About HCI Today

Who runs HCI Today?

HCI Today is operated by CIT, a CIC under Companoid Labs Holdings.

Companoid Labs Holdings is a UX-innovation company builder-type holding company. Simply put, it invests in startups and works alongside them to grow their businesses beyond a certain level as a companion company. Because founders face many challenges in the early stages of building a company, we invest not just capital but also human resources, assets, and time. Since our founding in 2021, we have found great fulfillment serving as core colleagues and CPOs for founders building products and services.

CIT is a CIC under Companoid Labs Holdings, and its full name is Companoid Institute of Technology. This CIC serves as an institute for HCI research and UX talent development. It conducts research relevant to companies and government agencies that need HCI expertise, and it trains professionals with the user experience skills that startups need. Companoid Labs established CIT in 2022 after working closely with startup founders and practitioners and recognizing the critical lack of awareness about HCI and the severe shortage of UX talent.

Why was HCI Today created?

HCI Today was born from asking: "How can we make the HCI field more accessible so that everyone from the general public to researchers, practitioners, and entrepreneurs can engage with it in their daily lives?"

Companoid Labs Holdings Chairman Jinkyu Jang, senior partners Mina Park and Hyeonggeun Yun, along with other members and CIT staff, researched ways to address this shared concern. The conclusion was that for people to recognize the importance of HCI, there needs to be an abundance of relevant content they encounter in daily life. However, the real problem was that while experts can see how content relates to HCI, it is not easy for the general public to catch that connection.

To solve the problem of people not viewing content through an HCI lens despite the abundance of material, we believed it was essential to curate and deliver high-quality content effectively. Even among Companoid Labs and CIT members, there was an information gap due to busy schedules and different content consumption channels. Solving this became the starting point for HCI Today.

Why is HCI Today text-only?

HCI Today believes the power of great content lies in text.

Unlike video, text may lack the ability to deliver rich sensory stimulation, but it has a greater power to convey authenticity. CIT believes that even in the age of video, text remains the optimal format for knowledge transfer in human history, and we want to emphasize that text is best for preserving the benefit of content delivery to humans.

There are also copyright concerns. It's not that we can't technically retrieve images or videos — reusing them without permission is difficult from a copyright perspective. And having AI generate substitute images doesn't convey the philosophy CIT stands for. HCI Today will continue to be a text-only service.

How is HCI Today's AI designed?

The core challenge of HCI Today is identifying HCI-relevant content even when the content itself doesn't explicitly mention HCI — something only experts would recognize.

Since most content doesn't use the term "HCI," determining whether content is meaningful from an HCI perspective is the most critical task. Classifying content that is related to actual HCI research or practical work is impossible without the rich experience and metadata of HCI domain experts.

In this regard, HCI Today quantifies the combined perspectives of Jinkyu Jang, Mina Park, and Hyeonggeun Yun — startup investors and HCI domain experts — and operates based on AI technology designed to select only content highly relevant to HCI. CIT's proprietary AI fundamentally operates on the HCI Affinity Score, and it is designed so that CIT cannot intervene to manually select or manipulate content without specific justification.

How does HCI Today handle copyright?

HCI Today surfaces content that helps readers understand original sources from an HCI perspective.

One of HCI Today's core principles is to protect the inherent rights and authority of original authors, and to let their work shine. Since HCI Today's mission is to offer fresh interpretations from an HCI perspective and help readers appreciate original content more deeply, we design our system to minimize copyright infringement risk.

HCI Today also does not cause harm or loss to the platforms hosting original content. We encounter news across multiple channels that we consider relevant and beneficial from an HCI perspective, but we recognize that the likelihood of even a single expert finding and reading all the relevant news across those channels is extremely low. Therefore, we curate without infringing on copyrights and design the experience to make original sources and their platforms stand out even more.

On HCI Today, the news title is the most prominent element — it serves as the gateway to the original. Our role is to guide users from our site to the external original page as quickly as possible. For users unsure whether to read a piece of news, we want them to understand how valuable the insights are so they ultimately read the original. To that end, we don't simply summarize or reorganize the original content; instead, we briefly introduce the key points fully from our perspective and encourage reading the original.

If you're a blogger or have news you'd like featured, please submit it through Submit Source anytime. If it meets our review criteria, it will be classified and surfaced by the HCI Affinity Score on equal footing with all other sources, without any intervention. Conversely, if you're an author or platform representative who feels their copyright or rights have been infringed, please submit a request through Removal Request at any time.

How does HCI Today work, and why is the newsletter sent on Fridays?

Every morning at 7 AM (Seoul, Korea time), HCI Today's HCI Affinity Score algorithm begins analyzing news from around the world that appears meaningful in the HCI field.

The process of selecting news for highlights runs from Saturday through Friday morning, finalizing the week's highlights in time for the Friday newsletter. Assuming no issues with the completed highlights, the newsletter is finalized and sent out on Friday morning.

What is the Industry section on HCI Today?

Many excellent corporate blogs go unnoticed, and there are more HCI-related news in tech company updates than you might expect — we spotlight the ones we think deserve attention.

While corporate blogs often share straightforward news, recent tech companies are publishing posts with deep technical and philosophical understanding driven by AI. Despite this, corporate blogs generally don't receive much attention, which is unfortunate. Among the insightful posts about AI, quite a few are relevant to HCI.

HCI Today drives traffic to original links so that corporate blog posts get the attention they deserve. News that the HCI Affinity Score algorithm determines to be HCI-related are shared in the Highlights and Feed sections from an HCI perspective. In other words, corporate blog posts may appear simultaneously in the Industry section and in the Highlights or Feed sections.

Note: The Highlights and Feed sections only share HCI-focused content, while the Industry section covers corporate blog content.