This year’s MobileHCI conference was held in wonderful Stockholm, Sweden. I was lucky enough to have both a paper accepted for publication and also to serve as a student volunteer.
Stockholm is a beautiful city. With its 14 islands and numerous bridges, it is rightly referred to as the “Venice of the North. “ Below is a photo which shows the area around the conference venue.
The conference itself took place in a beautiful old brewery, Münchenbryggeriet, which is located in the south part of central Stockholm.
The conference lasted for four days, with over 300 people attending. The program was very diverse with workshops, two lecture tracks, industrial panels, posters, demos, industrial cases and exhibitions. The following picture shows the opening announcement by Oskar Juhlin, who was one of the program chairs.
The opening announcement was followed by a very interesting keynote by Jeanna Kimbré of SonyEricsson, who gave an overall perspective on the design process that is employed when designing new cell phones.
The first conference day ended with a reception dinner. It was held across the conference venue at the Stockholm’s City Hall, famous for being the venue of the Nobel Prize banquet. Since it is located on the other side of Riddarfjärden bay, we had to board the ferries, which gave us a nice view of the City Hall and its surroundings. 
The picture below shows the Golden Hall, the room where the reception dinner was held. It was named after the decorative mosaics, which consist of more than 18 million tiles!
The last day of the conference ended with a keynote by Adrian Cheok of Keio University, Japan. He gave an overview of the various projects he and his collaborators are working on in the area of human-computer interaction. One of their ideas that I found very interesting and even provoking is to try to make people feel more connected when they are far from each other by transmitting taste, smell, emotions and even feelings.
The conference was very well organized (and not just because I was one of the volunteers 
), with 25 enthusiastic student volunteers who helped things run as smoothly as possible. I am very happy that I had a chance to serve as a volunteer, since it gave me an opportunity to meet even more interesting people than when just being an attendee and also made me appreciate further all the “background” work that is necessary for a successful conference. Each student volunteer had several shifts every day during which we performed registration, directed people to various sessions, handled microphones during lectures, helped presenters with the equipment, etc. Between the shifts we had a chance to attend sessions and talk to other attendees. The following picture shows one of the student volunteers’ organizational meetings.
Overall, I can say that MobileHCI 2011 offered plenty of high quality research from various areas of human-computer interaction. Thus, I am looking forward to the next year’s MobileHCI, which will be held in San Francisco.
Zeljko Medenica
