Hello everyone,
It’s t-shirt design time! Every year, we call on students to design the wonderful t-shirt that our SVs wear! If your design is selected, you guarantee yourself an SV spot! This year, the deadline is Sunday, January 14th, 2024 (AoE), and your submissions should be sent to svchair@chi2024.acm.org with the subject: CHI 2024 SV T-Shirt Design Contest

Design Details & Selection Process

You may consider incorporating elements of Honolulu, Hawai’i into your design, though this is not a requirement. What’s most important is that the design is respectful of local culture, engaging, and distinctive, allowing it to stand out in a crowd. Remember, SV T-shirts often serve as a form of uniform at our events. 🙂

Please send us front/back designs, noting that we cannot print on sleeves or the extreme edges of the shirts. Designs should be ONE colour. In general, this means a black or white design on a coloured shirt.

The imprint size is roughly 11″ (~28cm) wide and 13″ (~33cm) high, front or back. The design can contain more than one print (e.g., a large print on the back and a smaller print on the front).

You can find the CHI 2024 logo information here: [CHI2024 Design Package]

Submission Details

Mock-ups should be sent as PDF, JPG, or PNG in medium resolution. If your design is selected as a winning design, we will require the final version in a .eps or .ai format.

You may submit several designs or variations on a single design, should you so desire.

Please follow the following naming convention for each of your designs: lastname_firstname_tshirtdesign.ext

The deadline is Sunday, January 14th, 2024, at 23:59 AoE to submit your designs to svchair@chi2024.acm.org with the subject: CHI 2024 SV T-Shirt Design Contest.

We will select a winner in the week following the end of the contest and notify the winner, as well as everyone who submitted designs. The selection process involves both SV-Chairs selection and a popular vote among ACs and OC members.

Here are some photos from previous SV T-shirts, courtesy of our wonderful past chair Haley MacLeod:

Thank you, and we’re looking forward to seeing your creativity!

Maximiliane Windl, Mikołaj P. Woźniak, and Yudai Tanaka
CHI 2024 SV Co-Chairs
svchair@chi2024.acm.org

NB — The numbers might not always work out here, there are missing data from the analyses due to conflicts.

This blog post covers the outcomes of the first round of reviewing for the CHI 2024 Papers track. Last week, authors were invited to revise and resubmit when at least one associate committee member (AC) recommended Revise and Resubmit or better. This short post provides analyses that might help to contextualise review recommendations across submissions. This post focuses on outcomes; we will be reflecting further on the review process and the huge contributions made by associate chairs (ACs) and reviewers in a future post.

Review scales

Before we go into the outcomes, a reminder of the scales that have been used during the CHI 2024 review process. Reviewers and ACs provide a recommendation (recommendation category out of 5 choices) and can further contextualise their recommendation based on originality, significance, and research quality (each a 5 point ordinal scale from Very Low, Low, Medium, High and Very High).

Outcomes after the first round of reviews

CHI 2024 Papers received 4028 complete submissions. Four papers were withdrawn and 207 papers (5%) were desk rejected before going out to review. 1651 (41%) received at least one ‘RR’ (or better) recommendation from 1AC or 2AC and were put forward to round 2. 2166 papers (54%) did not receive at least one ‘RR’ (or better) recommendation from 1AC or 2AC, and were rejected as they did not meet the threshold for entering the next round.

Of the papers moving to the next stage of review, the decision process of 1586 submissions could be further analysed (the others were redacted from the raw data due to Analytics Chair conflicts). Of these submissions, 1095 (69%) proceeded to revise and resubmit because both ACs made a recommendation of RR or better (i.e., RR, ARR or A). Three hundred and sixty (23%) proceeded to revise and resubmit because the 1AC gave a recommendation of RR, but the 2AC gave an RRX or X recommendation (i.e., the 1AC recommendation carried the submission to revise and resubmit). In 131 cases (8%), the 1AC recommended RRX or X, but the 2AC recommended RR or better (i.e., the 2AC recommendation carried the submission into revise and resubmit).

Looking at the review recommendations more widely across 3,678 Reject and RR submissions (NB – Analytics Chair conflicts account for the ‘missing’ 139 submissions), we can identify forty submissions (1%) proceeding to RR with three or four A (accept) recommendations from ACs and reviewers. Two hundred and fifty submissions (6.8%) were rejected with four X recommendations.

Progression from RR to final decisions

It is not possible to directly relate RR/Reject decisions to “average” scores – only one AC needs to recommend RR and submissions go to revise and resubmit (79 submissions have gone through to revise and resubmit with one RR AC recommendation and three others at X or RRX). However, we can still observe that RRX (revise and resubmit/reject) was the review recommendation that authors were most likely to see amongst their reviews (2,599 submissions received one or more RRX). As you might expect, authors were least likely to find an A (accept) recommendation amongst their reviews (only 416 submissions received one or more A).

Even with reviews in hand, it’s useful to know where a given submission sits compared to others. One way to look at this is by calculating the proportion of “supportive” reviews for a given submission. This support is inferred from the actual recommendation of the reviewer, not the text of the review. Figure 1 shows the proportion of reviews recommending RR or better (i.e., RR, ARR, A) for each submission.

Figure 1: How many supportive (A, ARR, RR) reviews does each submission have? With four reviews per submission, it’s somewhere between zero and four.

We can also break the recommendations down in the same way, but using A and ARR as indicators of support (rather than A, ARR and RR). Last year, 49% of submissions were invited to submit revisions. Of those submissions progressing to RR, 59% were subsequently accepted and 41% rejected. Considering the proportion of revised submissions accepted at CHI 2023, and imagining this measure of support translates directly into acceptance (caveats abound!), then it seems less likely for submissions that have no A/ARR reviews to be accepted.

Sticking with the CHI 2023 data can also help give an idea of how things pan out in the end. We don’t have the data from the first round, so this plot is based on the final review recommendations after a second round of review. Reviewers could still choose A, ARR, RR, RRX, or X in round 2, even if only two decisions were meaningful: Reject in second round and Accept in second round. But it still gives an idea of where reviews might need to end up after round 2 for a submission to be accepted; an overwhelming majority of the submissions accepted after the round 2 (92%) had four recommendations of RR or better. Figure 2 shows this distribution.

Figure 2: At CHI 2023, the vast majority of submissions that were accepted ended the Round 1 review process with four ‘supportive’ reviews of A, AAR or RR.

Whether you’re contemplating your revisions, or your manuscript has been rejected and you’re thinking about where to send your work next, spare a thought for the authors of 89 submissions who received a different recommendation for each of their four reviewers (8 were rejected, 81 advance to revise and resubmit).

Outcomes as a function of submission type

This year marks the resurrection of different categories of submissions under the Papers track. CHI in previous years solicited “Notes” – short submissions of up to four-pages plus references. Notes were last solicited at CHI 2017. This year, the call for papers identified three categories of submission: Short, Standard, and Excessively Long. Short submissions, of 5000 words or less, were “strongly encouraged”. Although not a facsimile of the old Note format, the call for Short submissions was intended to create a similar space for shorter pieces that perhaps make smaller contributions.

The table below shows a breakdown of submissions by type. It shows how many papers of each kind were submitted, and what the outcomes were for those papers. To keep things simple, we just focus on papers that went to full review and had either a revise and resubmit outcome or a reject outcome. We will ignore desk rejects and withdrawn papers.

You can see that Excessively Long and Standard submissions move to RR at a similar rate. Short submissions are about half as likely as other submissions to move to RR. This pattern is similar to what we have seen in the past with Notes – acceptance rates are much lower than for ‘full’ papers.

Outcomes as a function of subcommittee

Our CHI 2024 blog post on submissions received broke down submission rates by subcommittee. How has variation across subcommittees fed into submission outcomes? To keep things straightforward again, let’s just consider submissions with RR and Reject decisions. These make up 95% of the decisions made and make plots more readable. Figure 3 shows that the User Experience subcommittee passed the lowest proportion of papers to RR (36%). The Critical and Sustainable Computing subcommittee passed the highest proportion of papers to RR (52%).

Figure 3: What proportion of submissions to a given subcommittee have progressed to revise and resubmit?

In our CHI 2024 blog post on submissions received, we also showed the relative size of subcommittees in terms of the number of submissions that they received. Given the differences in the RR rates of the different subcommittees, the relative size of the subcommittees in terms of the number of papers under review has changed. Figure 4 shows that the User Experience subcommittee was biggest by number of submissions, but is now sixth biggest based on the number of submissions that remain under consideration.

Figure 4: How many submissions in each subcommittee are still part of the CHI 2024 review process (and how many were submitted)?

Note that the final acceptance rate for each subcommittee will also vary. It is not necessarily the case that the rank order presented below will follow precisely for acceptance rates. These data from CHI 2023 show the difference between the RR rate (i.e., the proportion of non-desk rejected submissions invited to revise and resubmit) and the Accept rate (i.e., after RR). The difference between these two rates is as much as twelve percentage points. (Unsurprisingly, RR still very strongly correlates with Accept, r(16)=0.86, p<.001; higher RR rate yields higher Accept rate and vice versa.)

Bonus Chartjunk

In our CHI 2024 blog post on submissions received, we analysed new data that has only become available in PCS, the conference submission system, in this cycle. We considered when authors created their submissions for the Papers track, and when they made their final edits before the deadline. The general theme of the analyses was that authors do things at the last minute. As reviewers are largely drawn from largely the same pool as authors, are reviews also submitted at the last minute? It looks like reviewers generally accept reviews quickly (Figure 5)… and finish them at the last moment (Figure 6) – the deadline was the 25th October! (NB – we’ve taken the first complete submission of a review as the signal for completion, but many reviewers update their reviews several times before, during and after the discussion period.)

Figure 5: How quickly do reviewers accept invitations to review? Quite quickly!

Figure 6: How quickly do reviewers return their reviews? At the last minute!

Datatables

It is not possible to produce useful datatables for all analyses, many of which require access to individual submission and review data that cannot be easily or safely shared. However, in the interests of transparency we are trying to make the data that support the analyses available where we can.

The data on the proportions of recommendations made by reviewers across individual reviews (not submissions!) is given by:

Figure 1 was plotted using this summary data:

Figure 2 was plotted using this summary data:

Figure 3 and 4 were plotted using this data:

The ‘bonus chartjunk’ plots are histograms produced from PCS logs, rather than a summary table, and so it is not possible to share this data.

Designing a technical programme for a conference like CHI is complex, often with many directly competing needs and wants. Given how many constraints need to be balanced, all of our decisions in designing the technical programme are guided by the following key principles.

Travel is Not Required to Publish

Decoupling publishing of archival work from travel and in-person presentation is an important step to support more inclusive publishing. There are many reasons why someone can’t or won’t be able to travel to CHI 2024, and we want to send a clear message that traveling is not required for disseminating knowledge and participating in scholarly discourse. All the Calls for Participation have had clear details around what requirements are in place for participation and what modes of presentation are available for all venues.

Live is Synchronous, Remote is Asynchronous

After lessons learned from CHI 2022 and CHI 2023, it is clear that a synchronous hybrid experience would not be possible for CHI 2024. Synchronous hybrid (e.g. a live session connecting in-person and remote attendees) will not happen for Papers sessions in any form for CHI 2024. In light of this constraint, we are focusing on creative solutions to deliver a hybrid experience that weaves together the best of synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for all attendees.

Why We Attend Conferences

Fundamentally, we attend conferences to share knowledge and participate in scholarly discourse. What this looks like will be a little bit different for every person, where some people want to soak up new knowledge all week, some want to ask questions and have debates, and others want to focus on reconnecting and expanding their networks. Everyone conferences differently, so we’re designing a hybrid programme that supports key activities in synchronous and asynchronous ways. Registering for the conference, in-person or remotely, is how you gain access to the conference, disseminate your work, and participate in scholarly discourse at CHI 2024.

Disseminate Your Work

Our primary mode of dissemination is through publication in the ACM Digital Library. All authors, regardless of in-person or remote registration, will have their work published in the ACM Digital Library, in the ACM CHI Proceedings, or ACM CHI Extended Abstracts.

Authors also have the opportunity to give a presentation during the conference. Further details about presentation formats for in-person and remote attendees are described in the following sections for each venue.

Asking and Answering Questions

One of the most important parts of participating in scholarly discourse is to respond to questions about your own work. Contributing questions to the scholarly discourse is crucial, offering new perspectives, challenging ideas, and advancing the field. We will use multiple platforms for collecting and archiving questions for all authors, which will provide opportunities to respond to questions about your work during the conference and ask questions for all the conference content.

Networking and Making New Connections

What is special about a conference week is that everyone has committed time and energy to being present in-person or remote. For all attendees, we aim to create opportunities for face-to-face, remote, and hybrid interactions that help people nurture their networks during the conference week.

Papers and Journals

As the archival and largest track in the CHI conference, Papers is often a special case. We’ve given particular attention to designing a Papers programme and invited Journal presentations to support in-person and remote attendees. Questions and discussions for all authors will be focused around tools like Slido, Discord, and the SIGCHI Conference Programmes progressive web application (PWA), allowing equal access to participation for all attendees.

In-person presenters will give a live presentation in sessions organised by topic. Questions will be facilitated by the session chair from the platforms available to ensure quality dialogues after paper presentations. Authors will also be able to respond to questions on these platforms throughout the conference week.

Remote presenters will be organised into remote sessions by topic. These sessions will not have synchronous time slots in the conference programme, but will have an asynchronous presence throughout the conference week. Remote author pre-recorded presentation videos will be shown continuously throughout the conference on the exhibit floor with QR codes to access content in the PWA, will have channels on Discord, will have online watch parties, and remote session chairs to support asynchronous engagement.

Extended Abstracts Venues

Venues in the Extended Abstracts have options for in-person, hybrid, or remote authoring or attendance based on each specific venue. The following table gives an overview of the in-person and remote options for all extended abstracts venues.

Case Studies, LWB, and alt.chi: In-Person and Remote Asynchronous

Case Studies, Late Breaking Work, and alt.chi authors will have live presentations for in-person attendees and pre-recorded videos for remote attendees. Following the model of the papers and journals presentations, in-person authors will give a live presentation and remote authors will give a pre-recorded presentation. Questions will be facilitated by in-person or virtual session chairs using tools like Slido, Discord, and the PWA. Remote author pre-recorded presentation videos will also be shown continuously throughout the conference on the exhibit floor with QR codes to access content in the PWA, will have channels on Discord, will have online watch parties, and remote session chairs to support asynchronous engagement.

Keynotes: Live Streamed

Keynotes will be on-site and will be streamed live for remote attendees, with questions facilitated on Slido.

Panels: Live Streamed Hybrid

Panels have a flexible format so that the organizers have the choice of running them as in-person only, or hybrid with remote panelists. All panels will be live streamed for the remote audience.

Workshops and SIGs: In-Person, Remote, or Hybrid Venues

Workshops and SIGS have flexible formats determined by the organisers. Workshop organizers have the choice of running it as in-person only, or hybrid. Organisers can use tools like Zoom, Discord, Slido, and the PWA to facilitate in-person, remote, and hybrid interactions.

Courses, Doctoral Consortium, and Video Showcase: In-Person or Remote

Courses have a flexible format determined by the organisers. Course organizers have the option of running their course as fully in-person or fully remote. Organisers can use tools like Zoom, Discord, Slido, and the PWA to deliver their course in person or remote.

The Doctoral Consortium will run in two complementary formats to support students who attend in-person or remotely. The In-person DC will be a live event during the conference where in-person attendance is expected, while the Remote DC will run asynchronously online for remote attendees.

The video showcase will run in a dedicated session during the conference, and videos will be available through the PWA and the ACM Digital Library. Presenters can be either in-person or remote, as the special session will be chaired by the track chairs and does not include live questions and answers.

Interactivity and Student Competitions: In-Person Only

A small number of venues are only suitable for in-person interactions and have limited opportunities for remote authors or attendees within these tracks.

Interactivity presenters are expected to attend the conference and give a live demonstration of their work. Remote presentation is not possible for this venue, but remote attendees will be able to see video demonstrations and the extended abstract that describes the demonstration.

The Student Research Competition, Student Design Competition, and Student Game Competition will run as in-person sessions, where students are expected to participate in person. Remote attendees will be able to see the extended abstract that describes each project, and winners will be announced at the live streamed closing keynote.