Georgia Tech has highlighted trends in keyword topics from the CHI 2020 papers session, mapping the results based on where researchers conduct their work. In an effort to report on key trends that are of value to the community and can be gleaned from the available data, we have limited the scope of the analysis to keyword topics in the papers. It might be a boon to the field to better understand other demographic characteristics of authors and research, such as sub-fields that institutions specialize in or temporal trends in HCI research, but the conference program is not explicitly designed for such analysis.
This current analysis would not be possible without the program data being made publicly available. We sincerely thank the efforts of the CHI conference committee to make this information accessible.
Georgia Tech researchers are focusing their work on privacy and security issues in HCI as well as finding insights into peoples’ physical, mental, and professional health using technology. Click on the maps below to explore global trends in HCI.
Almost nine percent of CHI 2020 papers included ‘virtual reality’ as a keyword topic and it is the only research area approaching double digits in the program (Privacy and security ranked 2nd with six percent of papers). VR previously held the top spot for paper keyword topics in an analysis of CHI 2017 and 2018.
Georgia Tech research this year evaluated the impact of VR becoming more common on the manufacturing floor. A paper by Alyssa Rumsey and Chris Le Dantec provides “insights into the organizational impact of VR on human performance augmentation and skill acquisition revealing the larger infrastructural challenges facing the adoption of consumer grade smart technologies in industrial workplace settings.” Read more here.
Privacy and security topics include information privacy, privacy controls, security and privacy decision-making, and a score of other related topics that collectively make up the second most popular area of research in the papers program. Broadly, keyword topics that included “privacy” outpaced those for “security” by a 3-to-1 margin.
One Georgia Tech paper in this area that received an honorable mention focuses on how friends or extended family sometimes share digital accounts (e.g. streaming services) and the security and privacy issues this brings. Sauvik Das and the research team found “as we delve deeper into an era of social computing, notions of digital resource ownership are often complicated through both shared and social uses of digital resources.” Read more here.
Accessibility is a central topic in more than 30 papers (3 percent of program) and has a presence in almost every other part of the CHI proceedings. Accessibility within the papers program is paired most frequently with the keywords of visual impairment or blindness.
Research in accessibility addresses a range of solutions, from screen readers to tactile graphics, and focuses on diverse populations including students, immigrants, caregivers, and older adults.
Augmented reality is a distinct research field sometimes connected to virtual reality but affording very different user experiences and interactions. The most prevalent locations that include AR researchers in the proceedings are in the eastern United States and South Korea.
Georgia Tech alumna Julie Kientz and her co-authors take one of the most recognizable examples of the technology and examine a health perspective in their paper “It Should Be a Game for Fun, Not Exercise”: Tensions in Designing Health-Related Features for Pokémon GO.
Social media research in the papers program is most heavily concentrated in five U.S. cities – Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Cambridge, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. The primary related topics include variations on fake news and misinformation. Facebook and Twitter were the channels most often tagged in the papers.
Georgia Tech led a study that focuses on understanding organizational cultures by using anonymous reviews of workplaces posted by employees on Glassdoor. Researchers “propose a methodology to apply our construct on Glassdoor reviews to quantify the [organizational culture] of employees by sector.” The work comes from the labs of Gregory D. Abowd and Munmun De Choudhury and attempts to explain job performance and lead to possible future work for designing tools for improving “employee functioning”.