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 get a free SV spot! That means you move off the waitlist, or if you’re already accepted, you can give the spot to a friend (as long as they are also a student). This year the deadline is Friday, February 14, 2020, and your submissions should be sent to svchair@chi2020.acm.org with the subject: T-Shirt Design Contest.

The effect of rebuttals on scores is something that people often want to understand. Jofish Kaye has previously provided some analysis that suggests that although rebuttals move scores for many submissions, they only make a meaningful difference to outcomes for a small number of submissions. In this post we will take another look at this question by looking at scores but also the content of rebuttals themselves.

We started with 3,126 submissions and were left with 2,852 papers needing decisions to be made at the programme committee meeting. Of these, 647 were accepted, 113 are being shepherded and 2,092 were rejected. Shepherding means that a submission needs substantive changes before it meets the threshold for acceptance. These submissions will be ‘shephered’ by an AC to ensure that these changes are made in a way that meets the committee’s expectations. Note that all acceptances are provisional at this stage – changes may still be requested by ACs before accepted papers lose that ‘provisional’ tag.

There were 3126 complete submissions in the Papers track (an increase of 166 or 6% on CHI 2019). Of these, three were withdrawn and 90 were desk rejected for failing to meet submission criteria for the conference: 

• 36 for not keeping to the page limit
• 31 because they were not correctly anonymised
• 12 for plagiarism
• 4 for being under submission elsewhere
• 4 for miscellaneous reasons
• 3 for being out of scope for the conference

A further 148 submissions were quick rejected. This means they were rejected through a quick review process. Associate chairs quick rejected submissions that they felt were sufficiently weak that they did not go through the full peer review process. These papers received a review from an AC to explain the rationale for the quick rejection.

The student volunteer organization is what keeps CHI running smoothly throughout the conference. You must have had student status for at least one semester during the academic year before CHI. We are more than happy to accept undergrad, graduate, and PhD students. We need friendly enthusiastic volunteers to help us out.

The SV lottery is already open at chisv.org and will close on December 12th. Approximately 175 students will be chosen as SVs. All other students who registered will be assigned a position on the waiting list. To sign up for the lottery, please visit chisv.org, select the appropriate conference, and follow the steps to enroll.

Submissions to the Papers track of CHI 2020 closed at the end of last week. The 4067 abstracts registered a couple of weeks ago have turned into 3127 complete submissions. The conference continues to grow: there are 161 more submissions to be considered than last year (2966), an increase of 5%.

Associate Chairs are currently in the process of allocating potential reviewers and dealing with papers that are candidates for early rejection. Last year just under 10% of submissions were early rejected; if a similar proportion are early rejected this year there will be around 2,850 papers to review.

As we approach the first of the main submission deadlines for CHI2020, we thought we’d provide a quick summary of some of the changes happening in the Technical Program for CHI2020.

Templates! As you’re undoubtedly all too aware, last year’s templates created all sorts of problems. We’ve therefore reverted to a version of the CHI2018 templates, but with a few modifications. Please use the templates on the CHI2020 website, accessible here.

By Pernille Bjørn and Shengdong Zhao, CHI2020 papers chairs  

Diversity in the program committee for CHI is important to ensure balanced perspectives and inclusiveness in creating a top tier program displaying excellent research from across the whole CHI community. Setting up the program committee, the Papers chairs for CHI2020 have in particular focused on balancing junior/senior researchers from across the regions of the world and considering gender diversity. We set up a venue for people to volunteer as AC to recruit more junior researchers, but also paid attention to the regional and gender distribution. Below are the numbers and statistics. While we are happy with the line up, there is still more work to be done – please let us know if you have ideas, which can help future CHI conferences to become even more diverse.