Search

From September 10 to 12, 2007, over 100 attendees convened in Manchester, England, travelling from all over Europe, as well as the far climes of North America, Asia and Australia. Unlike many visitors to Manchester they weren't here to witness the city's much heralded football team, but had gathered instead at the University of Manchester for the 18th International Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext 2007). Here they would discuss recent innovations in hypertext, whose most famous form exists as the World Wide Web, and assess the challenges and opportunities in the latest groundbreaking research. Traditionally the success of the Hypertext conference series has been attributed to its immense diversity, and this year was no different, with papers being divided into 5 varied tracks: Hypertext and the Person; Hypertext and Society; Practical Hypertext; Hypertext Culture and Communication; and Hypertext Models and Theory. The conference was a vibrant affair that featured 16 full papers and 7 short papers (with a 29% overall acceptance rate), posters, demos, keynotes, panels, Birds-of-a-Feather (BOFs) and social events. However, what characterized this year's conference the most was an underlying sense of reintegration, a rejoining of disparate trends in hypertext to common goals. And as such a lot of unity and camaraderie too.

The Hypertext conference is SIGWEB's flagship conference every year on hypertext and hypermedia. This year's Hypertext 2010 was the 21st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia and was held at the University of Toronto campus in Toronto, Canada from June 13--16, 2010. Everyone enjoyed the hospitality of the local conference committee and student volunteers, which made the conference run smoothly and efficiently. The General Chair for Hypertext 2010 was Mark Chignell from the University of Toronto, and the Program Chair was Elaine Toms from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Alvin Chin is a Member of Research Staff at Nokia Research Center (NRC), Beijing, working in the Mobile Social Networking group. Alvin recently completed his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto where he worked under Professor Mark Chignell. His PhD thesis was entitled "Social Cohesion Analysis of Networks: A Novel Method for Identifying Cohesive Subgroups in Social Hypertext" where he created a framework for automatically identifying influential members in subgroups from online social networks. At NRC Beijing, Alvin's research involves creating novel solutions that use the cell phone and context to participate and integrate with other users and online social networks, and enabling an intuitive user experience for social networking. He graduated with a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering and a Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. He has worked 2.5 years full time in industry researching emerging technologies in the wireless and pervasive computing area, especially Bluetooth and 802.11. His current research interests include social networking, computer-supported collaborative work, context-aware computing, and pervasive computing. Alvin is an active user of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. He can be contacted at alvin.chin@nokia.com, and blogs frequently at http://www.alvinychin.com/blog.

The ACM Hypertext Conference is the main venue for high quality, peer-reviewed, double-blind research on "linking" and interconnectivity. The Web, the Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Social Networks, and Web Science all demonstrate the value of the link concept.