Today was the first day of CHI 2007, the Computer Human Interaction conference in San Jose. CHI's reputation is very good and it is attended by the best in the business and academia, including researchers from Google, Yahoo, PARC, HP, Microsoft, and the best universities in the world.

CHI is the sort of academic conference that would be interesting to a non-technical person, or at least semi-technical, because the topics typically have a lot of visual interest. The presentations cover the kind of technologies that we often think of when we imagine the future of computing: gesture-driven interfaces, haptics, face recognition and next generation user interfaces (think Minority Report). People who attend are a nice mixture of grad students and academics, designers and engineers, universities and industry. The HCI community is a tight one and people often refer to one another by first name when fielding post-presentation questions.

I submitted a paper to CHI this year with my coworkers Kenton and April and we were very happy to hear that it was accepted. CHI is another conference that is quite competitive. Our paper is an analysis of the mobile video user study I mentioned a few weeks back. Hearing of our paper's acceptance to CHI this year brought to me both disappointment and incredible excitement. Do you want the good news or the bad news first? Don't worry the good news fully trumps the bad.

Ok, the bad news first. This year's CHI is in San Jose. "That's it?", you say? Yeah, considering previous venues include picturesque locations like Portland, Montreal, and Vienna (which I attended). And next year it's in Florence, which is tremendously motivating.

The good news? We won a Best Paper award It's quite a prestigious recognition and I certainly would not trade it for a more interesting city. A special thanks to Kenton who was lead author on the paper.

Stay tuned. I'll be writing about interesting presentations I see this week.