I had the pleasure to gatecrash the HCI 2017 conference in Vancouver today, which gave me the chance to see Dr Ali Dewan present three excellent papers in a row (two with his name on them) on a variety of themes, as well as a great paper written and presented by one of our students, Miao-Han Chang.

Both did superb jobs of presenting to a receptive crowd. Ali got particular acclaim from the audience for the first work he presented  (Combinatorial Auction based Mechanism Design for Course Offering Determination
by Anton Vassiliev, Fuhua Lin & M. Ali Akber Dewan) for its broad applicability in many areas beyond scheduling courses. 

Athabasca, and especially the School of Computing and Information Systems, has made a great showing at this prestigious conference, with contributions not just from Ali and Miao-Han, but also from Oscar (Fuhua) Lin, Dunwei Wen, Maiga Chang and Vive Kumar. Kurt Reifferscheid and Xiaokun Zhang also had a paper in the proceedings but were sadly not able to attend to present it.

Jon and Ali at the Vancouver Conference Centre after Ali's marathon presentation stint. I detect a look of relief on Ali's face!

Papers

• Combinatorial Auction based Mechanism Design for Course Offering Determination
  Anton Vassiliev, Fuhua Lin, M. Ali Akber Dewan, Athabasca University, Canada
• Enhance the Use of Medical Wearables through Meaningful Data Analytics
  Kurt Reifferscheid, Xiaokun Zhang, Athabasca University, Canada
• Classification of Artery and Vein in Retinal Fundus Images Based on the Context-Dependent Features
  Yang Yan, Changchun Normal University, P.R. China; Dunwei Wen, M. Ali Akber Dewan, Athabasca University, Canada; Wen-Bo Huang, Changchun Normal University, P.R. China
• ECG Identification Based on PCA-RPROP
  Jinrun Yu, Yujuan Si, Xin Liu, Jilin University, P.R. China; Dunwei Wen, Athabasca University, Canada; Tengfei Luo, Jilin University, P.R. China; Liuqi Lang, Zhuhai College of Jilin University, P.R. China
• Usability Evaluation Plan for Online Annotation and Student Clustering System – A Tunisian University Case
  Miao-Han Chang, Athabasca University, Canada; Rita Kuo, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, United States; Fathi Essalmi, University of Kairouan, Tunisia; Maiga Chang, Vive Kumar, Athabasca University, Canada; Hsu-Yang Kung, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan