Collaboration and community building are crucial for equitable participation in research, especially in disability and accessibility research fields.Engaging with communities of disabled individuals helps understand their unique challenges, expectations, and needs, which should be reflected in assistive technology design.However, a gap exists between research in resource-rich societies and the practices of low-resource settings, where socio-economic and infrastructural constraints are often overlooked.Conversely, the innovation and sustainable solutions in these settings are often

The Human-computer Interaction (HCI) community has the opportunity to foster the integration of research practices across the Global South and North to begin overcoming colonial relationships. In this paper, we focus on the case of Latin America (LATAM), where initiatives to increase the representation of HCI practitioners lack a consolidated understanding of the practices they employ, the factors that influence them, and the challenges that practitioners face. To address this knowledge gap, we employ a mixed-methods approach, comprising a survey (66 respondents) and in-depth interviews (19 interviewees). Our analyses characterize a set of research perspectives on how HCI is practiced in/about LATAM; a set of driving forces and tensions with a heavy reliance on diasporic dynamics; and a set of professional demands and associated structural limitations. We also offer a roadmap towards building connections across HCI communities, in an attempt to rebuild HCI as a pluriverse.

This paper presents a 3D video game project that incorporates smell generated by an olfactory display (an ultrasonic humidifier and a PC fan) controlled by fuzzy logic. In order to improve the olfactory display efficiency, we apply Edge computing by running the fuzzy logic control software on the microcontroller itself and not on the video game computer or a network server. Our video game activates the olfactory display by sending a wireless signal using MQTT data communication protocol to the microcontroller board connected to a local wireless network. The video game objective is to find a virtual lemon in less than 15 seconds, hidden behind many virtual crates. The olfactory display generates a lemon smell when the player is close to the virtual lemon. The fuzzy logic controls the fan speed according to the distance between the virtual lemon and the player’s main game view. An early test showed that the fuzzy logic and the MQTT protocol ran efficiently on the microcontroller board. This demonstrates that Edge computing can be useful in simple olfactory display applications.

Nowadays much of human interaction are taking place online and on social networking sites. These platforms often encourage people to use profile pictures as parts of their profiles. To understand digital identity construction across various user communities and to foster inclusive, diverse, and sustainable online interactions among them, it is imperative to understand the perception of different users groups about digital profile pictures (DPP). In order to explore this, we conducted a cross-border analysis on different social media platforms. Based on a quantitative study on more than 500 responses from a two-week survey of social media users from 29 different countries, we observed how people from various demographic groups perceive the importance of DPPs. Our results suggest that the perception is significantly different across some social factors and social media usage behavior.

South Asia faces one of the largest gender gaps online globally, and online safety is one of the main barriers to gender-equitable Internet access [GSMA, 2015]. To better understand the gendered risks and coping practices online in South Asia, we present a qualitative study of the online abuse experiences and coping practices of 199 people who identified as women and 6 NGO staff from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, using a feminist analysis. We found that a majority of our participants regularly contended with online abuse, experiencing three major abuse types: cyberstalking, impersonation, and personal content leakages. Consequences of abuse included emotional harm, reputation damage, and physical and sexual violence. Participants coped through informal channels rather than through technological protections or law enforcement. Altogether, our findings point to opportunities for designs, policies, and algorithms to improve women's safety online in South Asia.

After several rounds of workshops on Computer Animation with Alice, a free platform for three dimensional computer animation created by Carnegie Mellon University, a pattern of styles of use was observed. Some attendants seemed to try to follow the instructions given and attempt to reproduce exactly the animation the instructor was creating. A second group concentrated on creating visually attractive scenes; a third one on inventing stories and putting models in the scene to talk to each other according to those stories. In the fourth group participants wanted to go well beyond the instructor explanations and explored features and functions of Alice by their own creating complex and action-rich animations. At some point the consistency of those observations lead us to attempt a systematic study by crafting a description of the styles and designing observation tools to detect them and measure the frequency of each one. In this showpiece we will recount the experience, describe in detail the styles observed and present the results of the systematic observation in order to receive suggestions for improvement. We hope to reflect with viewers on why the study of styles of use in Alice could be important for visual languages and computer science education.