SIOP 2016: Schedule Planning for a Deluge of Technology

Technology has truly arrived at the SIOP conference, which begins Thursday, April 14 and runs through Saturday, April 16. Not only are there technology-oriented sessions virtually every hour of every day, but there is a full technology poster session. Unfortunately, it’s cross-listed with two very interesting-looking tech symposia, but at least it’s there! Progress! The topics are all over the tech spectrum, including big data, social media (including Twitter-specific presentations!), simulation technology, the impact of mobile devices, technology-mediated interviews, and technology-enhanced training.  Last year was the first time a “technology” category appeared on the SIOP program, right up there aside selection, training, teamwork and other traditional I/O areas, and there is clearly an enthusiasm for it.  This post contains a list of all the sessions that I interested in attending, which generally come from this grouping.

In what is now clearly a yearly tradition, just as in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, I’ll also be live-blogging the conference on Twitter, barring any unexpected battery problems (this has been much easier since I started carrying a serious battery pack with me!). A permanent record will also stored on my blog.

This year’s conference is in Anaheim, literally across the street from Disneyland. Conference by day, wandering Main Street USA by night waiting for fireworks over Sleeping Beauty Castle. Quite a contrast with New Orleans!

Two exciting bits for me this year. First, Dr. Tara Behrend and I are hosting an IGNITE debate on convenience sampling with Amazon Mechanical Turk, to be held at noon on Thursday in 204 A (Convention Center).  If you haven’t attended an IGNITE before, it’s a unique experience – 15 seconds per slide, 5 minutes max for each presentation.

Second, my lab’s poster on web scraping (a Big Data technique) was named one of the ten “top posters” of the conference. I’m not quite sure how many posters are at SIOP, but I’m pretty sure it’s over 300 (top 3%), so that’s pretty amazing! We’ll be showing it off at the Thursday evening reception in Hilton Pacific D at 6PM.

Conference events are generally from 8AM to 6PM Pacific time (11AM-9PM Eastern), so tune in to Twitter for the live coverage.

In the graphic below, the events that I am part of are colored red, events I am planning to attend are marked with a purple bar, and official SIOP Twitter chats are in blue. You will notice that there are a lot of red blurry sessions – those are meetings I have scheduled, and you can’t come! Things can and often do change last minute, so if you’d like to meet up at any of these events, don’t trust that I’ll be there – just let me know you’re planning to be there too!