In Love Again; with the International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility.

In Love Again! Well I don’t think it is any secret that in my opinion the last few years programme at ASSETS have included a number of papers I didn’t consider to be solid or particularly scientific, with a focus less on the technical aspect (the CS, that is the remit of the ACM and their SIGS) as opposed to sociology. While I understand the need for psychology, sociology, and anthropology in our work I’ve been disappointed by the cursory nature of some of the work and the tendency to reach for low hanging fruit; indeed this shows the low regard in which some authors hold both of these domains.

But this year, THIS YEAR, I’m in love with ASSETS again!

This years programme was characterised by high quality technical work across all domains, and at the cross-disciplinary interface; it was a joy to see the quality of both the work and the delivery – right down to the Undergraduate Student Research Competition (supported by the ACM and Microsoft Research). Everything, without doubt was solid, and a lot of work had true gravitas, including the Best Paper and the Best Student Paper.

Congratulations to everyone involved, and if you have time you should look at the proceedings to see just what I’m talking about.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2049536&picked=prox&CFID=66138444&CFTOKEN=10822264