My first experience at IDC 2018 and my first trip to Europe is a blast! I have learned so much and also feel cognitively/mentally exhausted from trying to absorb all the topics/talks (despite knowing that this is probably not the best way to spend my energy but just can’t help)! I also got to meet a lot of professors working in this space from all over the Europe and even in Australia. There are three researchers making apps related to speech therapy/children with disabilities, and I’ve officially recruited them for my research study. There’s also an increased interest in voice-based interaction.
I am glad that I actually started my first day at IDC with a pre-conference KidRec Workshop (with international researchers from Italy, Netherland, Switzerland,UK, and USA). We got so many things (e.g., critical evaluation of existing landscape, collaboration for publication to potential venues, comparing industry vs. academia needs); it’s such a enjoyable and loving group. One of the workshop organizer, Dr. Jerry Alan Fails, will be the host organizing IDC 2019 in Boise, Idaho. I should definitely consider submitting because the theme is “Living Healthy”. I have downloaded all relevant proceedings and plan to spend more time to reflect on some of the paper sessions/talks that I resonate with. This is a particular good exercise for me as (1) a mean to re-process all my learning holistically, (2) an appreciation for the kind travel sponsorship from my advisor, and (3) a way to help contributing to institutional knowledge for future perspective doctoral students who may also attend IDC in the years to come.
My biggest “aha” moment is recognizing my contribution to Recommendation Systems by sharing ongoing practice experiences from speech language pathologists and elaborate on how these health professionals recommend educational and clinically informed contents when they use multimedia with children with disabilities in the context of speech therapy.
Another contribution is how to build upon what my advisor has trained in terms of “system thinking” and its implication to the research, practitioner, and designer collaboration framework, proposed by Natalia Kucirkova. For instance, is it possible to use a metaphor of human anatomy to illustrate the relationship between different stakeholders? Does children = heart of what we are designing for, designer = hands that allow design work to happen, and researchers = brains that empower creativity and innovation?
So, what did everyone learn from the KidRec Workshop?
- International institute of collaboration: apps for books
- Produce assets easily understandable by different stakeholders (academic, industry)
- Importance to have a landscape review to communicate w/ broader audience, b/c discussions are internally within company or disciplines
- Sharing funding opportunities/research calls
- European: track (collection to benchmark novel systems) as a paradigm (what do we need w/o ingredients, what do we want, what methods can we use, what are the benefits)
- Importance to include practitioners (but know that practitioners rely on money from administrators)
- How to turn this interdisciplinary contribution into venues and funding opportunities? [Shared venue?]
- Fitting perspectives into own paradigms
- What is recommendation system? What is relevant?
- Shared challenges across different domains
- Role of a big company and the contribution to this field: distributing
- Importance of having all disciplines represented
- Goals from 4 years ago: making personalized recommendations → first workshop that is specific to KidRec
- Unit of analysis is at one organizational level, right contexts but ongoing challenges
- From product → recommendation systems
- How to translate curriculum to adjust to international school systems
- Application for recommendation systems for different stakeholders
- Outcome: Where are we as a community? Why this community matters? What happens next? How do we reach out to others?
- Pure researchers/designers/practitioners can be overcomes by individuals w/ mixed competence; teachers need to be aware about the work that researchers did; take part in the research and design to add the best product/researchers for children