MyHcI-UX: taking HCI in Malaysia to greater heights

The Kuala Lumpur ACM SIGCHI chapter, myHCI-UX, is now two years old. HCI was first starting to find its place in Malaysia circa 2005–2007, when many Malaysian researchers were returning home after completing their postgraduate degrees in HCI. After many meet-ups of HCI academics and practitioners, support from ACM SIGCHI, and with the urge to make a difference and to contribute back to society, the chapter was officially formed on July 27, 2017. Prior to 2017, ACM SIGCHI had been giving moral support to various activities and programs. During i-USEr 2016, Eunice Sari from the Indonesia ACM SIGCHI chapter organized the CoCo (Connect and Collaborate) workshop to give insights about the HCI and UX landscape in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia and Malaysia, and how HCI researchers should collaborate to unlock the HCI and UX potential of these two countries. Our current committed members had also been involved in other activities in the greater ACM SIGCHI communities, such as the SEACHI and Asian HCI symposiums, which have been successfully held since 2015 at the annual CHI conferences. Apart from that, some of our members also had the opportunity to be involved in the international CHI reviewing process and in regional initiatives, such as the Japan ACM SIGCHI chapter and Australia's OzCHI. In addition, our members had been actively participating in CHIuXiD, the Indonesia ACM SIGCHI conference, as presenters and reviewers

Change, Choice, and Commercialization: Backpacker Routes in Southeast Asia

South-East Asia has the oldest and largest backpacker trails. This paper examines the geographies of such flows, drawing upon the largest survey to date of backpackers in Asia using qualitative research to survey the key changes from the 1970s to the 2000s. Backpacker trails have changed significantly and new routes have emerged including the ‘northern trail’ (Bangkok - Cambodia - Vietnam - Laos). It is to be expected that routes change as backpackers constantly seek new places, pioneering for later mass tourism. However, this paper suggests that using institutionalization as a framework, these changing trails and backpacker ‘choices’ can be seen as driven by growing commercialization and institutionalization. This then operates in combination with external variables (travel innovations - low cost airlines, and new transport networks); exogenous shock (political instability, terrorism); and growing regional competition from emerging destinations such as Vietnam and Cambodia

Innovations in Civil Engineering for Society and the Environment

Proceedings of The 4th International Conference of Euro Asia Civil Engineering Forum 2013 (EACEF 2013), National University of Singapore, 26-27 June 201

Globalization or Localization? A longitudinal study of successful American and Chinese online store websites

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study of 2562 images on the homepages of successful American and Chinese online store websites,with the goal of determining whether cultural factors impact their visual presentation and evolution. Descriptive and statistical content analyses reveal that the U.S. and Chinese online store sites showed significant cross-national image differences from their inception; moreover, the Chinese sites diverged further from the U.S. sites over time, strengthening their own cultural identity and suggesting a trend towards localization in a diverse and dynamic world market. These findings support the view that although English-speaking Western culture is widespread in today’s Information Age, other cultures are not necessarily undermined

Exploring Research through Design in Animal-Computer Interaction

This paper explores Research through Design (RtD) as a potential methodology for developing new interactive experiences for animals. We present an example study from an on-going project and examine whether RtD offers an appropriate framework for developing knowledge in the context of Animal-Computer Interaction, as well as considering how best to document such work. We discuss the design journey we undertook to develop interactive systems for captive elephants and the extent to which RtD has enabled us to explore concept development and documentation of research. As a result of our explorations, we propose that particular aspects of RtD can help ACI researchers gain fresh perspectives on the design of technology-enabled devices for non-human animals. We argue that these methods of working can support the investigation of particular and complex situations where no idiomatic interactions yet exist, where collaborative practice is desirable and where the designed objects themselves offer a conceptual window for future research and development

Fast and Accurate Neural Word Segmentation for Chinese

Neural models with minimal feature engineering have achieved competitive performance against traditional methods for the task of Chinese word segmentation. However, both training and working procedures of the current neural models are computationally inefficient. This paper presents a greedy neural word segmenter with balanced word and character embedding inputs to alleviate the existing drawbacks. Our segmenter is truly end-to-end, capable of performing segmentation much faster and even more accurate than state-of-the-art neural models on Chinese benchmark datasets.Comment: To appear in ACL201