News Story

‘Best SIGCHI Paper’ award for Yanna

Marc Eisenstadt, Monday 1 Jul 2002

First-year KMi postgraduate student Yanna Vogiazou has won a top prize for ‘excellence in combining theory and application’ at the Designing Interactive Systems 2002 conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The conference, co-sponsored by Sun, IBM, Microsoft, and the British HCI group, was held in London from 25th-28th June.

The prize, accompanied by a cheque for £150, was awarded for Yanna’s invited presentation on “Massive Multiplayer Presence” in the DIS2002 Postgraduate Symposium strand. According to the conference literature, “The Postgraduate Symposium is a closed session that allows postgraduate students from a range of disciplines to explore their interests in the design of interactive systems and get feedback on their research from their peers and a panel of established researchers.” Individual participants were “invited on the basis of submissions describing their research work.”

The awarding panellists were Dr. Allan MacLean, Xerox Research Centre Europe, and Prof. Gillian Crampton Smith, Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea, Italy (formerly Director of Computer Related Design (CRD) at the Royal College of Art). The prize was sponsored by City University, which hosted the Symposium.

Yanna’s presentation described her theoretical and applied work on massively multiplayer games based entirely on the presence awareness of other players. The work has evolved from a combination of studies of crowd psychology, game technologies, and presence awareness in instant messaging. The accompanying photo illustrates some of Yanna’s work on the design of a ‘massive bumper car’ game.