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HCI International News, Number 95, May 2019

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HCII 2019 HIGHLIGHTS

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HCII 2019: Important Deadlines

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HCII 2019: Submission for "Late Breaking Work"

You still have the opportunity to present the latest results of your work to an international audience, by submitting a proposal for a Paper or a Poster presentation.

Submit ‘Late Breaking Work’ - PAPER proposals: Prospective authors should submit extended abstracts (800 words) corresponding to one of the Conference Thematic Areas. Following a fast-track peer-review process by at least two reviewers, a decision is communicated to the authors. If accepted, the authors, apart from having the opportunity for oral presentation during the Conference, depending on the time of submission of their proposal, may also have the opportunity of including their full paper in the ‘HCII 2019 Late Breaking Work’ Springer LNCS Proceedings, to be published just after the conference, according to the below timetable:

  • Deadline for abstract submission: Submission open until 24 May 2019
  • Notification of review outcome: 1 week after submission
  • Deadline for camera-ready submission and registration: 14 June 2019

Submit ’Late Breaking Work’ - POSTER proposals: Prospective authors should submit abstracts (300 words). Following a fast-track peer-review process, a decision is communicated to the authors. If accepted, the authors, apart from having the opportunity to present their work during the Conference, depending on the time of submitting their proposal, may also have the opportunity of including an extended poster abstract in the form of a short research paper in the ’HCII 2019 Late Breaking Work’ Springer CCIS Proceedings, to be published just after the conference, according to the below timetable:

  • Deadline for abstract submission: Submission open until 24 May 2019
  • Notification of review outcome: 1 week after submission
  • Deadline for camera-ready submission and registration: 14 June 2019

The additional volumes for ‘Late Breaking Work’ will be an integral part of the full set of the HCII2019 Conference Proceedings and will be indexed by major indexing services exactly like the rest of the Proceedings Volumes.

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HCII 2019 Tutorials' Program: Places are still available

Places are still available for the 23 half-day pre-conference tutorials, which will run from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 July 2019. The description of each tutorial is available through the Conference website.

For the special deals which are available, please have a look at the Registration webpage.

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HCII 2019: Advance Program

The HCII 2019 Conference Advance Program, including paper and poster presentations, is available on-line. It should be noted that the Advance Program is subject to change.

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HCII 2019: General Information

Proceedings: The Conference Proceedings will be published by Springer in a multi-volume set. Papers will appear in Volumes of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. Poster Extended Abstracts will be published in Volumes of the Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) series.

In addition to the LNCS/LNAI and CCIS Volumes of the conference proceedings, edited by the Thematic Areas / Affiliated Conferences Program Chairs, additional Volumes will be published just after the conference:
- ‘HCII 2019 Late Breaking Work’ for paper proposals under Springer LNCS series, and
- ‘HCII 2019 Late Breaking Work’ for poster proposals under Springer CCIS series.
These additional volumes will be an integral part of the full set of the HCII2019 Proceedings, and will be indexed by major indexing services exactly like the rest of the Proceedings Volumes.

The Volumes that will be published before the conference, will be available to registered conference participants for download, though their account at the Conference Management System (CMS), just before the commencement of the conference. The Volumes that will be published after the conference will become available to registered conference participants for download though their Conference Management System (CMS) account.

Keynote speech: Richard H. R. Harper, Co-director, Institute for Social Futures and Professor, School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, United Kingdom, will give the Keynote Speech during the Opening Plenary Session on Sunday, 28 July 2019, 18:00 hrs. The title of his speech will be "Understanding AI, Understanding Interaction: the Future of HCI".

Mentoring Session: Gavriel Salvendy has cordially accepted the conference invitation to hold a mentoring session for PhD students with important topics. Attendance in the Mentoring Session is complimentary, but participation requires registration to the conference and pre-booking by 31 May 2019 with submission of official evidence of university enrolment. The Mentoring Session will take place on Tuesday 30 July 2019, 4:00pm to 6:00pm and will be addressing the following topics:

  • Development of a high impact PhD Dissertation and its effective dissemination.
  • Transition from a PhD student to industry professional.
  • Transition from a PhD student to successful Faculty

Professor Gavriel Salvendy has been Major Professor to 67 PhD students.

Seminar: Abbas Moallem, San Jose State University, USA, will offer a seminar on “Cybersecurity Awareness of College Students and Faculty”. The seminar will be held on Wednesday, 31 July 2019, from 10:30am to 12:30pm.
The main objective of this seminar is to discuss the cyber security awareness of people and how they protect themselves against cyber-attacks, show trends and discuss possible solutions. The first part of this seminar will review the main results of the surveys administered in 2018 among students and faculty. In the second part, participants will discuss what needs to be done to improve awareness of the general population to protect themselves in cyberspace.

Awards: An award will be presented to the best paper of each of the HCII 2019 Thematic Areas / Affiliated Conferences and the best poster extended abstract.

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HCII 2019: Accommodation

The Walt Disney World Dolphin of the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort will be the conference venue and official HCII2019 hotel.

A number of rooms have been reserved to be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis, while significantly reduced rates have been agreed with the hotel, valid for all Conference participants for the duration of the Conference as well as for 2 additional days, before and / or after the Conference, subject to availability of rooms at the time of the reservation. Please note that Friday, June 28, 2019 is the cut-off date for reservations. Any requests after that date will be accepted at the Hotel's prevailing rate based on availability.

Detailed information about accommodation is available through the Conference website.

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HCII 2019: Exhibition

You are invited to exhibit at the HCI International 2019 exhibition. The HCI International Conference is an ideal opportunity to exhibit your products and services to an international audience of around 2000 researchers, academics, professionals and users in the field of HCI.

List of current Exhibitors registered so far:

Information about the previous years’ exhibition, including photos of the exhibition hall and exhibitors, are available in HCII News Facebook page and the conference web site.

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HCII 2019: Sponsorship

Sponsorship in the context of HCI International 2019 is the ideal opportunity to expose your organization to an international audience of around 2,000 academics, researchers and professionals in the field of HCI. Sponsorship is not limited to financial support but can also take the form of material and service provision. If you are interested in sponsoring this international event or simply wish to receive more information, please contact Conference Administration.

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Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes: Scamming in Modern Time

In the world of scamming the story of Victor Lustig is one of the most amazing and unbelievable ones. Lustig, a professional con man, was successful in selling the Eiffel Tower. Although this case was not very old, it happened at a time where there was no computer, Internet or any mass communication.

In 1925, while living in Paris, Lustig observed the discussion in the French newspapers about the problem with the cost of maintenance of the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair, and as the construction of it finished, the problem with the cost of maintenance inspired Lustig for his scam. After hiring a forger to produce fake government stationery, he got ready to start. To proceed with his plan, Lustig invited a small group of metal dealers to a confidential meeting at a luxurious hotel, presenting himself as Deputy Director General of the Ministère de Postes et Télégraphes. In the meeting with the metal dealers, he was able to convince them that the Eiffel Tower was becoming too much for Paris. Thus, he conveyed that the French government wished to sell it so that the metal could be reused but underlined that the government did not want this information to be revealed since it might be controversial and create reactions from the population. This is why nothing could be disclosed until all the details were thought out. During the meeting, he paid attention to who could be the most likely to fall for his scam. He found André Poisson as the person most probable to fall to his fraud, somebody who he felt as eager to rise amongst the inner circles of the Parisian business community and the one who showed the most interest in purchasing the monument. He then arranged a private meeting with Poisson and made him believe that he was a corrupt official and convinced him to pay a hefty bribe to secure ownership of the Eiffel Tower. Once Lustig received his bribe and the funds for the monument, he fled to Austria.

The Lustig story seems unbelievable in today's world, but we might think that was possible at that time since people did not have the level of communication that we enjoy today.

Now let’s look at the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos as it is a story parallel to the Lustig case.

Elizabeth Holmes, a young woman who was admitted to Stanford University, dropped out to found her company Theranos in 2003 at the age of 19. She observed that the business of blood tests was enormous and with many analyses conducted every day it was a vast industry. In addition to that, every politician would love to bring this cost down, as that was an appealing issue for the population in regards to healthcare. She claimed that she had the technologies to analyze blood with just a drop of it; thus, no need for precious blood taking procedures and physician prescriptions. She claimed that she had the technology to do so. Theranos quickly raised more than $700 million from venture capitalists, and private investors and the company in 2014 was valued at $10 billion. Elizabeth Holmes claimed that Theranos "Edison" machine was capable of performing hundreds of tests with just with one drop of blood.  Despite experts' opinions who qualified the process technically impossible, Holmes continued her claim, and the company signed up with Safeway and CVS pharmacy and the Cleveland Clinic as a partner. The company was kept private so as not to provide the details of how they did their work. Holmes was able to convince many political leaders and business leaders to have their backing. She also invited many of them to join her company's board, and this included: former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, William Perry (former U.S. Secretary of Defense), Henry Kissinger (former U.S. Secretary of State), Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator), Bill Frist (former U.S. Senator and heart-transplant surgeon), Gary Roughead (Admiral, USN, retired), James Mattis (General, USMC), Richard Kovacevich (former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO) and Riley Bechtel (chairman of the board and former CEO at Bechtel Group).

In short, Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani never had any technology to do what they were claiming, and by closely monitoring every employee they were successful in keeping this secret until the investigative journalist John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal questioned the validity of Theranos' technology. And the final episode was played out on September 4, 2018, when Theranos announced that it would cease operations and release its assets and remaining cash to creditors after all efforts to find a buyer came to nothing. Most of the company's remaining employees were laid off on the previous Friday, August 31.

For those who might be interested in knowing more, I would recommend watching an excellent HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” directed and produced by Alex Gibney, or read “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup," by John Carreyrou.

Looking at these two stories we see many parallel points. However, the extent of this scamming is much more significant than the Lustig bribery case especially considering, of course, the context and time. It is astonishing to see that in the 21st century, in Silicon Valley (reputed as the most technologically advanced area in the world), such a case of scamming and fraud could occur for over 15 years. The main question that needs to be answered is who were the people who benefited from this scam.

Interestingly, this case did not have a lot of coverage in the press and media. Maybe too many high profile people were involved.

In cybersecurity, we still see many people fall victim to Phishing emails or social engineering. If we can scam and make a very elite group people believe in an impossible case, then how can we blame an individual for falling victim to a phishing mail?!

Abbas Moallem

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Gibney Alex (2019): “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” HBO Documentary, 1h 59m, Initial release: January 24, 2019

https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-inventor-out-for-blood-in-silicon-valley/about

Carreyrou John, Siconolfi Michael and Weaver Christopher (2016): “Theranos Dealt Sharp Blow as Elizabeth Holmes Is Banned From Operating Labs" The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2016.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-regulator-bans-theranos-ceo-elizabeth-holmes-from-operating-labs-for-two-years-1467956064

Carreyrou John (2018): “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou", Knopf Publishing Group, May 21st, 2018.

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About HCI International NEWS

The HCI International NEWS is a newsletter that contains information about the HCI International Conference, book reviews, news from the field of HCI, as well as links to interesting articles and conferences. If you have any questions or comments, or if you would like to make a contribution, please contact the Editor, Dr. Abbas Moallem. The opinions that are expressed in this Newsletter are the sole responsibility of its authors and do not represent any institution or company.

How to Contribute
We welcome your contribution to the HCI International News. Please send to us interesting news, short articles, interesting websites, etc. We will consider your comments and contributions for upcoming issues. Please send your contribution to the Editor, Dr.Abbas Moallem.

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