Call for Tutorials

This year, we have all been confronted with major changes caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Unfortunately, the MobileHCI2020 conference is no exception, and the organizing committee has made the difficult decision to move the conference online, with no physical event happening this year. To reflect this decision, we have updated our Call for Tutorials.

We invite you to submit proposals for online tutorials that are to be held on the 5th of October during the MobileHCI 2020 conference. We strongly believe that online tutorials provide a great opportunity for our community to reach more researchers, while at the same time improving sustainability and reducing barriers to participation (e.g., due to visa issues). However, in order to face the unique challenges, we are introducing some fundamental changes to our Call for Tutorials:

1) Moving tutorials online requires us all to rethink the established concepts of previous tutorials. Therefore, we open tutorials to a broad range of formats in order to engage the online audience in a way well-suited for the presented topic. From online lectures with questions and answers (e.g., on novel research topics or authored books) to more interactive formats involving live coding (e.g., with Jupyter notebook), we welcome all your ideas and are looking forward to reading your proposals.

2) To tackle the issue of different time zones, we discussed possible solutions. We considered organizing the tutorials in the daytime of one specific time zone, to follow previous years and keep it simple. However, we think this solution would exclude many people willing to organize or attend a tutorial. Therefore, we suggest a major change. We ask tutorial organizers to specify a time slot of at least four hours in their time zone (on the 5th of October) in which they would be able to carry out the tutorial, as well as the expected duration of the tutorial (we encourage a shorter tutorial length but recommend at least one hour). We will later determine the time slot for each tutorial based on all accepted tutorials and attendees’ preferences to combine them efficiently into sessions. Furthermore, we will try to offer video recordings of each tutorial. Recordings will only be offered with the consent of the organizers and attendees.

3) Our last change is optional for tutorial organizers. We explicitly ask you to submit tutorial proposals that address topics related to the pandemic and help address the novel challenges that arose from it (e.g., by addressing related topics such as tracking apps or touchless interaction). We believe our community can contribute to improving the situation and we are looking forward to reading your proposals for online tutorials at MobileHCI 2020.