chi 2013

it has been seven years since i have been to chi. but i finally went back this year. i was attending the doctoral consortium, which provides a great opportunity to get feedback on your thesis in an interdisciplinary workshop, under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers.  since i work in an audio research institution, i have great access to audio experts, but i don't get any feedback from hci community. we were about 15 doctoral students and 5 experts. as i presented my sonification work, i got very interesting advice on which aspects of my research i should better focus on the next stages of the project. i have been comparing the auditory perception with visual perception in most of my presentations. i usually bring up the fact that regarding temporal resolution and frequency range, the ear exceeds by far visual capabilities. e.g. movies show 24 frames/sec whereas the ear is capable of resolving temporal microstructures of a magnitude of a few milliseconds. and while we can hear pitches across 10 octaves (20hz - 20khz), we can only see one octave (400 -700nm). some of these arguments and more about sonification were not enough to convince the panel of experts at chi which was a great learning lesson for me to back up my arguments with more comparisons of visuals which is more familiar to the hci community.
it was overall a great experience and i also enjoyed the interactivity  exhibits. i look forward to the next years' chi in toronto, if my papers get accepted.