June has gotten off to an exciting start! I won a poster presentation competition, got a poster paper into Mobile HCI ’14 and scheduled my annual progress review. I’ve arranged my 2nd year viva, which is an annual progress review for my PhD research. Finishing and submitting my report felt a little anticlimactic compared to last year; I suppose the first year review is much more important and by this stage it’s more of a checkpoint. Lately I’ve been writing and research planning a lot so I’m looking forward to getting back to actually doing research. Designing, making, all those fun things that make HCI awesome! Yesterday was the SICSA HCI yearly meetup, which was good fun. This year it was hosted by University of Dundee so travelling to Dundee was nice. I spent a lot of time there as a kid, especially around the university campus, so it was cool to go back there and see how everything has changed. Highlights of the day included keynotes from Miguel Nacenta and David Flatla. Miguel presented some really cool research and David was so damn entertaining! We also had a few posters and a demo from our group. I won the poster presentation competition, which was a nice surprise. My poster (below) gave a general overview of my PhD research and showed off a couple of projects.

Winning the poster competition must have been a good omen because I returned home to a notification from Mobile HCI saying my poster was accepted. That paper and poster are about two gesture design studies from the start of my PhD. I’ll post more about them another time.