CHI-Mexico: Ten Years of
the Mexican Conference on HCI
DOI: 10.1145/3145627 COPYRIGHT HELD B Y AUTHORS
For Mex IHC 2014, we had an excellent
program selected by an international
technical program committee. The
same year, Mexican researchers working
in institutions abroad partnered
with colleagues based in Mexico to
coordinate some of the leading roles
of the conference, which strengthened
connections.
Last year, MexIHC celebrated its
10th anniversary. Mex IHC 2016 took
place in Colima, with 160 participants
from Mexico and abroad. In addition,
the Graduate Consortium and the
Student Design Competition were
funded by ACM SIGCHI with the goal
of partially covering the costs of travel
and accommodations, conference
registration, and meals. Needless to say,
this support has been instrumental in
promoting student participation in the
conference.
Over the past 10 years, MexIHC
has helped to grow the Mexican HCI
community. The generous support of
SIGCHI has made this possible, enabling
us to invite renowned speakers, as
well as helping us to increase student
participation. We are aware that our
community is still consolidating and are
working toward improving the quality
of the submissions and the overall
conference program. Going for ward, we
would like to have more participation
at an international level to increase
collaboration opportunities between
Mexican researchers and international
scholars. Toward this goal, the CHI-Mexico chapter has begun collaborating
with the ACM SIGCHI Latin America
HCI Community (LAIHC) to increase
the participation of researchers working
in Latin America. This collaboration
can be key in improving communication
between researchers and practitioners to
The human-computer interaction (HCI) research community in Mexico started in the mid-1990s, when university curricula in computer science and informatics began offering
courses that taught HCI concepts. In
1999, several HCI researchers created
the local ACM SIGCHI chapter, CHI-Mexico. Over the past 18 years, the HCI
community has grown steadily and since
2006 has held a biennial conference. This
conference, the Mexican Conference
on HCI (MexIHC), is the premier HCI
forum in Mexico. Gathering researchers,
students, and practitioners from
Mexico and abroad, it is CHI-Mexico’s
flagship event. Since its creation, CHI-Mexico has been promoting HCI and
exploring approaches to HCI research
and professional practice grounded in
Mexican context and culture. Here, we
reflect on our experiences organizing
Mex IHC and provide an overview of how
the MexIHC conference has evolved over
the years.
In 2006, the first MexIHC was
organized in Puebla. Despite this being
the inaugural conference, we received
a good set of submissions, two of them
from abroad. In 2008, MexIHC was
organized in collaboration with the
Mexican International Conference
on Computer Science (ENC), which
allowed us to publish our papers
in proceedings edited by the IEEE
Computer Society. For Mex IHC 2010, a
few of the top-quality submissions were
published in the ACM Digital Library,
and the conference began to be held
in cooperation with ACM. In 2012,
MexIHC was jointly organized with
the Interacción conference organized
by AIPO, the HCI association in Spain.
publicize the high-quality HCI research
in Latin America, which may provide
different—and perhaps challenging—
points of view from a developing region
with very special HCI contexts.
Pedro C. Santana-Mancilla is affiliated with
the School of Telematics at the University of
Colima, Mexico. He serves as chair of the SIGCHI
Latin American HCI Community and on the board
of the Mexican Association on Human-Computer
Interaction. He has served as an officer of the
Mexican SIGCHI Chapter for several years.
→
psantana@ucol.mx
Luis A. Castro holds a Ph.D. in informatics
from the University of Manchester, U.K. He is
affiliated with the Department of Computing
and Design at the Sonora Institute of Technology
(ITSON), Mexico. He currently serves as the
president of the Mexican Association on Human-Computer Interaction (AMexIHC).
→
luis.castro@acm.org
Monica Tentori investigates the human
experience of ubiquitous computing through the
development and evaluation of prototypes for
healthcare and urban living. She was the first
Latin American woman and first Mexican to be
awarded a prestigious Microsoft Fellowship.
She is an active member of multiple academic
associations.
→
mtentori@cicese.mx
Mario A. Moreno Rocha is a professor and
researcher in HCI and the leader of UsaLab in
the Institute of Computing at the Universidad
Tecnológica de la Mixteca in Huajuapan de
León, Oaxaca, Mexico. He has experience in the
development of usability studies, contextual
studies, and cross-cultural usability.
→
sirpeto@gmail.com
Marcela D. Rodríguez is a professor and
researcher in usability studies in ambient
assisted living in the Faculty of Engineering at the
Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC),
Mexico. She has served as the president of the
Mexican Society of Computer Science (SMCC).
→
marcerod@uabc.edu.mx
Tuomo Kujala is ACM SIGCHI vice president
for local chapters.
→
sigchi-vp-chapters@acm.org
INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG 86 INTERACTIONS NOVEMBER–DECEMBER2017
COMMUNITY SQUARE
Pedro C. Santana-Mancilla, University of Colima, Luis A. Castro, Sonora Institute of Technology (ITSON),
Monica Tentori, CICESE, Mario A. Moreno Rocha, Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca,
Marcela D. Rodríguez, Autonomous University of Baja California, Tuomo Kujala (Ed.), ACM SIGCHI