Student Research Competition

Quick Facts

The Student Research Competition is a forum for undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their research, exchange ideas, and improve their communication skills while competing for prizes. CHI 2024 will be a hybrid conference from May 11-16, 2024 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

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, January 18th, 2024
• Notification: Thursday, February 8th, 2024
• e-rights completion deadline: Thursday, February 15th, 2024
• Publication-ready deadline: Thursday, February 29th, 2024 
• TAPS Closes: Thursday, March 7th, 2024

Submission Details

• Online submission: PCS Submission System
• Template: ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column)
• Student(s) must be currently enrolled in a university or college at the time of the initial submission deadline. For further details see the Eligibility and Guidelines section below.

Submission Format

• Extended abstract (maximum of 8 pages excluding references), poster, and proof of student status. Both poster and abstract submissions must meet SIGCHI accessibility requirements. See details in the Preparing Your Student Research Competition Submission section below.
• Submissions are not anonymous and should include all author names, affiliations, and contact information.

Selection Process

Reviewed

Message from the Student Research Competition Chairs

The Student Research Competition (SRC) is a forum for undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their research, exchange ideas, and improve their communication skills while competing for prizes at CHI 2024. The CHI SRC competition is a branch of the ACM Student Research Competition which hosts similar competitions at other ACM conferences.

The Student Research Competition has the following goals:

• to give undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to share their research ideas and results at CHI in a special forum that provides visibility for their work
• to recognize and reward outstanding student research
• for students to receive feedback about their research and presentation, from a panel of distinguished judges from industry and academia
• to give students the opportunity to meet with and interact with CHI attendees to share ideas, gain new insights, and understand possible practical applications
• to give students an opportunity to sharpen their communication skills

Eligibility and Guidelines

Authorship requirements follow the requirements for the ACM Student Research Competition:

• Student(s) must be currently enrolled in a university or college at the time of the initial submission deadline.
• Graduate students (Masters or PhD program) submissions must submit individually their research project (i.e., single-author).
• Undergraduate students can submit as an individual or in a team project. Team projects may have multiple student authors with one author designated to present. Should they win, the designated presenter will be the recipient of the medal and monetary award.
• Research completed while the student was an undergraduate may be submitted to the undergraduate category even if the student is now a first-year graduate student.
• If the submission is selected, the designated presenter must have active ACM student membership and register to attend the CHI 2024 conference.
• If an individual is part of a group research project and wants to participate in the SRC, they can only present their part of the research.

Note that supervisors are not allowed as co-authors.

Funding

Students can apply for a Gary Marsden Travel Award. The application can be filed as early as 9th January, independent of submitting to the Student Research Competition.

Prizes and Awards

Three winners will be selected in each category: Undergraduate and Graduate. The top three winners at CHI 2024 in each category will receive prizes of US$ 500, US$ 300, and US$ 200, respectively. All winners will receive a medal and a one-year complimentary ACM student membership with a subscription to the ACM Digital Library. Winners will be recognized during the closing plenary session of the CHI 2024 conference. The first-place winners will also go on to compete in the ACM grand finals with winners from other ACM conferences.

Preparing Your Student Research Competition Submission

A submission to the Student Research Competition should describe recently completed or ongoing student research in any of the topic areas covered by CHI. For undergraduate students, a group of undergraduate students who worked together on a project can submit the research with all their names on it, but all students must be undergraduates and the faculty advisor cannot be listed as an author. Graduate student submissions must be single author– even if the research was completed under the supervision of a supervisor, the submission must be authored by the graduate student alone. Submissions should be original work that is neither in submission elsewhere nor already published in CHI or another conference or journal. Abstracts should describe:

• The research problem and motivation for the work
• Background and related work
• Novelty of the research
• Research approach
• Results
• Contributions to the field of HCI

For examples of extended abstracts, we recommend checking accepted submissions from previous years. You can find them in the past CHI proceedings on the ACM Digital Library or on SIGCHI.org (open access). Select “Extended Abstract” and look for “Student Research Competition” session. Winners of previous years are listed on ACM website, search for “CHI” on these pages: 2021, 2020, and 2019. For earlier years, select on the navigation bar. Note that the published extended abstracts have a different layout from the submission template.

For guidance on how to create a research poster, see this XRDS article by Lorrie Cranor.

To participate in the Student Research Competition:

• Submit an abstract and a poster to the Student Research Competition category via the Precision conference submission system:
  • The submission must be a maximum length of 8 pages. References are not included in this page limit.
  • The initial submission for this venue is *not* anonymized. Please include the name of the author(s) and the acknowledgment section as they will appear in the camera-ready version of the abstract.
  • Posters should include (1) the title, authors’ names, and affiliations, (2) a concise overview of the research, (3) clear illustrations of key aspects of the work, and (4) a compelling visual design. Posters might also include QR codes to link to online materials (e.g., scenario videos, interactive prototypes). The typical poster size recommended is a maximum of ~39.3 inches tall by ~39.3 inches wide (or a maximum of 1 meter tall by 1 meter wide).
  • The poster design must be reduced to one standard letter page in size and submitted in PDF format. The file can be no larger than 4 megabytes.
  • For this year, we recommend designing posters in the landscape format because they can be shown on-screen without zooming-out as much as in the portrait format.
• Submit proof of student status by sending a note signed by your academic supervisor verifying all of the following information:
  • your university
  • whether you were a graduate (i.e., Masters or Doctoral level) or undergraduate (i.e., Bachelor level) when the work was done
  • confirm that you are either currently registered in an academic program full-time, or will return to be a student in the upcoming 180 days (starting submission deadline).

(Optional) Apply for a Gary Marsden Travel Award

Students may apply for a Gary Marsden Travel Award at the Gary Marsden Travel Award page. Note that the Travel Award’s application deadline is on 9 January. It is possible to apply before submitting to the Student Research Competition.

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

Submissions will be evaluated by a minimum of three reviewers according to the ACM Student Research Competition scoring system:

• Problem and motivation: 5 points
• Background and related work: 5 points
• Approach and uniqueness: 10 points
• Results and contribution: 10 points
• Total possible score: 30 points

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Confidentiality of submissions is maintained during the review process. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity. All submitted materials for accepted submissions will be kept confidential until the start of the conference or the release of conference abstracts in the ACM Digital Library, with the exception of title and author information which will be published on the website prior to the conference. Submissions should not contain sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at publication time.

Up to twenty-five submissions in total will be chosen to participate in the competition at CHI 2024.

Upon Acceptance of Your Student Research Competition

Student Research Competition abstracts will be archived in the ACM Digital Library. Publishing in the Student Research Competition will not constrain future submissions (e.g., as a conference paper or a journal article). Your abstract and poster are not considered to be a prior publication of the work for the purposes of a future conference or journal publication.

Authors of all accepted submissions will receive instructions on how to submit the publication-ready copy of their abstract. Deadline and instructions regarding publication-ready submissions are emailed to accepted authors. This email will also contain instructions of how to notify the Student Research Competition and Accessibility Chairs of any necessary accommodations. Authors will also receive instructions by email about poster design for presentation at the conference.

Contact authors of accepted papers will receive instructions on how to prepare and submit a final version by the Publication-Ready Deadline. If the authors are unable to 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.

At the Conference

The first round of the competition evaluates the research during a poster presentation at CHI.

The poster presentation will be evaluated by multiple judges according to the ACM Student Research Competition scoring system:

• Oral presentation: 10 points
• Visual presentation: 10 points
• Research methods: 15 points
• Significance of contribution: 10 points
• Total possible score: 45 points

Based on the results from the poster session, the judges will select three submissions for each category to advance to the second round. During the second round, students will have the opportunity to give a short presentation of their research followed by a question and answer session, which will be evaluated by a panel of judges according to the ACM Student Research Competition scoring system:

• Knowledge of research area: 15 points
• Contribution of research: 10 points
• Presentation: 10 points
• Total possible score: 35 points

Winners will be announced during the closing plenary.

In-person attendance

The CHI 2024 Student Research Competition relies on in-person attendance, so that all students can benefit most from the experience.  Accepted submissions are expected to attend CHI 2024 to participate in the Student Research Competition. If you have an exceptional circumstance which prevents your in-person attendance, please contact the Chairs.

Competition Jury

The following reviewers from across the CHI community were convened to discuss finalists’ presentations and select the finalist:

1. Yuhan Luo, City University of Hong Kong, China
2. Adriana Alvarado, IBM Research, United States
3. Jie Li, EPAM, Netherlands
4. Katherine Isbister, University of California Santa Cruz, United States
5. Elizabeth Churchill, Google, United States
6. Aaron Quigley, CSIRO’s Data 61, Australia
7. Kaisa Väänänen, Tampere University, Finland
8. Marisol Wong-Villacres, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador

Competition Reviewers

The following reviewers from across the CHI community were convened to discuss finalists’ presentations and select the finalist:

• Alan Angeluci, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
• Syed Arshad, Data61, CSIRO, Sydney, NSW, Australia
• Mark Billinghurst, Data61, CSIRO, Auckland, New Zealand
• Alessandro Bozzon, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
• Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom
• Laura Cabrera-Quiros, Costa Rican Institute of Technology, Cartago, Costa Rica
• Gustavo Calixto, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
• Lamogha Chiazor, IBM Research, Hursley, United Kingdom,
• Elizabeth Churchill, Google LLC, San Francisco, California, United States
• César Collazos, Universidad del Cauca, Popayán, Colombia
• Benjamin Cowan, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
• Cleidson de Souza, UFPA, Belem, PA, Brazil
• Philip Doyle, IBM, Dublin, Ireland
• Sindhu Kiranmai Ernala, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• Thomas Eskridge, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida, United States
• Jeanette Falk, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
• Juliana França, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• André Freire, Universidade Federal de Lavras, Lavras, MG, Brazil
• Julian Frommel, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
• Laura Sanely Gaytán-Lugo, Universidad de Colima, Colima, Mexico
• David Geerts, KU Leuven Digital Society Institute, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
• Carla Griggio, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark
• Ridhima Gupta, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• Jesus Gutiérrez, Grupo de Tratamiento de Imágenes, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
• Valeria Herskovic, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
• Katherine Isbister, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, United States
• Matt Jones, Swansea University, Swansea, United Kingdom
• Esther Kang, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
• Keeheon Lee, Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
• Minha Lee, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
• Jie Li, Global Research Institute, EPAM, Hoofddorp, Netherlands
• Eddy Zexin Liang, Apple Inc. (AIML), Seattle, Washington, United States
• Gustavo Lopez, University of Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica
• Leticia Machado, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
• Sven Mayer, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany
• Gonzalo Mendez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
• Pejman Mirza-Babaei, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
• Michael Muller, IBM Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• Philippe Palanque, ICS-IRIT, University Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III, Toulouse, France
• Roberto Pereira, Federal University of Paraná, Brazil
• Pablo Perez, XR Lab, Nokia, Madrid, Spain
• Mark Perry, Brunel University, United Kingdom
• Aaron Quigley, Science Director and Deputy Director, CSIRO’s Data61, Sydney, NSW, Australia
• Amon Rapp, University of Turin, Torino, Italy
• Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, MIT, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• Kamila Rodrigues, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
• Asreen Rostami, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden
• Luciana Salgado, Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Saiph Savage, Northeastern University, Boston, United States
• Stephan Schlögl, The Entrepreneurial University, Innsbruck, Austria
• Kelsea Schulenberg, Clemson University, South Carolina, United States
• Harish Varma Siravuri, Northern Illinois University, Illinois, United States
• Jean Song, DGIST, Daegu, Republic of Korea
• Arthur Theil, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom
• Kaisa Väänänen, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
• Paula Veske, Imec and Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
• Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy, Samsung, London, United Kingdom
• Marisol Wong-Villacres, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Guayaquil, Ecuador
• Chengyuan Xu, University of California, California, United States
• Cheng Yao, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
• Hye Jun Youn, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, United States
• Xinjia Yu, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

After the Conference

The first-place winners from each category will advance to the ACM Grand Finals of the Student Research Competition where the winners of several ACM conferences compete for more prizes and recognition. Accepted Student Research Competition abstracts will be distributed in the CHI Conference Extended Abstracts. They will be placed in the ACM Digital Library, where they will remain accessible to thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide.

Frequently asked questions

Can I submit to the Student Research Competition and submit the same work in parallel with other tracks (e.g., Late-breaking work)?

For each work, authors must choose only one track and submit their submissions to a single track. Any concurrent submissions must be declared and should follow ACM policies on Redundant Publication or Self-Plagiarism. Any duplicate submissions across tracks will be rejected.

Can high school students submit to Student Research Competition?

Unfortunately, no. CHI Student Research Competition follows ACM Student Research Competition rules that limits the participants to undergraduate and graduate students.

Can I reuse the content of my Student Research Competition paper in my future paper?

The copyright of the content in the Extended Abstracts is typically retained by the authors, not assigned to the ACM. Thus, the authors may reuse their content.

Suppose the authors plan to reuse the content as a part of their future paper. In that case, we recommend reaching out to the paper chairs or editors of the target venue to clarify the re-publishability early on. Their decision will depend on the policies at the time of your future submission. For the CHI conferences, relevant policies are the ACM policies on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions, Guidelines and Criteria for Evaluation of Submissions for ACM Publications, and Policy on Plagiarism, Misrepresentation, and Falsification.

According to these policies, as of 2024, material published in a semi-archival, widely disseminated publication, such as the CHI Extended Abstracts, should not be republished unless the work has been “significantly” revised. A significant revision would contain at least 25% unpublished material and amplify or clarify the original material. These are subjective measures left to the interpretation of the reviewers and committee members – authors are wise to revise well beyond the Policy guidelines. Whenever submitting material that has partially appeared in a widely disseminated publication, it is good practice to cite the prior publication and explicitly state the differences between the new and prior material.