“A summer or winter school is a program of lectures, classes, tutorials, hands on technology sessions, exercises or group work organised by a group of SIGCHI members for the benefit of SIGCHI student members. ”
This was the start of the call for bids to hold summer/winter schools in 2017 published to the SIGCHI membership in 2016. This simple line caught the interest and imagination of members, students and conferences across the world. So far we have had two deadlines and many more applications than we can fund. We funded 7 events in 2017, of which 4 have already taken place.
We are also pleased to see that conferences such as RecSys are leading the way by creating their own summer school programs making use of our Specialised Conferences Development Fund.
This post is being updated as we reflect and report back to our members on what the organizers of the various SIGCHI supported summer school have been able to tell us. What each group has shown might inspire others to propose new summer schools or uncover alternative ways to help realize our shared mission in HCI education beyond our regular workshops, conferences and meetings. Our thanks to those who helped contribute to this post incuding Markus Zanker.
RecSys 2017
The ACM Summer School on Recommender Systems (funded by SIGCHI and supported by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) was held as a pre-program to the RecSys’17 conference from Monday 21st of August to Friday 25th in Bolzano, Italy. The Doctoral Symposium (DS) of RecSys’17 has been integrated into the program of the summer school and took place in parallel on the last day of the summer school.
The school had around 110 participants, mostly PhD students and young researchers as well as 15 lecturers. They were leaders in the field who volunteered to give tutorials and hands-on lessons at this summer school. The lectures were covering a broad range of topics from an algorithmic as well as an methodological perspective. In addition upcoming and trending topics such as recommending to groups or affect and personality-based recommendation approaches have also been addressed.
For more details on this summer school please see this site: http://pro.unibz.it/projects/schoolrecsys17/
Organizers: Robin Burke, DePaul University, USA,
Francesco Ricci, Free University Bozen-Bolzano, Italy and
Markus Zanker, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.