Birth of the Dumpling Emoji, to be released mid 2017 together with Chopsticks, Take-out Box and Futune cookie emojis. The Artist behind these artwork will tell you the story from its birth, design, to release. ??

Understanding emoji can provide web platforms with deeper insight into user behavior. This talk will take a look at Twemoji as a phenomenon and examine its use in search, trends and hashtags.

Fusion is a relatively new digital news company trying to conduct serious journalism and also reach a young, diverse audience on the platforms they use. Here’s how emojis and Facebook bots helped us do all those things.

Let’s talk about sex. Get a grip on the notorious eggplant and seduce with emoji. Become a master of sexting and learn about the history and future of sex, emoji, and technology.

Subjectivity and arbitrariness is what lends emoji so well to pragmatic communication. It’s this very quality that has been undermined by the new designs of OS-10, and is perhaps inherently unsustainable without becoming contrived.

This presentation examines emoji in action through screenshots of real conversations ?. We will look at what makes emoji so useful: their ability to perform communicative gestures with more agility than language itself.

Debunking the myth that technology is neutral and objective, the reality is that digital technologies are deeply and inextricably embedded with social, ethical, and political values that have real consequences for the people who use them. In this lightning talk, emoji researcher Kate Miltner will show––through the lens of emoji–– how investing in the idea of “neutral” and “objective” technology often results in unequal systems that privilege certain users over others.

Emoji are becoming ubiquitous in communications. They have the ability to address the complexity and nuances of human communications.  Can we use them to express what we really feel and think? Learn what neuroscience tells us about personalization, dynamism, and context having a positive impact in emoji communication.

Explore how emoji is becoming ever more integrated into daily life.

A warm introduction and overview of the experience from the founders of the first-ever Emojicon!

Emoji Art is taking center stage in the art world. Learn about the major works of Emoji art through the lens and work of an ‘early adopter’ Emoji artist and founder of the first crowd-sourced Emoji Dictionary.

Everybody loves sending emoji inline in their text, but the focus on the Unicode Consortium as the governor of emoji is misguided. The Unicode Technical Committee’s core competency was in assembling a bunch of independent text-encoding schemes (for English, Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari…) into one character set. But now we are asking the same committee to make decisions for the world about the universality of take-out boxes and tacos, or whether a Brontosaurus is a real dinosaur. No committee is qualified to do this. Asking Unicode to make a decision on each individual proposed emoji is silly, and there is no need to put every emoji on a single numbered list anyway. Many systems already support emoji the “right way,” which is to say, they are independent of Unicode and they make sure that emoji appear the same way to the sender and receiver. If you’re building a communications system or app, be like the ones who get this right: Slack, Zulip, Blogger, or anything that allows HTML inline images.

Visual communication is open to interpretation.  But why do some people see a high five and others see praise hands? Is ? a high score or a plainly told truth? And is your friend suggesting a coffee meeting or serving some shade? This talk will explore alternate definitions for emoji from a cultural perspective.

Each team from the Emoji Hack will have the opportunity to present their project on the mainstage.

Is it suggestive or playful? With fewer than 2000 emojis, it’s impossible to capture every nuance of emotion. Visual communication has taken over the user experience across popular platforms ––but with the proliferation of emoji, stickers and reaction GIFs, what’s the difference? This double feature lightning talk will feature Joe Rideout of Kik on how they created a popular emoji-based GIF search, followed by Sophie Xie on Facebook stickers and open up to a moderated Q&A by Mercedes Kraus.