People of ACM European Chapters - Vanessa Peña-Araya

August 13, 2024

What led you to pursue a career in Human-Computer Interaction?

I started to get interested in visualization after a class where we coded in the Pharo programming language. In that class I started participating in the development of Hapao, a visualization tool for developers to assess their test coverage. The tool would execute a software’s unit tests in order to profile which methods were executed by them and then visually represent it. I thought it was super cool that the developers could have a simplified yet expressive representation of their test coverage in order for them to decide which areas needed more testing.

I later got interested in working with geo-temporal data and map visualization. I was particularly interested in observing the geopolitical relationships among countries and how they evolved over time. I started that during my PhD and continued later during my postdoc, where we created tools to explore the evolution of links among named entities from news articles. These relationships can be modeled as hypergraphs (a generalization of graphs) whose visualization can be challenging.

Besides finding the research in Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction interesting, I really enjoyed collaborating with people from different research areas and learning from them. As an example, for the projects I participated in during my postdoc, we collaborated with people from Ouest France (the most read Francophone newspaper in the world) and in my latest projects, I’m collaborating with geologists from different countries. I think the process of co-creating technology with people from different domains is really fun and interesting.

What is one example of an emerging research area that will have a significant impact on your field in the coming years?

More than a research area, I think the discussion about the ecological impact of technology is starting to be more present in the conversation with researchers around me and in the SIGCHI community. These conversations have led the community to explore new directions, like the use of biodegradable materials to build a computer mouse or electronic textiles. It has also led us to reflect about how we do research and what is the impact of the technology we create, in particular those that contribute to the ecological crisis we are living.

In fact, in the domain of Human-Computer Interaction, the sub-field of Sustainable HCI is not particularly new, so I can’t say it’s an emerging research area. However, the conversation around ecology and related research, like nature engagement, is growing.

Will you tell us about us about some of the regular activities or upcoming plans for the Paris ACM SIGCHI Chapter?

Our main activities are the organization of talks and seminars from researchers in France and abroad. We are aiming to record the coming talks and leave them publicly available online so anyone can see them after.

We are still planning our activities for the next period so there are still a lot of things to decide. However, some of the things we are discussing to do is to bring different profiles closer together. For example, we would like to do dedicated events for young researchers in order to promote their work.

Based on your experience with Niñas Pro, what are some of the most effective ways of fostering more gender diversity in STEAM?

I think opening dedicated spaces can be a good way to start. For example, before we started Niñas Pro with Jazmine Maldonado around 2016, there was already a coding workshop in our university. It was open to anyone younger than 18, regardless of their gender. However, as computer science was still thought to be mainly for men, there were only a few girls who applied and most of them left not too long after the workshops started. However, when we created a dedicated space for girls to code, we had a lot of applications (approximately 60 the first year, almost 200 the second year, I don’t have the numbers of the attendance today) and a good majority stayed during the whole duration of our workshops. The girls really liked the workshops and were motivated enough to wake up early every Saturday morning for months in order to attend. Besides learning how to code, we also saw that some of them created friendships as they found other girls with the same interests as them. We were happy to see that some of these friendships lasted beyond our coding workshops.

I think creating a dedicated space allowed us to see there were girls interested in coding but just didn’t dare to come because of preconceived ideas. I think this is particularly important for kids and teenagers as the stereotypes impact them more. For example, several students in our workshops asked us to go to their schools to show there were women working in technology and that coding could be fun. They asked us this after they received negative answers when they invited other girls in their class because “this is only for boys”. Demonstrating that computer science includes a huge diversity of topics and that people working in it have diverse profiles can help younger people to see beyond the limited preconceptions in society. Things have changed since then (as this was 8 years ago). However, I do believe that creating dedicated spaces can be a good first step to include people who feel they don’t belong to a particular domain.

Vanessa Peña-Araya is a Chilean researcher who is based at Inria Saclay, France. Her main research interests concern data analysis and visualization, mainly focused on geotemporal data. In 2016 she co-founded Niñas Pro, an initiative that motivates girls to learn to code, in order to reduce the gender gap in STEAM. Although she is no longer part of the association, Niñas Pro continues growing thanks to its organizers and volunteers.

Peña-Araya is also the Chair of the ACM SIGCHI Paris Chapter. The goal of the Parisian SIGCHI chapter is to provide a means for all HCI researchers and practitioners of the Parisian region to come together, discuss topics in the field and promote collaboration.