The Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) annual project has decided to research on how people interact with technology since COVID-19 first hit in March.

Dr. James Prather, a professor in the school of information technologies and computing, said that this year’s the project will look into the past and get data from students this semester about this past spring semester during coronavirus.

According to Prather, each year this student-led undergraduate research group undertakes a research project usually starts in the fall. Just last year, the group did a research project where they “phished” half of the student body. When someone is “phished”, this is when their information is potentially under attack because of a false link that they clicked on in an email.

Prather described how the goal of their research was to discover which certain training the students responded to more when they were “phished” after they clicked on the link set to them by ACU IT through their email and how they repeated this process a couple times over in order to see which training worked.

Their research was submitted to the CHI, Computer-Human Interaction, conference in Honolulu. They were supposed to attend but were unable to because of coronavirus. Their research however, was published as a scholarly peer-reviewed paper and can be found either on Google Scholar or on the CHI website.

This year they wanted to investigate the relationship of people with their technology and discover if this changed at all because of the virus.

Garrett Powell, a computer-science software engineering major from Alveo, said this year’s research will be on online technology and its impact.

“we’re looking to see the impact on students in the past spring semester and how we want to explore more of this learned helplessness with technology and what the trend is with feelings and behaviors in regards to online technology,” Powell said.

Dr. Prather explained further that they (SIGCHI) wanted to investigate people’s feelings about tech and how with over-reliance with technology.

“We will get advice from the psychology department on what kinds of questions we should ask when collecting data or partner with other departments to help run tests,” Powell said.