About Chi2
CHI-Squared (pronounced "kai", after the Greek letter Χ) is the Chicago area Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). Meetings take place on Wednesdays once a month at 6:00 p.m.
CHI-Squared was founded to:
- build a community of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) professionals and students in the greater Chicago area,
- provide a forum where HCI professionals in the Chicago community could meet and exchange ideas and resources,
- gain a better perspective of the type and range of HCI work being conducted in the Chicago area,
- gather HCI resources,
- provide information on experts available in the local area.
Hisotry
The first meeting for CHI-Squared took place on September 9th, 1997 at 6:30 p.m., at DePaul University's School of Computer Science. The 20-some attendees elected officers for the new chapter, and Andrew Sears, who spearheaded the push to organize a local chapter, agreed to serve as the first Chair. CHI-Squared was granted official status as an ACM SIGCHI on September 24, 1997.
Since most SIGCHI Chapters incorporate the city or region in their name, the obvious first choice for the Chicago Chapter was CHI-CHI or CHI2 for SIGCHI-CHIcago (for instance, the San Francisco Bay area Chapter is BayCHI, the Toronto Chapter is TorCHI, and the Columbus, Ohio Chapter is BuckCHI, after Ohio's slogan 'The Buckeye State'. (To view all local SIGCHI chapters, visit http://www.acm.org/sigchi/local-sigs/). To avoid difficulty in pronunciation, and because superscript typography was not available in many of the contexts where the name would be used, Andrew Sears suggested spelling out CHI2 as CHI-Squared.
Current Officers
- Brian Maggi, Chair
- Mark FelcanSmith,Vice Chair
- Elizabeth Carpenter, Treasurer
- Sarah Wallace, Secretary
- Jordan Light, Web Manager
- Cathy Herzon and Lynn Ferguson, Producers
Past Officers
| Name | Position Held | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Kay Burnett | Chair | 2003-2005 |
| Cathy Herzon | Web Manager | 2004-2005 |
| Shikha Desai | Secretary | 2003-2004 |
| Jessica Friedman | Co-Chair | 2002-2003 |
| Nicholas Hoyt | Co-Chair | 2002-2003 |
| Stacie Hibino | Chair | 1999-2002 |
| Kathy Moczulewski | Vice Chair | 1999-2000 |
| Charles Patton | Treasurer | 1997-2000 |
| Andrew Sears | Chair | 1997-1999 |
| David Hess | Vice Chair | 1997-1999 |
| Brian Buck | Secretary | 1997-1999 |