I arrived at the Atlanta airport about 9:30 Wednesday morning.  I eventually found Lori and we made our way to the conference hotel by train.  When we arrived, we were greeted by a giant hotel and 3 floors of girl geeks, vendors, schools and organizations.

Inside our hotel

Upon registering, we received a Grace Hopper 2010 bag, complete with swag!  We knew it was a different sort of computer conference upon realizing that among the screwdriver kits, microfiber screen cloths and USB drives, the bag also contained about 4 types of lip gloss, chocolate, hand sanitizer and a nail file.

After talking to a few conference attendees, Lori and I decided we had to get a Poken. Pokens are small networking devices that were provided at the conference to act as an electronic business card and help people share information.

Wednesday night was the General Poster Session and we got to share our project with a variety of students and professionals.  Lori setup a demo on her laptop of our Bugs vs Insects multitouch presentation for people to try.

Thursday was a session filled day that began with an amazing Keynote by Duy-Loan T. LE, the Senior Research Fellow at Texas Instruments.  She shared a lot of the wisdom she has learned over the years about working with people.  ”The first person we must collaborate with is ourselves,” she noted.  A very nice summary of her keynote can be found on the GHC Community Wiki here: http://community.anitaborg.org/wiki/index.php/Keynote:_Duy-Loan_Le_(Texas_Instruments)

Thursday afternoon, I attended the BOF session called “Barbie has a Pink Laptop.”  This session was about questioning how and why the world views being a computer scientist as a nerdy, unsociable profession and whether or not this is changing.

Thursday night was the Awards ceremony, followed by the DJ Dance Party.

On Friday, I went to nearly all of the HCI track sessions.  These began by explaining what HCI is and how people got into HCI careers.  After lunch, Fernando B. Viegas shared some of the work she has done in the visualization field.  Her website features many of these projects and can be found here: http://hint.fm/

To end the trip on exciting note, I headed to GVU, Georgia Tech’s HCI lab and got to see demos of some of the research projects they have been working on.

Our tour guide waiting patiently to ask a question

Learn how to play the piano with this glove

That concludes my conference adventures.  It was great experience, and I highly recommend it.  Hoping to find a way to go again next year!

Be sure to check out the the GHC Community page for images, videos, summaries and more.