FY 2021 Annual Report
SIGCHI Annual Report for 2020-2021
1. The SIG is a healthy and viable organization
SIGCHI continues to be on solid financial ground and our sponsored conferences are running smoothly. The SIG has successfully survived 1.5 years of COVID-19 with relatively small financial dents. In fact, the SIG has been offering financial support for attending its virtual conferences to all members who have sought this support. The involvement of the community in shaping key decisions for the SIG and its conferences is also growing, which is evident from the activity on social media, and through participation across virtual events and initiatives organized by the Executive Committee (EC), as documented below.
2. Efforts related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
Post-pandemic, the SIGCHI Development Fund committee that was led by Neha Kumar (then SIGCHI VP at Large, now SIGCHI President) took on the charge of revising and managing the SIGCHI Development Fund and the Gary Marsden Travel Awards, particularly in support of virtual and hybrid events and participation. It also set up the SIGCHI Latin America Committee to strengthen SIGCHI’s ties and presence in Latin America. Other initiatives launched by the committee included the Community Events and Holiday calendars, aimed at better coordinating information regarding events and holidays across the global SIGCHI community. These allowed SIGCHI members to be more informed of HCI activity in other parts of the world that they could participate in, and also share their cultural and regional constraints for event/conference organizers to be informed. The Voices of SIGCHI Medium publication, featuring regular blog posts, was an effort to bring together diverse voices from different parts of the world. These efforts continue to be developed.
From March to August, 2021, a series of ten Equity Talks was organized on the topics of (1) being global, (2) making SIGCHI accessible, (3) reviewing and mentorship, (4) infrastructures for equity, (5) understanding gender, (6) research and practice, (7) future of SIGCHI, (8) SIGCHI across chapters, (9) making SIGCHI sustainable, and (10) race and SIGCHI. Each of these sessions was recorded, with captioning and sign language support, and the recordings have been uploaded on SIGCHI’s YouTube channel and summarized in blog posts on the SIGCHI Medium publication. Prior to these talks, the Executive Committee also organized a series of Ask-Me-Anything sessions in July-December 2020. These were targeted towards hosting conversations around each of the roles on the EC, so that the community could be more informed of the work of the various EC members. Both sets of EC events have been community-facing virtual events aimed at engaging SIGCHI members in conversations around improving transparency and accountability within the community.
We continue the work of SIGCHI CARES, which was first established in January 2020 to support those who experience discrimination and/or harassment at SIGCHI events, offering them an open and confidential conversation, which, with the affected individual(s)’ consent, we hope to cultivate better awareness of discriminatory dynamics on the part of event organizers and increasing the accountability of conference organizers, event staff, and conference attendees. CARES also works closely with other established allies within the SIGCHI community, such as Allyship. Over the course of 2020-2021, we have expanded our remit to include handling cases around peer reviewing, coercion, and abuse in the publication process. Shaowen Bardzell (then SIGCHI VP at Large) stepped down as the chair of SIGCHI CARES in June 2021 to focus on her new responsibilities as the Executive Vice President on the new SIGCHI Executive Committee. The new co-chairs of SIGCHI CARES are Celine Latulipe and Michael Muller. The SIGCHI CARES committee currently has 11 members.
Related to our broader DEI efforts is the establishment of the Critical and Sustainable Computing paper subcommittee at ACM CHI2021. This subcommittee welcomes HCI research connected to themes of social justice, global sustainability, critical-reflective research practice, artful and aesthetic experiences, and critical computing—all in pursuit of meaningful alternatives to the status quo. The subcommittee is epistemologically pluralistic, welcoming of a range of perspectives, approaches, and contributions that might take interpretivist, empirical, activist, political, ethical, critical, and/or pragmatic approaches to both societal challenges and how HCI research frames itself in relation to them. The roots of the values that underpin this new subcommittee can be extended back to the mid-1970s, with the 1975 Aarhus Decennial Conference focusing on critical computing, and the lively discussion of HCI’s impact on society has grown ever since (the ACM DIS conference series began having Critical Computing as one of the paper subcommittees in 2019). The critical stance of HCI research has been continually sharpened to consider people, our own individual and collective expressions of our humanity and solidarity, as more than just interchangeable cogs in the machine. The Critical and Sustainable Computing subcommittee aspires to support expressions of research that foster deliberative self-awareness and care in the research, design, and development of interactive systems. It engages the broader HCI community’s own contributions—both positive and negative—to concerns such as criticality and ethics in computing, social justice, and climate crisis and by the brave actions of those within computing and beyond who have challenged societies to be more just.
In the second year of our term, we opened two new Adjunct Chair positions to support DEI initiatives: AC for Equity and AC for Accessibility. We recruited two ACs in each role. On the equity front, Adriana Vivacqua took the lead in putting together the SIGCHI Latin America Committee, mentioned above, to help build ties and increase interaction between Latin American groups and the SIGCHI community. This involved reaching out to the community through questionnaires, meetings, and roundtable talks. Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy undertook efforts to learn how our 24 conferences’ steering committees operate, as well as their diverse needs and priorities.
On the accessibility front, a new Vision for an Accessible SIGCHI introduced by ACs Stacy Branham and Soraia Prietch details a strategy for equitable participation of our members with disabilities. Towards meeting this vision, we secured annual contracts with providers of sign language interpreting and real-time human captioning. These services have been used to broaden the reach of our virtual public events, including our widely-viewed Equity Talk video series. We have tripled our dedicated accessibility budget for the 2021-22 fiscal year and formed an Accessibility Committee to expand support for accessibility initiatives going forward.
3. Awards and Recipients
SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award Scott Hudson, Carnegie Mellon University
SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award John Richards, IBM Research Division
SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award Wendy Kellogg, Retired Phillippe Palanque, Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier
SIGCHI Social Impact Award Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) Andy Dearden, Sheffield Hallam University Juan Gilbert, University of Florida
SIGCHI Academy Maneesh Agrawala, Stanford University Ann Blandford, University College London Jeff Heer, University of Washington Jonathan Lazar, University of Maryland Fabio Paterno, CNR-ISTI Rosalind Picard, MIT Fernanda Viegas, Google Allison Woodruff, Human-computer Interaction Researcher
SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award Josh Andres, IBM Research-Australia Arunesh Mathur, Princeton University Qian Yang, Cornell University
4. Significant Papers from the SIG (Best Paper Award Recipients at CHI 2021)
What Do Hackathons Do? Understanding Participation in Hackathons Through Program Theory Analysis — Jeanette Falk, Gopinaath Kannabiran, Nicolai Brodersen Hansen
Falx: Synthesis-Powered Visualization Authoring — Chenglong Wang, Yu Feng, Rastislav Bodik, Isil Dillig, Alvin Cheung, Amy J Ko
"Can I Not Be Suicidal on a Sunday?": Understanding Technology-Mediated Pathways to Mental Health Support — Sachin R Pendse, Amit Sharma, Aditya Vashistha, Munmun De Choudhury, Neha Kumar
CapContact: Super-resolution Contact Areas from Capacitive Touchscreens — Paul Streli, Christian Holz
RadarNet: Efficient Gesture Recognition Technique Utilizing a Miniaturized Radar Sensor — Eiji Hayashi, Jaime Lien, Nicholas Gillian, Leonardo Giusti, Dave Weber, Jin Yamanaka, Lauren Bedal, Ivan Poupyrev
Screen Recognition: Creating Accessibility Metadata for Mobile Applications from Pixels — Xiaoyi Zhang, Lilian de Greef, Amanda Swearngin, Samuel White, Kyle Murray, Lisa Yu, Qi Shan, Jeffrey Nichols, Jason Wu, Chris Fleizach, Aaron Everitt, Jeffrey P Bigham
LGBTQ Persons' Pregnancy Loss Disclosures to Known Ties on Social Media: Disclosure Decisions and Ideal Disclosure Environments — Cassidy Pyle, Lee Roosevelt, Ashley Lacombe-Duncan, Nazanin Andalibi
Increasing Electrical Muscle Stimulation’s Dexterity by means of Back of the Hand Actuation — Akifumi Takahashi, Jas Brooks, Hiroyuki Kajimoto, Pedro Lopes
Designing Menstrual Technologies with Adolescents — Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Marianela Ciolfi Felice, Madeline Balaam
The Show Must Go On: A conceptual model of conducting synchronous participatory design with children online — Kung Jin Lee, Wendy Roldan, Tian Qi Zhu, Harkiran Kaur Saluja, Sungmin Na, Britnie Chin, Yilin Zeng, Jin Ha Lee, Jason Yip
Building for ‘We’: Safety Settings for Couples with Memory Concerns — Nora McDonald, Helena M. Mentis
Oh, Snap! A Fabrication Pipeline to Magnetically Connect Conventional and 3D-Printed Electronics — Martin Schmitz, Jan Riemann, Florian Müller, Steffen Kreis, Max Mühlhäuser
Getting Ourselves Together: Epistemic Burden and Data-centered Participatory Design Research — Jennifer Pierre, Roderic Crooks, Morgan Currie, Britt Paris, Irene Pasquetto
"Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work": Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI — Nithya Sambasivan, Shivani Kapania, Hannah Highfill, Diana Akrong, Praveen Paritosh, Lora M Aroyo
Resisting the Medicalisation of Menopause: Reclaiming the Body through Design — Marianela Ciolfi Felice, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Madeline Balaam
U!Scientist: Designing for People-Powered Research in Museums — Mmachi God'sglory Obiorah, James K.L. Hammerman, Becky Rother, Will Granger, Haley Margaret West, Michael Horn, Laura Trouille
“Why lose control?” A Study of Freelancers' Perspectives with Gig Economy Platforms — Juan Carlos Alvarez de la Vega, Marta E. Cecchinato, John Rooksby
"That courage to encourage": Participation and Aspirations in Chat-based Peer Support for Youth Living with HIV — Naveena Karusala, David Odhiambo Seeh, Cyrus Mugo, Brandon Guthrie, Megan A Moreno, Grace John-Stewart, Irene Inwani, Richard Anderson, Keshet Ronen
The Ethics of Multiplayer Game Design and Community Management: Industry Perspectives and Challenges — Lucy A. Sparrow, Martin Gibbs, Michael Arnold
Coupling Simulation and Hardware for Interactive Circuit Debugging — Evan Strasnick, Maneesh Agrawala, Sean Follmer
Impact of Task on Attentional Tunneling in Handheld Augmented Reality — Brandon Victor Syiem, Ryan M. Kelly, Jorge Goncalves, Eduardo Velloso, Tilman Dingler
XRgonomics: Facilitating the Creation of Ergonomic 3D Interfaces — João Marcelo Evangelista Belo, Anna Maria Feit, Tiare Feuchtner, Kaj Grønbæk
Heuristic Evaluation of Conversational Agents — Raina Langevin, Ross J Lordon, Thi Avrahami, Benjamin R. Cowan, Tad Hirsch, Gary Hsieh
Clandestino or Rifugiato? Anti-immigration Facebook Ad Targeting in Italy — Arthur Capozzi, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova, Corrado Monti, André Panisson, Daniela Paolotti
The Landscape and Gaps in Open Source Fairness Toolkits — Michelle Seng Ah Lee, Jatinder Singh
Understanding Data Accessibility for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities — Keke Wu, Emma Petersen, Tahmina Ahmad, David Burlinson, Shea Tanis, Danielle Albers Szafir
How to Evaluate Object Selection and Manipulation in VR? Guidelines from 20 Years of Studies — Joanna Bergström, Tor-Salve Dalsgaard, Jason Alexander, Kasper Hornbæk
Designing Interactive Transfer Learning Tools for ML Non-Experts — Swati Mishra, Jeffrey M Rzeszotarski
5. Conference Activity
SIGCHI-sponsored conferences were all conducted in a fully virtual format in 2020-2021. As opposed to events having to pivot when pandemic conditions worsened, most conferences planned to go fully virtual from the onset. This change in the planning process brought a learning curve on best practices for virtual conferences, and the need for increased sharing of experiences with different tools and formats. Andrew Kun, the SIGCHI VP for Conferences, organized a series of panel discussions to facilitate such knowledge sharing. In these panels, members of all SIGCHI-sponsored conference steering committees and organizing committees for upcoming conferences. These virtual panels were received well by the participants, and we will be organizing them regularly in the new EC term (2021-2024).
Through in-depth interviews conducted with several general chairs of SIGCHI conferences, we highlight the following lessons learned for the virtual segments of future conferences:
In the case of hybrid (and potentially all-virtual) conferences, make the shift to online early. Think online-first not virtual-first!
Consider using the virtual conference activities towards radically expanding the conference playing field, attracting those on the peripheries of the conference community. Think global!
No platform is going to be perfect, but combining platforms (e.g., Zoom and Discord) or working with the platform’s team to tailor it to a conference (e.g., OhYay for IMX 2021) might work well.
Be inclusive when it comes to time and time zones. Make sure the (dis)comfort is distributed. Not all of the attendees will ever make all of the sessions. Leave enough room for attendees to tend to their in-person lives.
Invest care and effort into planning social events. Lots can be done remotely, e.g., karaoke events, virtual tours, yoga classes, board games.
Cater to students, who are arguably more impacted by the lack of an in-person experience than senior scholars. Facilitate as many conversations with/for students as possible.
Distribute the costs to recognize that different attendees have different capacities to pay for attending. Use or appeal to SIGCHI resources when possible.
Finally, think people-first! Include CARES representatives, keep open channels for people to reach out, and prioritize participation of new and old members.
Overall, SIGCHI sponsored conferences continue to navigate the current global pandemic with grace, skill and commitment to community and science. Due to the efforts of our volunteer organizers, most of our planned specialized conferences were successfully conducted, and our community remains strong.
6. Special Projects and Non-Conference Programs that Provided Service
See 2 above regarding the following programs:
SIGCHI Development Fund,
Gary Marsden Travel Awards,
SIGCHI Equity Talks, and
SIGCHI CARES.
7. Key Issues Facing SIGCHI
We highlight the key issues facing our SIG below. These are also areas within which we are recruiting adjunct chairs (ACs), or have already, and will be setting up teams to broaden and deepen the focus.
Global/Local: Many members of our EC are committed to growing SIGCHI’s presence as a global entity, with strong local ties and roots. Our VPs at Large and VP Chapters will ensure a strong set of activities and conversations “across borders”. We will focus on introducing new chapters and developing existing ones, creating regional committees in support of building HCI community across relatively less HCI-dense parts of the world.
Awards: We are rethinking our awards programs to ensure that these are more inclusive, and target a more diverse set of nominations than before.
Sustainability: Our AC for sustainability and their team will help SIGCHI shape its response to climate change and environmental collapse by deciding how to cut back on travel as a community, carefully move our activities online, and analyze possible changes our conferences and researchers could take on in support.
Accessibility: Having recently recruited our Accessibility Committee, we will ensure that our conferences, EC and community events, publications, website, etc. are all accessible, and that our membership receives the necessary education to recognize the importance of communicating in ways that are sensitive towards the disabled members in our community.
Volunteering: We will be investing in creating and sustaining leadership and mentorship pipelines for our volunteers, across conference and community roles.
Equity: Challenges in the realm of equity continue and we will ensure that we learn to not only ensure that there is equal representation at all levels throughout the SIG, but that this participation is also equitable, whether we look at marginalization on account of race, gender, class, religion, or any other factor.
Community Support: We have done well in regards to supporting our community through “virtual travel awards” and development funds. Now that we have the mechanisms in place, we look forward to a more directed and inclusive approach to making this support useful and usable for our entire, global membership.
Partnerships: We will be looking to grow our partnerships with a variety of organizations across the board, including practitioner organizations such as UXPA, adjacent research communities such as SIGGRAPH and SIGCAS, and HCI communities in Africa and Asia.