News from the HFES Annual Conference

For anyone who was not at the HFES conference last week, you missed an excellent event. The Internet session on Tuesday morning was a great set of five talks. The extreme gaming session was also very interesting, and in fact is a model for what we want to do going forward (see below).

ITG Business Meeting:
Our incoming Technical Group Chair, Ania Rodriguez, led a discussion on what ITG wants to be and how to focus our activities to achieve this. We had a long discussion on what to do with the TG web site and how to grow the technical program for future conferences. More specifically:

1. The most important thing is next year's technical program. We had one lecture session and one special session this year, as well as several posters. All were very high quality. The number of sessions is a function of the number of submissions, so we can get more sessions if people send in more (and high quality) proposals. We plan to co-sponsor more sessions next year with other TGs, especially computer systems. And I can imagine some good titles with health care, systems development, and others. The idea is to create some unique and innovative panels that will draw in a diverse crowd. There were over 1300 people at the conference, so it is a great opportunity to share ideas with a broad cross section of HF professionals. Ideas suggested at the meeting and afterwards include social networking systems, large-scale military systems, and several others.

Note - the deadline for submissions is January 28th, so start thinking now. The call for proposals will be out next month. The conference will be in Times Square, so it is also a great place to go for other reasons (vacation and professional).

2. Please send me articles for the rejuvenated ITG journal (resnickm@fiu.edu). We haven't named it yet (it used to be called Internetworking), so you can recommend titles as well. Anything related to internet human factors is fair game. Articles should be 2-4 pages long and will be peer reviewed.

3. Please send in URLs for your favorite internet human factors resources. We will be putting up a link farm on the site so that the site becomes a useful destination for good content. We discussed the fact that there are already several of these around, but we will keep this one small and focused as a contrast to the others that seem to have links to everything.



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