The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). CHI – pronounced 'kai' – annually brings together researchers and practitioners from all over the world and from diverse cultures, backgrounds, and positionalities, who have as an overarching goal to make the world a better place with interactive digital technologies.

CHI 2022 is structured as a Hybrid-Onsite full conference from April 30–May 5 in New Orleans, LA.

Categories
Hybrid Conference

Allyship Crash Course, Quiz, and Fireside Chat

Allyship Crash Course, Quiz, and Fireside Chat

This ACM sigCHI 2022’s Allyship team is made up of Rina R. Wehbe, PhD (She/Her), Siobhan Day Grady, PhD (She/Her), and Christine Bauer PhD (She/Her).

We continued the initiatives created last year by Rina R. Wehbe as the Diversity Allyship Co-Chair of ACM SIGCHI 2021 Globalization Diversity and Inclusion (GDI) team with Nitesh Goyal, Maria Wolters, and Kirsten Ellis by maintaining and extending the YouTube Allyship Crash Course from 2021 for 2022.

In addition, we have also created a to accompany the Crash Course. The quiz is intended to highlight some key points about Allyship based on the YouTube Allyship Crash Course. We decided to keep the quiz at a manageable length, as a result not all issues are highlighted. Instead, please treat this as another milestone on your own personal journal of Allyship to help you think about what it really means to be an ally. Use this form to get credit for passing the quiz, so you remember that you reached this personal milestone.

On Wednesday, May 4, 2022, at 14:15 – 15:30 (New Orleans, LA, local time), we will have the Allyship Fireside Chat. For the details (including the time in your timezone and the on-site location), have a look at the program: https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2022/program/session/82030.

In this fireside chat, we will discuss what it means to be an ally and to create a supportive CHI community. We aim at generating discussion and suggestions on how to be a supportive community member. Join the discussion with Rina R. Wehbe and invited discussants. You can use The Hub to post your questions.

Discussants

Photo of Karen Holtzblatt

Karen Holtzblatt
(she/her)

Karen Holtzblatt is a thought leader, industry speaker, and author. As co-founder and CEO of InContext Design, Karen is the visionary behind Contextual Inquiry and Contextual Design, a user-centered design approach used by universities and companies worldwide. Recognized as a leader in requirements and design, Karen has been twice honored by the ACM SIGCHI. Karen is a member of the CHI Academy and the first recipient of the Lifetime Award for Practice presented in recognition of her impact on the field. Karen is also the Executive Director of WITops, a non-profit dedicated to understanding the issues faced by women in tech and finding practical interventions to retain women and help them thrive. The @Work Experience Framework identifies the six experiences women need in their everyday work experiences. WITops volunteer teams have also developed tested intervention techniques to encourage these experiences available at WITops.org. Karen has over 30 years’ experience presenting at conferences, coaching product teams, and advising universities on their HCI training.


Photo of Nazanin Andalibi

Nazanin Andalibi, PhD
(she/her/hers)

Nazanin Andalibi, PhD (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research interests are in social computing and human-computer interaction. She examines the interplays between marginality and technology in sociotechnical contexts ranging from social media to artificial intelligence. She is committed to equity and justice in her research, teaching, mentoring, and service activities. She is also a member of the SIGCHI CARES team.


Photo of Christina Harrington

Christina Harrington
(she/her)

I am a designer and qualitative researcher who focuses on understanding and conceptualizing technology experiences that support health and wellness among older adults and individuals with disabilities. My research employs design as a catalyst for health equity and socially responsible technology experiences. I explore concepts of health through community-based participatory design and co-creation, considering health management as a sociotechnical experience. I believe that constructs of identity and social positioning impact our interactions with technology, including individual access to online information, the relevance of certain systems in our everyday lives, and the ways we accept certain interventions. Through participatory research methods I explore constructs of empowerment and access among communities marginalized along multiple dimensions of identity (age, race, ethnicity, income, class). I am an Assistant Professor in the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where I also have a courtesy appointment in the School of Design. I am also the Director of the Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab.


Photo of Nitesh Goyal

Nitesh Goyal
(He/Him)

Tesh leads and manages Responsible AI Tools user research efforts at Google Research, and is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU. His works have been published at CHI, and CSCW and have received two best paper honorable mention awards at these venues. Tesh has been actively involved in the program and organization committees of multiple ACM SIGCHI conferences at various levels; including Globalization, Diversity and Inclusion efforts at CHI over the past years, and will serve as the Tech Program Co-Chair for CHI 2023.

Categories
In-person conference

Presenter Update – Mac Computers

Presenter Update – Mac Computers

It was brought to our attention today that IN PERSON presenters that have Mac computers with Monterey operating systems have encountered issues when presenting. If you have a Mac with the Monterey operating system please bring your presentation on a thumb drive that can be plugged into our host computer onsite. Alternatively, if you do not have a thumb drive or cannot locate one prior to your session, you must arrive early to your session to connect with your AV tech to transfer your presentation to them.

General Reminders:

  • Please show up to your session 30 minutes in advance
  • Make sure your computer battery is charged
  • Bring your device charger and any applicable adapters with you

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the CHI Virtual Team at chivirtual@executivevents.com.

Categories
Accessibility Hybrid Conference

Outstanding Access Issues with Hubb

Outstanding Access Issues with Hubb

While accessibility concerns played a huge role in choosing the digital platform for CHI 2022 and the accessibility chairs working tirelessly with Hubb to improve their system, we have not managed to have all identified issues ready in time for the conference. We do continue to check for and identify issues, and also improve the system where we can—please let us know if you encounter errors. We present here the list of outstanding issues so that attendants may identify how this potentially impacts their participation and contact the accessibility chairs to identify possible work-arounds.

  • General Issues
    • Generally viewing on a small screen or increasing the font for readability will result in text running off the page, which isn’t scrollable to be read, and other page elements appear to overlap.
  • Making appointments with others
    • The ordering of elements is confusing when scheduling meetings and on the message pages.
    • Meeting boxes act as buttons and the ‘+ Select’ button seems to be the same. It seems like it doesn’t matter where you click to get to the next screen, and for a screen reader it just mentions the larger box is the button.
    • The send invite button is at the top of the interface (next to the button labeled “select”), before the user enters the meeting details.
    • The cancel meeting option, though is activatable with a screen reader, does not announce itself as a link or a button unless it is pressed for the first time. After the first press, it announces itself as a link. This could result in the users assuming that the control is inaccessible.
    • When using the schedule an online meeting feature (the flow that lets us select one of pre-created zoom rooms), and selecting a room:
      • NVDA announces “table with 0 rows and 0 columns” when going through the rooms.
      • When going through each room, NVDA announces “button button”, 20, and “yes” or “no”. It is unclear what this information was mapping to.
  • Welcome Page
    • The settings icon on the teaser video can’t be selected using VO(control+option)+Space.
    • There is an H2 heading saying “Welcome To” but nothing else. This H2 heading is also above an H1 heading which says “CHI 2022”.
    • There are a bunch of links labeled “resized” after the text “FemWork: Critical Pivot towards design for inclusive labor features” in the main page.
  • Photobooth
    • When I navigate to the main content page it say “frame 0, main”. Participants then have to go into the frame before they can explore content.
    • The CHI logo within the frame has confusing alt text “Snapbar” rather than mentioning it is the CHI logo.
    • There’s a link with the text “here”. It should be more descriptive.
  • CHI Community
    • The heading in the main window goes from H2 to H1.
  • Program Page
    • There is an “add to schedule” clickable item in addition to the button that says “Add to schedule.” Same for remove.
    • In the program view that has multiple sessions (on or after May 2), each paper is tagged with a heading level 3. However, there is no such annotation for sessions, making it hard to jump between sessions.
  • Posters and Demos
    • There seems to be an unlabelled or empty link after each authors(s).
  • Notifications
    • Notifications message isn’t easy to access using a screen reader on mobile.
  • Mobile Use
    • When tapping through homepage, voiceover on mobile reads menus that aren’t visible because they are hidden behind the burger menu
Categories
Hybrid Conference

How to Hybrid at CHI

How to Hybrid at CHI

All of academia are all still figuring out what makes an effective hybrid conference. For CHI2022, we decided early on that there was no one platform or single channel where everyone would interact. While we are pushing the conference content through Hubb, we wanted to try a multi-pronged strategy for the other major activity of any conference – the social interaction.

Discord: If you are registered for the conference, you can join the CHI2022 Discord channel, where there are channels for every room at the conference, for seeking friends, for chatting about broader CHI issues and whatever else you’d like.

Twitter: Does any conference live without the tweet these days? There is always the #chi2022 conference hashtag, and the @acm_chi account to follow. Keep up-to-date on the latest drama! 😉 Our social media team is anxious to elevate you! Use #CHI2022nola for in-person experience what we should retweet and #CHI2022web for an online experience what we should retweet. Student volunteers use #CHI2022SV for their perspective on the conference.

LinkedIn: Yes, *that* LinkedIn. We have a CHI conference page on LinkedIn where we will share information (https://www.linkedin.com/company/80328897) and a CHI LinkedIn Group (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12250153/) for you to follow.

Instagram: We want you to share your pictures of how you view CHI! Using the #chi2022 hashtag, share you set up at home, or your experience in New Orleans. Follow our account at https://www.instagram.com/acm_chi/.

Facebook: For the classic, vanilla version of CHI, there is the CHI conference page (https://www.facebook.com/acmchi). If you also like to live dangerously, there’s CHI Meta (https://www.facebook.com/groups/834637469921428).

Use one, use them all! If you are in New Orleans, or anywhere else in the world we want to see your pictures, how you’re experiencing CHI2022. We look forward to interacting with you on social media!

Categories
General Program

Equity & Justice Initiatives at CHI 2022

Equity & Justice Initiatives at CHI 2022

CHI 2022 is committed to creating an equitable, just, and accessible environment that is safe for everyone to conduct their professional meet-ups. This accounts for both virtual and in-person parts of CHI 2022. Here, you’ll find an overview of those efforts. In case you have any questions, issues or requests not covered here, please contact Christina Harrington and Katta Spiel at equity@chi2022.acm.org.

Accessibility

The Accessibility chairs (Dhruv Jain, Garreth Tigwell, Zainab AlMeraj, Venkatesh Potluri and Kotaro Hara) work towards ensuring that different physical and digital access needs among the committee, presenters, and attendees are met swiftly and adequately. However, beyond a notion of making CHI ADA compliant, we strive towards building a welcoming environment for CHI attendees and will specifically attend to how we may create spaces attuned to disability culture(s). You can find out more about our efforts or reach the chairs at accessibility@chi2022.acm.org.

Family

The Family chairs (Pamela Gibbs and Annika Wolf) facilitate options for attendees to participate in the conferences with their children. They have provided a resource list of potential activities for families in New Orleans and are available to you at family@chi2022.acm.org.

Social Justice Events

Social Justice Event chairs (Minha Lee, Patrick Gage Kelley, and Rua Williams) have planned activities and meet-ups oriented toward addressing Social Justice issues more generally. The two sessions happen on Monday (Social Justice 1: Towards a Collective Manifesto https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2022/program/session/81226) and Tuesday (Social Justice 2: The Intersection of Allyship and Social Justice https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2022/program/session/81227). Feel free to contact them in case of questions at socialjustice@chi2022.acm.org.

Global Inclusion & Equity

To decrease the barriers of access for communities around the world, the Global Inclusion & Equity chairs (Annu Sible Prabhakar, Cuauhtémoc Rivera-Loaiza, Eiad Yafi, Jones Yeoba, and Marisol Wong-Villacres) organize the Global Plaza, providing opportunities for our global communities to lower barriers to participation and support networking efforts. You can contact them at global@chi2022.acm.org.

Sustainability

The Sustainability chairs (Parisa Eslambolchilar, Jason Jacques, Pedro Reynolds-Cuellár, and Kristin Williams) have advised the conference on purchasing decisions, hybrid conferencing, carbon offsetting, and collect data to shape CHI’s environmental impact for the better in both the short and long term. If you have any questions or suggestions, leave them at sustainability@chi2022.acm.org.

Allyship

Finally, the Allyship chairs (Siobahn Day Gray, Rina Wehbe, and Christine Bauer) have established our Policies against Discrimination and Harassment, further developed the allyship crash course and organised a fireside chat on allyship. Any requests or further input and info on how you can support these efforts can be garnered by contacting them at allyship@chi2022.acm.org.

Additionally, the following SIGCHI CARES representatives are present at CHI 2022:
In Person: Rosanna Bellini, Nazanin Andalibi, Stevie Chancellor
Online: Michael Muller, Helena Mentis, Andrea Parker, Rina R. Wehbe

Categories
General Program

How Does CHI Happen?

How Does CHI Happen?

As we move into the conference, we thought it would be interesting to give a peek behind the curtain and describe some of the work that it takes to get CHI done. Especially this year, CHI is a big and complex beast.

How did it end up in New Orleans?

Locations for the conference are chosen by the CHI Steering Committee (https://chi.acm.org/). The SC is comprised of former general chairs, technical program chairs, papers chairs and a representative from SIGCHI Access. They have already done a long blog post (https://chi.acm.org/what-is-the-site-selection-process-for-chi-conferences/) on how site selection happens. Key for us, the site is chosen well before any volunteers are recruited for the organizing committee.

Cliff was there for that decision, and there were lots of great reasons to pick New Orleans. UIST had recently had a successful conference there. The convention center was more than capable of meeting our needs. The site is relatively inexpensive compared to others. And NOLA is one of the US’s great cities.

How do General Chairs get picked?

Being a General Chair for CHI is a tough gig. When the Steering Committee is picking General Chairs, they are looking for people with long experience with the conference, or with other leadership roles successfully completed in SIGCHI. For this year, they chose Cliff, and he asked Simone to partner up with him. When thinking about the team, you want a series of good components in place. Both members should be experienced, and it’s helpful if they have complementary experiences. It’s helpful if they come different research areas, or represent different groups in SIGCHI (across a wide variety of dimensions). And of course, they should hopefully work well together.

General chairs have to be approved by the CHI Steering Committee and the SIGCHI Executive Committee. Cliff and Simone have been working on CHI2022 since January 2020.

What do General Chairs do? In describing this to our own team, we often joke that our biggest role is to be in charge of the budget. That’s a big job, especially this year when there were so many unknowns introduced by the pandemic and our hybrid conference. Another important role is to solicit the rest of the large crew of volunteers needed to make the conference run. We interact most closely with the vendors, writing statements of work, interviewing vendors, selecting them, working with them on their many aspects of the conference and deciding on the “experience” elements of the conference with them. Finally, it’s our job to balance all of the needs of the conference, meeting as many of them as we can with the budget we have. Oh, and we pick the keynotes!

How do Technical Program Chairs get picked?

The TPC role is huge. They manage all of the technical content of the conference. Every piece of content we have flows through them. They set policies, work with the chairs of the different programs in CHI, set the schedule for the conference, and work on all of the technical systems that comprise our back end, like PCS and QOALA.

In picking TPCs, you want people who have shown strong leadership in multiple roles in CHI or other SIGCHI activities. Technical expertise is a plus. In general, they have to be able to communicate effectively with a massively distributed team, resolve structural and individual issues quickly and effectively and work with all other aspects of the program to make sure the content matches the overall goals of the conference. TPCs are proposed by the General Chairs, and also have to be approved by the Steering Committee and the SIGCHI Executive Committee.

How do the Equity, Justice and Accessibility Chairs get picked?

This year, we created a new role for EJA chairs. This is in response to some discussions we’ve had for the past four years about equity issues, and when it is best to address them. The short answer is: the earlier the better. Therefore we wanted to have the EJA chairs as part of our planning process from the very beginning, and part of every decision making meeting.

We wanted EJA chairs who had long experience advocating for Equity and Justice in CHI and SIGCHI activities. We were looking for people who had shown leadership on these issues, and could help shape equitable practices.

The EJA chairs attend all of the meetings with the GCs and TPCs, which also includes many of our vendors. They lead a large team of additional volunteers with specific remits like accessibility, sustainability, allyship, family inclusion and more. They have helped shape many of the services and practices we have at the conference this year.

How do Papers Chairs get picked?

The Papers Chairs are in charge of the Papers program, which generates a good amount of content for the conference. Because of the complexity of the role, Papers Chairs are proposed by the TPCs, and have to be approved by the Steering Committee and Executive Committee. Papers chairs are often selected from existing Sub Committee Chairs, since that group has the most experience with the CHI Papers reviewing processes. This year, Steve was willing to carry over from having been a chair in 2021, creating continuity between years as well. The Papers chairs select and manage the Sub Committee chairs, who in turn select and manage Associate Chairs, who then select and manage external reviewers. It’s a massive undertaking, and we can’t thank this group enough.

How do the other chairs get picked?

The rest of the organizing committee was solicited via an open call for volunteers. We did that this year because we wanted to avoid over-depending on volunteers with whom we already had familiarity – which can lead people to have trouble breaking into CHI leadership roles. Almost all of our roles (about 120 people) were selected from this list of people who answered the open call. These selections were made by the GCs, TPCs and EJA chairs. This has enabled us to have many people who are leading a CHI team for the first time, which we think is a fantastic outcome.

How did you decide to have a hybrid conference?

Hooboy, Covid. As we all know, the past two years of CHI have been extremely affected by the pandemic. This year, we were also strongly affected, and at different points in our organizing over the last two years, it was really uncertain what the world would look like when the conference started.

With a lot of feedback from the community, we persisted in planning for an in-person CHI, but knew we would have to offer a strong online option for attending as well. The phrase we used often in our meetings was “no second class experiences” to guide our commitment to making both modes of CHI attendance as meaningful as we could make them.

There were a lot of unanticipated challenges to running a hybrid conference. We had to up our AV delivery considerably, and spent a lot of time talking to AV companies who would make an effective partner for us. Finding the right online platform was surprisingly challenging given the mix of needs that we have. Really, overall, it’s like planning two massive conferences at the same time. The future of hybridity for CHI will be an active conversation in coming years.

What does an average week look like in organizing?

Things definitely change by time. In the few months leading up to the conference, the General Chairs have 8-10 meetings a week with different teams. The entire “executive team” meets twice a week – which includes our TPCs, GCs, EJA chairs, chairs assistants, vendors, the ACM and whomever else can make it depending on the agenda. We meet separately with different vendors to talk virtual conference set up, food and beverage decisions, keynote preparation, AV set ups or whatever else needs to happen. We use Basecamp for most of our organizing, and respond to several hundred Basecamp messages a week. It’s a lot of communication, consensus building, decision making and listening as different issues arise.

CHI is a major enterprise that requires (considering all of the people who volunteered their time reviewing) thousands of people to make happen. Our fervent hope is that both the in-person and online event are meaningful for everyone attending. Our tagline is “Cultivating Communities” and the appropriate work we’ve done is to use all of the tools at our disposal to interact with, listen to, and work with the different communities that make up the CHI Conference. We hope to see you either in NOLA, or online, in just a couple of weeks.

Categories
Hybrid Conference

February Site Visit Report

February Site Visit Report

This week, Cliff Lampe (General Chair), Ihudiya Finda Williams (Assistant to the General Chair), and Ayman Shamma (Technical Program Chair) traveled to New Orleans for a site visit supported by our support team from Executive Events. In between bites of New Orleans cuisine, we managed a lot of planning. Other members of the organizing team participated in spirit, supporting us at a distance and pre-loading us with good questions to bring to the meeting.

Cliff, Finda and Ayman at the New Orleans Convention Center.

Cliff, Ihudiya Finda, and Ayman at the New Orleans Convention Center.

The main thing we do at this visit is walk the site, and make sure we assign different rooms to different tasks. We want to make sure that we have rooms for things like religious observance, sensory breaks, childcare, operations – and of course technical content. We meet with the staff of the convention center to go over details like Internet access, sustainability practices, health and safety, and much more.

Ayman sitting in front of digital signage that says 'CHI22.'

Ayman sitting in front of digital signage that says “CHI22.”

While we are finalizing a couple of details on the experience, our goal has been to create great experiences for both in-person and online attendees. This means planning around AV and volunteer effort to help make sure all content is streamed in the way that ties together the two experiences. While we know there will be stumbles, we know the strong commitment of this community can carry us forward.

Workshops and courses are currently listed in their mode on the site. The solution we are working towards for the experience is to have live, synchronous sessions for both presenters and attendees for the technical content. Keynotes will present at the conference, with a livestream being simultaneously broadcast for remote viewers. As always, content will be made available on the SIGCHI YouTube channel as soon as it can be processed as well.

Ayman at the theater where keynotes will be presented.

Ayman at the theater where keynotes will be presented.

There are more details we are working hard to sort out, and more information coming soon. We hope to see you either in New Orleans or online to enjoy all of the work of the authors, reviewers, and volunteers who strive to make CHI happen during such turbulent times.