In-Person Doctoral Consortium

Quick Facts

The In-Person CHI’24 Doctoral Consortium is a CHI’24 event for mentoring and sharing research among a small group of Ph.D. students. The full CHI’24 conference is a blend of virtual attendance on-line and physical in-person attendance in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

The in-person Doctoral Consortium (DC) will consist of a physical event taking place in Honolulu before the on-site conference. The primary goal of the DC is to provide a forum for in-depth research discussions and to build a mentoring and peer network for participants.

For 2024, financial support will be distributed differently than in previous years.  Participants invited to the Doctoral Consortium will not receive free registration and financial support may be prioritised for those suffering from financial hardship or lacking institutional support to at the DC.

Important Dates

All times are in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone. When the deadline is day D, the last time to submit is when D ends AoE. Check your local time in AoE.

• Submission deadline: Thursday, November 09, 2023
• Notification date: Thursday, December 14, 2023
• e-rights completion deadline: Thursday, December 21, 2023 
• Publication-ready deadline: Thursday, January 25, 2024
• TAPS Closes: Thursday, February 1, 2024 

Submission Details

• Online submission: PCS Submission System
• Template: ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column) for research description.

Submission Format

• Submission: including a 6 page (excluding references) research description, a benefits statement, a letter of recommendation, and CV (see detailed instructions below).
• Submissions are not anonymous and should include all author names, affiliations, and contact information.

Selection Process

Reviewed

Message from the Doctoral Consortium Chairs

The CHI 2024 Doctoral Consortium is an event for Ph.D. students to share their Ph.D. research. A small group of Ph.D. students who are about midway (see further guidance below under Preparing and Submitting your Doctoral Consortium Proposal) through their Ph.D. programs will join a small panel of established HCI researchers. The aim is for students to learn from one another and from experienced HCI researchers from other institutions.

The goals are that the selected Ph.D. students will:

• Gain new ideas and perspectives on their research directions;
• Support each other by constructively offering their feedback to the other attending Ph.D. students;
• Form new friendships with the other attendees, together becoming a supportive cohort of emerging scholars with a spirit of collaborative research; and
• Engage with the full CHI conference by participating in many of the events and opportunities that CHI offers, and by enjoying interactions with other CHI attendees.

Preparing and Submitting your Doctoral Consortium Proposal

Tip: You’re at the right stage for this event if you have a plan for the things you’ll do to finish your dissertation, have made some progress in carrying out that plan, and can still change the plan based on feedback. Please ensure that your proposal helps us see that you are indeed at this stage.

Each proposal should be a single PDF with four required components: (1) a six-page description of your Ph.D., (2) an expected benefits statement, (3) a recommendation letter, and (4) a two-page curriculum vitae. If you are unable to obtain a letter of recommendation from your thesis advisor, please include a short explanation.

To be considered, you must submit your Doctoral Consortium proposal by the submission deadline.

1. 1. Six-page research description (excluding references): Use the ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column) template and include the following:
      • Your name, Advisor(s) name(s), and the university where you are conducting your doctoral work.  Submissions should NOT be anonymous.
      • Current year of study and projected completion date (plus information about the regulations of your PhD program regarding length, any part-time study, etc.)
      • Have you ever attended another doctoral consortium? If so, please name it, link to the conference homepage, and give the size of the conference (number of participants overall and the number of participants in the DC). Then we will assess whether attending another DC makes sense.  
      • The background and motivation for your research, including the key related work that frames your research
      • Specific research objectives, goals, or questions; try to explain how your work differs from related work
      • Research approach, methods, and rationale
      • Results and contributions to date
      • Expected next steps, as well as open questions and challenges that you face in your research
      • Dissertation status and long-term goals
      • Note that, upon acceptance, the research description will be published as CHI Extended Abstracts in the ACM Digital Library.
   2. Benefits and Contribution statement (two paragraphs)
      • Describe what you hope to gain by participating in the Doctoral Consortium, and how your participation will benefit other students and faculty.
   3. Letter of Recommendation (from primary thesis advisor)
      • Describe your interaction with the student and your assessment of the quality of their work. Explain how the CHI 2024 doctoral consortium would benefit this student at this point in their doctoral program, as well as the contributions you expect the student to make to the group.
      • The doctoral consortium is targeted towards students who have a clear idea of their research plans and started their research, but have not yet executed most of their research plan. Please explain the structure of your student’s program and their expected level of progress by April 2024.
      • As stated above, if a student is unable to obtain a letter of recommendation from their thesis advisor (or the equivalent), the student should instead include a short explanation and a description of where they are in their doctoral progress and anticipated timeline.
   4. Curriculum Vitae: (maximum two pages)
      • Provide a concise summary of your current curriculum vitae, including research publications. Please separate published papers from those under review or in press.

Please ensure that your submission is complete and conforms to the format and content guidelines above. Because the Doctoral Consortium chairs expect to receive many applications, submissions that do not meet these requirements will be desk rejected.

Metadata Integrity

All submission metadata, including required fields in PCS like author names, affiliations, and order, must be complete and correct by the submission deadline.  This information is crucial to the integrity of the review process and author representation.  No changes to metadata after this deadline will be allowed.

Accessibility

Authors are strongly encouraged to work on improving the accessibility of their submissions before peer review begins, using recommendations found in the Guide to an Accessible Submission for their paper and in the technical requirements for video content for their video. For any questions or concerns about creating accessible submissions, please contact the Accessibility Chairs at accessibility@chi2024.acm.org.

Selection Process

Overview: As soon as the submission deadline passes, the Doctoral Consortium committee will review and select candidates via a reviewed process that considers both research quality and the goal of identifying a set of students who will benefit significantly from the event and support each other. We will seek diversity in backgrounds, identities, abilities, intellectual viewpoints, topics, and geographic areas.

Supporting a wide group of institutions/advisors: Besides the selection criteria above, kindly note that even if your submission is excellent, we might not be able to accept you because of our goals of having attendees across many institutions. For example, we probably cannot accept more than two students from the same institution, and definitely cannot accept more than one student with the same advisor.

Confidentiality of your submission: Submissions should not contain sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at publication time. Before publication time, we will keep your submission confidential in these ways:

• During the review process: Confidentiality of submissions will be maintained throughout the review process.
• If your submission is accepted: Your accepted submission will be kept confidential until the start of the doctoral consortium activities, except for title and author information, which will be published on the website before the conference. The research description will be published as CHI Extended Abstracts. All other materials (Benefits and Contribution Statement, Letter of Recommendation, and Curriculum Vitae) will be kept confidential in perpetuity.
• If your submission is not accepted: Your submission will be kept confidential in perpetuity.

Upon Acceptance of your Doctoral Consortium Proposal

We anticipate that partial support for participant attendance at the consortium will be provided by CHI 2024. All such benefits are contingent upon attending the in-Person Doctoral Consortium. Note that submissions will not be published without a signed ACM copyright form. Obtaining permissions to use video, audio, or pictures of identifiable people or proprietary content rests with the author, not the ACM or the CHI conference.

The author of a submission has to follow the instructions on preparing and submitting a final version by the Publication-Ready Deadline. If the author cannot meet these requirements by the Publication-Ready deadline, the venue chairs will be notified and may be required to remove the paper from the program. The publication-ready version has to follow the LaTeX and Word templates from ACM. Should you need technical assistance, please direct your technical query to: publications@chi2024.acm.org.

Furthermore, the corresponding author will also receive information about registration and attending the conference.

Authors of accepted submissions will receive instructions on how to submit the publication version of their submission, as well as how to prepare the presentation and the poster. Authors will also receive information about doctoral consortium registration and attending the conference.

At the Conference

Each accepted submission will be presented at the physical DC event in Honolulu. The in-person event will take place Saturday and Sunday in Honolulu on May 11th and 12th 2024.

All DC participants will receive specific instructions about the presentation format; this format will vary depending on the event to foster discussion and maximize participant attention. Accepted submissions will also be provided an opportunity to be presented as a poster at the on-site conference.

Attendance at In-person Event at CHI 2024

Individuals accepted to the In-Person DC are expected to attend the Consortium in full. Students should also bring a small version of their poster, on A4 or letter-size paper, to hand out during the Doctoral Consortium and poster sessions.

Each student will present their work to the group, with substantial time allowed for discussion and questions by the faculty and other students. Being accepted into the CHI Doctoral Consortium is a prestigious honor and involves a commitment to giving and receiving thoughtful commentary with an eye towards shaping the field and upcoming participants in the field.

Poster Session

In-person DC participants will present a poster of their work at the main conference, during the Doctoral Consortium poster session (date to be announced).

After the Conference

Doctoral Consortium description papers will be published as CHI Extended Abstracts in the ACM Digital Library.