The Effect of a Robot Surrogate Movement in Remote Collaboration was accepted at the ACM/IEEE HRI 2018 conference, and we will present our work during a poster session at the conference in Chicago.

Our paper Perspective on and Re-Orientation of Physical Proxies in Object Focused Remote Collaboration got accepted at the ACM CHI 2018 conference, and we will present our work at the conference in Montreal.