ACM CHI Barcelona 2026 (by Jessica Mcclearn)

 By Jessica Mcclearn    


After a long winter of writing my PhD thesis, I was very happy to wake up and drink espressos in the early morning sunshine of Barcelona for a much-needed caffeine boost before heading to the ACM CHI conference for a week! The ACM conference on Computer-Human Interaction is the largest conference in the field, with over 5000 in-person attendees over five days.

The main reason I attended CHI this year was to support a co-author during their presentation of our work on help-seeking for fraud and scams, a research project we worked on together while interning at Google in the NYC office. Through an analysis of 405 Reddit posts, we explored the motivations and hooks for scam engagement before delineating how people seek help for scams across different stages. We did so by developing a taxonomy of scam types and then analysing scammers' emotional and technical tactics for engaging targets. We expanded prior frameworks in HCI literature and suggested interventions to address sensemaking, guidance, therapeutic and external support needs before, during, and after encountering a scam. Please read our full paper here: "It didn’t feel right but I needed a job so desperately": Understanding People’s Emotions and Help Needs During Scams

I was glad to be able to catch up with two other CDT students, Anete and Arshia. It was great to support Arshia and attend her paper presentation based on her work with Dr Rikke Bjerg Jensen on Border Control Technologies. You can also read the paper here. I also attended two great workshops while at CHI - one on AI Safety for Youth and another on the environmental impact of AI data centres. I presented the beginning of a short piece of work based on findings from my ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia on the fragile foundations for the construction of AI data centres in contexts affected by conflict. This variety of sessions I attended exemplifies the breadth of subjects covered in the conference program.

Other moments that stood out to me included meeting up with my advisor and mentor Dr Reem Talhouk in person, as well as spending time with the Critical Computing Subcommittee. I had the opportunity to support the coordination of this subcommittee through the review process, which was insightful from both a logistical and research perspective. Engaging as a reviewer has taught me a lot and program committee meetings further broadened my education to understand the span of topics under the remit of critical computing. I gained empathy for the mammoth effort that goes into organising a conference the size of CHI and the labour behind the peer-review process.

Reflecting back over the course of my PhD, CHI was the first academic conference I ever attended in 2022 to co-lead an accepted workshop on longitudinal perspectives of migration and digital security, and it will likely be the last academic conference I attend during my PhD as I finish up writing my thesis over the next few months. Attending CHI in 2026 was a very different experience from 2022, as I am now fortunate to have a network of great peers and mentors to spend time with. So a word of comfort to anyone going to their first conference or anyone at the start of their academic journey: the more you put yourself out there and attend conferences and workshops, the more your network will grow and support you throughout your PhD. It gets easier!

With thanks to Rikke, Keith and to the doctoral school for their support of PhD student travel, as it is a very enriching part of the PhD experience!

 

 


 







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remote working and Cyber Security: Georgia Crossland and Amy Ertan

Introducing the project The shift to remote working represents a huge shift for employees and organisations alike, introducing significant implications for cyber security. Amy Ertan and Georgia Crossland are currently working on a research project, in collaboration with the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS) and funded by the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), on the impact of remote working on cyber security and wellbeing. This blog post will give an overview of a section of this project, how remote working impacts cyber security. In response to COVID-19, in March 2020, organisations across the world made the rapid shift away from physical office working to remote working, wherever possible. This shift has had a significant impact across many aspects of organisations. This blog post will offer a high-level overview of how the cyber threat landscape was impacted for many organisations and may further change organisational cyber resilience. Remote workin...
Read more

New Publication: Remote Working and (In)Security?: Amy Ertan

Image
A recent research report by CDT researchers Amy Ertan and Georgia Crossland has been published with the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS). The report examines ‘The Impact of Pandemic-Driven Remote Working on Employee Wellbeing, the Psychological Contract and Cyber Security’, with research carried out through a series of interviews with senior cyber security colleagues between January and April 2021. The full report can be found on the RISCS website: New publication: Remote Working and (In)Security | RISCS. Context In the UK and around the world, the impact of COVID-19 represented a total shift away from what was considered ‘normal living’. One aspect of this change was the rapid transition to remote working as people were encouraged to work from home and limit contact with others as far as possible through repeated lockdown conditions. Fellow CDT colleague Georgia Crossland and I were curious to explore how remote working has impacted the experiences - and se...
Read more

The Artificial Intelligence Monster: Nicola Bates

Image
Christopher Booker in 2004 wrote of the seven basic plots to any story, one of these being ‘overcoming the monster’. Within Hollywood, such ‘monsters’ often reflects the zeitgeist balancing commercial requirements with the political and societal preoccupations of the age. The monster evolves over time - from Russia in the Cold War years through to lone actors and terrorists and now to seemingly shadowy figures controlling intelligence. Whilst generally lighter in tone, such monsters also exist within children’s cinema. In recent years this monster has become increasingly defined by their use of highly sophisticated technology, finally becoming the technology in ‘The Mitchells vs. the Machine’*. Lethal technology and subversive machines aren’t new concepts in children’s movies. They can, for example, be found in ‘Short Circuit’ back in 1986. This movie begins with five United States military robots in a training exercise against tanks and focusses upon one of the robots becoming ‘alive’...
Read more