CHI NL Community Event 2024 in Utrecht

Attendees at the CHI NL Community Event 2024 in Utrecht.

The CHI NL Community Event brought together the local HCI community at Utrecht University on April 12th, 2024. After a Post-CHI event in 2023, we went back to the tradition of gathering before CHI to enable networking and social activities at the CHI conference and to provide an opportunity to present accepted work in a welcoming atmosphere. The event was a great success with a full day program and more than 100 registered attendees. 


We started the day with a welcome from the organizers and an introduction to CHI NL that was intended for the substantial number of people new to the community. The start of the technical program was our first keynote. Dr. Martijn Willemsen (Jheronimus Academy of Data Science & Eindhoven University of Technology) talked about recommender systems and AI and how we may leverage quantitative user-centric evaluation to better understand them.

Before lunch, we had our first session of paper presentation with presentations from Sara Salimzadeh, Lorenzo Corti, Mireia Yurrita Semperena, and Julian Frommel covering topics on human-AI decision making, needs of clinicians and citizens and toxicity in online games.

After the lunch break, we had the pleasure of welcoming Prof. Dr. Vanessa Evers (University of Twente) as our second keynote speaker. In her keynote, she showcased a wide range of her work on designing socially intelligent technology such as social robots. 

The afternoon continued with a second round of paper presentations from Benny Markovitch, Maarten Gerritse, Karthikeya Puttur Venkatraj, and Willemijn Elkhuizen. The presentations covered varied topics like cognitive assessment games, redirected walking in virtual reality, virtual avatar co-embodiment, and novel interactions with historical pop-up and movable books.

The coffee break featured interactive tables, where attendees could express their preferences in various categories (e.g., walking vs biking, quantitative vs qualitative research). After that, we had the last paper session featuring Esra de Groot, Yvon Ruitenburg, Roelof de Vries, and Chris Janssen talking about customizable and evolving avatars in online crowd work, dementia in everyday interactions, Blueprints as a way to systematize behavior change designs, head-up display designs for conditional automated driving.

The day ended with a social activity organized by Anouk van Kasteren and Marloes Vredenborg who sent groups on a treasure hunt where they had to complete different themed challenges. After this, the attendees had time to chat at a traditional Dutch borrel.


You can watch recordings of the presentations here and here.


This event was made possible by several people and organizations:

Organization: Hanna Hauptmann, Julian Frommel, Marit Bentvelzen, Eelco Heerder, Jeroen Ooge, Simone Ooms, Anouk van Kasteren, Marloes Vredenborg, Michel Wijkstra, and Judith Masthoff

Gido Hakvoort supported the organization as the financial liaison for CHI NL. The CHI NL Board provided support throughout the event. We thank Utrecht University and ACM SIGCHI for their support.  


Sponsors: