A new app developed by Associate Professor Yun Huang aims to make navigating conferences less work and more fun, so that attendees can meet others, discover fresh ideas, and "experience academic life as an exciting adventure." The app, PapersClaw.fun, will debut at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), which will be held from April 13-17 in Barcelona, Spain.
Huang built the app based on her own conference experiences.
"When I was a junior researcher, I noticed that some senior scholars seemed to navigate large conferences effortlessly, always knowing exactly which sessions would spark insight," she said. "I first created PapersClaw.fun for myself—to make sure I never missed important sessions and to help visually map out where I wanted to go during a conference."
PapersClaw.fun will help attendees quickly bootstrap a conference plan without clicking through individual papers on the conference website, which is often mission impossible for a large conference that has several thousands of papers. It will recommend relevant sessions based on people's interests, and scholars who published on adjacent topics. Paper authors have the option of adding a “backstage story” to their paper for a more personal touch. The app has also mapped out the Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona so that users can easily find their way around the venue.
Last year, CHI drew 50,000 attendees. To better enable serendipitous discovery, Huang designed AI agents that can prompt cross-domain collaborations that are out of people’s current collaboration networks.
"My colleagues suggested adding a 'coffee hour' feature, which would allow users to drop a pin on a map to host informal meetups and help others find them," she said.
Users can also customize digital ribbons to highlight their current interests. For example, faculty might tag "hiring undergraduate students," while students can indicate that they are "on the job market."
"To address privacy and safety concerns, the app only presents names to people who authorized their work and school accounts when logging in," said Huang. "For better privacy, users' schedules are saved in the local browser, not on the server, regardless of login or not."
Huang noted that though the data are conference papers, PapersClaw.fun can be used anytime. She is piloting her own "claw fish" to livestream paper reading and allowing authorized users to have their own AI agents contribute data to the site.
"Building on my past work on participatory sensing, this design reflects my passion for spatial discovery—an ocean of ideas waiting to be explored," she said.
Huang has shared this system with several conference organizers, who have provided positive feedback on deploying similar designs at additional conferences or for other forms of location-based knowledge sharing.
Huang specializes in human-AI interaction and social computing. She is passionate about developing systems that foster collaborative innovation between humans and AI, whether it is to conceive new services or enhance existing ones. Her work is sponsored by government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and Administration for Community Living, as well as companies such as OpenAI, Google, and IBM. Huang received her PhD from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.