ACM Interactions

The 2013 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (commonly known as just CHI) took place in Paris from April 27 to May 2, 2013. Many of you are familiar with the CHI conference either through direct experience or through reading papers that are showcased there. 

This was a bumper year for CHI: around 3500 attendees running between16 parallel tracks of content and activities that featured over 1000 presentations sorted into over 200 sessions. I should also note that non-collocated attendees were also part of the conference. Extensive use of social media was evident (Twitter had at least two streams simultaneously pouring forth content using #chi2013 and #chisadness, the latter created by those not physically present, some of whom were organizing local gatherings to watch content from afar). Needless to say, all this effort to be co-present on the part of far-distant people led to much discussion at the SIGCHI Town Hall Meeting about the benefits/costs of increasing our broadcast capabilities at future conferences.  

Preparation for and real-time management of the conference involved over 100 conference committee members and over 150 student volunteers and 30 local volunteers. 

As for the content planning, official statistics presented by the program chairs are as follows: 

• 1962 papers and notes submitted with 392 accepted (an acceptance rate of 20%)
• 1604 submissions to other venues with 659 accepted (an acceptance rate of 41%)

This all took over 10,000 invited reviews that were managed by over 200 program committee members. Once submissions were accepted there was a mammoth session-planning process aided by the specially designed Cobi system, which is “a collection of crowdsourcing applications that elicit preferences and constraints from the community, and software that enable organizers and other community members to take informed actions toward improving the schedule based on collected information.” You can see more on the Cobi system in the paper “Cobi: Communitysourcing Large-Scale Conference Scheduling” by Zhang and colleagues, in which they describe their process and the technology they developed. 

If you are interested in more details about the conference itself, I wrote a short, very personal review of my experience at CHI 2013 for the Communications of the ACM blog. 

Looking to the future, CHI 2014 will be in the gorgeous Canadian city of Toronto from April 26 to May 1, 2014. Start planning to attend—actually, don’t just plan on attending, plan to participate! 

Deadlines for submissions are as follows: 

• September 18,  2013: Papers and Notes
• October 4, 2013: Case Studies, Courses, Doctoral Consortium,Interactivity, SIG Meetings, Workshops
• December 27, 2013: alt.chi
• January 7, 2014: Panels, Student Design Competition, Student Game Competition, Student Research Competition, Video Showcase, Works-in-Progress

I look forward to seeing you there!

Elizabeth F. Churchill is Director of Human Computer Interaction at eBay Research Labs in San Jose, California. She is also vice president of ACM SIGCHI.

Elizabeth Churchill