Smart devices have pervaded every aspect of humans’ daily lives, with an increasing number of personal devices such as smartphone, tablets, watches, smart speakers, and laptops.With this emerging diverse multi-device ecology of smart devices, it remains challenging for users to best utilize devices for different tasks, partially due to inconsistent UI styles, unclear coordination, varying fidelity, lack of understanding intent, or limited data sharing and security. Therefore, in this workshop we want to address challenges for redesigning the UX tailored to multi-device ecosystems, to enhance the user experience and leverage new opportunities for cross-device UX design.
This workshop aims to serve as a meeting point for worldwide researchers of multiple fields including HCI, ubiquitous computing, AI, physiology etc. to share new ideas and experiences, discuss about the challenges and explore future directions related to distributed UX.
As I noted in my “Introduction to a series of posts on CHI 2021” post, there are many guidelines, policies, procedures etc. one should be aware when chairing a conference. This relates to the ACM SIGCHI Guide on organising and ACM SIGCHI Sponsored conference. If you come across my blog post via a search I must first strongly remind you the guidelines I’m writing about are for those organising an ACM SIGCHI sponsored or co-sponsored conference not an in-cooperation conference. Second, the guidance I’m referring to is intended to supplement the ACM planning guide with extra links and help on topics such as accessibility. Finally, nothing I state in this blog post should be read as official with respect to ACM or SIGCHI or CHI 2021. The ACM policies are dynamic, so to are SIGCHI’s and everything official for CHI 2021 can be found on the CHI 2021 website. In saying that, I hope you find some of the comments below interesting.
In my experience in June of 2021 the ACM SIGCHI Guide on organising and ACM SIGCHI Sponsored conference are guidelines with over 40 sections. Currently the guidelines are a work in progress and it is meant only to supplement the ACM Conference Planning Guide.
This SIGCHI page is best thought of as a help page which is broken down into five sections related to different phases including, starting out inc. the ACM SIGCHI Statement on Inclusiveness agreed by SIGCHI EC (Nov 17, 2015) and SIGCHI Conference Management Committee (Dec 10, 2015)]. site accessibility, accessibility accommodations, visa/travel concerns, venue size etc. are the first and key steps to being inclusive. Along with advice on diversity and inclusion which notes that SIGCHI conferences are now taking steps to increase the participation and success of underrepresented groups in HCI.
The following sections are on, before preliminary approval, general considerations (including accessibility), planning for the conference and what to consider after the conference is over.
If I try to summarise 40 sections, this blog post might end up as long as the guidelines! To me what is important in this document are the many volunteers who poured countless hours into it to help others. I myself know of dozens who helped since 2015 but the information has been building up for decades.
My top ten “interesting and surprising things” you might not know about include:
information on accessibility, site selection and bidding (some like IUI have calls to host, whereas CHI does not issue calls to host CHI, this will be the subject of an *entire* post in itself around site selection in the future),
information on steering committees and chairs,
Statement on Inclusiveness and how this needs to be inter-woven into everything
advice on websites and social media e.g. did you know that every SIGCHI website should have an /access page which brings up information on accessibility?
information on professional staff i.e. never employ someone without discussing it first with the ACM,
what does delegate expectation mean?,
GDPR issues which can be very tricky to deal with and surprise a lot of volunteers e.g. thinking of handing over mailing lists of email addresses to another volunteer? Talk to your steering committee and the ACM first. Privacy matters.
benefits/constraints of being an ACM conference and likewise the benefits/constraints of being SIGCHI sponsored, e.g. did you know SIGCHI provides access to the QOALA system to help you plan your conference and hence host your mobile program?
Re-publication of work in English did you know that “English is considered the international language of ACM SIGCHI and its journals and conferences”,
when you are planning your conference you should think about Bathrooms at conferences e.g. did you know that many SIGCHI volunteers have developed helpful guidelines on All-gender or gender-inclusive bathrooms
Of course, these guidelines are not complete. For example, the section on the ACM Policy Against Discrimination and Harassment which applies to all ACM-related activities notes that those involved in your conference, symposia, meeting must be trained and made aware of this policy and know how to ACT if something is reported. However, since this section was written SIGCHI has developed the SIGCHI CARES program. As a result, when I as a general chair spot this, I send an email to the ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences and let them know this should be updated. You can do the same, if you see something, scroll to the end and you will find a link so you can send helpful feedback. e.g. “Managed by Conferences”
I’m going to write a series of short blog posts and videos about the policies, process, terms, bylaws, best practice guides and procedures relating to organising CHI 2021.
The general chairs sit and report to the CHI Steering Committee(SC) which has 7 Policies and Processes and a set of CHI Steering Committee Terms (with a Core to CHI document) and a set of Members.
Next, the CHI SC report to the SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) and it has 4 core policies, 9 conference policies, 1 advice guide on organising a conference with links to other guides e.g. videos or all gender bathrooms and links to templates for conference series handbook and conference handbook and it’s all governed by the SIGCHI bylaws.
Above that you have the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) with 18 ACM Publications policies e.g “ACM Policy on Reviewer Anonymity” or “ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions”, 5 general policies e.g. Travel Policy and Procedure for ACM Volunteers or ACM Privacy Policy (on the right), 3 best practice guides e.g. remote participation (bottom right of link above), guidelines and procedures, 17 ACM bylaws – e.g. ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct and finally the crucially important SIG Conference Planning Guide with 61 sections.
This post is just to signpost you and as I add in new posts in the weeks and months ahead I’ll come back and revise this points with pointers.
A couple of years ago I organised with others a CHI SIG on Visions and Visioning. To support this we built a Wiki to collect all the videos (which you can see here). I’ve been using the collection to support my HCI teaching and now I’m placed all the youtube videos into one playlist.
Many of the videos are only a few minutes but there is the occasional hour long video included.
We are organizing with other colleagues a workshop at the CHI 2013 the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris in April 2013 called Blended Interaction: Envisioning Future Collaborative Interactive Space.
I’ve been asked to be an Associate Chair for the he 31st ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013). I’m looking forward to serving in this role.
