October 2008 Archives

It seems that I made some disorder of communities and conferences. -__-b
And this week I change my focus on the academic communities that I believe I might be part of someday. Well, I think it is very consistent with the conferences I am interested in.



A little different from conferences, there are some associations which gather a lot of scholars and professionals in the same research area. IAPP, which stands for International Association of Privacy Professionals, is a great example. IAPP is the world's largest association of privacy professionals. Based in York, Maine, U.S.A., this organization represents over 5,000 members from business, governments and academia across 32 countries.

ACM SIGCHI, the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, brings together people working on the design, evaluation, implementation, and study of interactive computing systems for human use. It is another community I look forward to joining in very much. Not only because it matches my interest, but also it has the most prestigious scholars in HCI area. And I believe I can learn a lot and get greatly inspired from them.

Well, although SOUPS does not have official organizations or associations for it, it has a special mailist for scholars in this area. Maybe it is not so appropriate to call it a "community", but I believe due to the specialty of this research area, to be a member of it is great experience.

IST is a rather interdisciplinary subjects and covers a broad range of research topics. And based on my own research interest and background, there are several conferences which I am very interested in and have a strong intention to submit papers.

The first one is CHI, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. It is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of human-computer interaction, which is hosted by ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. And I believe this conference is the dream of most IST graduate students. My research interest is human computer interaction in privacy area. And I think this goal would encourage me to do more work.

Secondly, it is SOUPS, which stands for Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security. It is a relatively young conference and it is very specific in privacy and security area. SOUPS distinguishes itself from other conferences by both providing a high quality technical program and by bringing together an interdispciplinary group of attendees in a format conductive to informal discussion and networking.

And the third one is ICIS, which is International Conference on Information Systems. It is an annual international conference for academics and research-oriented practitioners in the area of Information Systems. Basically, I heard this competitative conference from my supervisor Dr. Xu, who is from MIS area. And ICIS is generally regarded as the most prestigious gathering for the Information Systems research community around the world.

My supervisor, Dr. Heng Xu, is now an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. And she leads the Privacy Assurance Lab (PAL), which is an interdisciplinary research group working on a diverse set of projects related to understanding and assuring information privacy.

Her current researvh focus is on the interplay between social and technological issues associated with information privacy. She approaches privacy issues through a combination of empirical, theoretical and technical research efforts. Her research projects have been dealing with impacts of novel technologies on individuals' privacy perceptions, strategic management of firms' information privacy practices, and design and empirical evaluations of privacy-enhancing technologies.

Now I am actually working with Dr. Xu on some interesting projects on privacy enhancing technologies and location-based privacy research.