FY 2022 Annual Report

SIGCHI Annual Report for 2021-2022

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 successfully survived the worst of the pandemic with relatively small financial dents. The SIG is continuing to offer financial support for attending its conferences, prioritizing those with financial need. 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. Moving forward, the SIG will work to maintain this financial health and engagement, while encouraging conferences to provide a hybrid option for attendees.

2. Efforts related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) 

Continuing post-pandemic efforts, we have sustained the SIGCHI Development Fund and the Gary Marsden Travel Awards, particularly in support of virtual and hybrid events and participation. We set up the Sustainability Committee to foster a culture of social-environmental sustainability across the community. The committee has developed objectives, including sharing knowledge, setting targets and monitoring performance, recognizing and incentivizing sustainable practices and activities, among others. 

We have also developed a communications strategy that is focused on ensuring that the SIG and the EC are more welcoming and transparent, and that community members are aware of EC activities. Part of this strategy is having an open meetings process, where we hold recorded open sessions with community members to enable community engagement on important topics, as well as accessibility of these meetings to those who were not able to attend. We have maintained the Voices of SIGCHI Medium publication, featuring regular blog posts, in an effort to bring together diverse voices from different parts of the world. 

With SIGCHI turning 40, we have begun efforts to think about the future of the community and inform the formation of Futuring SIGCHI, an initiative modeled after ACM’s Future of Computing Academy, aimed at supporting early career involvement in the SIG and piloting of creative community projects. 

We continue the work of SIGCHI CARES, 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. The committee has continued to develop and conduct outreach to the community, with the aim of committee members serving as CARES representatives at each individual SIGCHI conference. 

To serve the EC’s larger commitment to engage and nurture SIGCHI activities globally, we will be organizing a SIGCHI-sponsored research symposium “HCI & Friends” in Mumbai, India, scheduled to take place before the EC’s quarterly meeting. This is part of a series of initiatives we will be supporting to engage growing HCI communities across the world.   

3. Awards and Recipients

SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award Yvonne Rogers

SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award  Steven Pemberton 

SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award Geraldine Fitzpatrick 

SIGCHI Social Impact Award Liz Gerber Jennifer Mankoff Aaditeshwar Seth

SIGCHI Academy Mark Billinghurst  Tanzeem Choudhury  Aniket Kittur Amy J. Ko Norbert A. Streitz Jaime Teevan Marilyn Tremaine Roel Vertegaal

SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award Aakash Gautam Fred Hohman Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken

4. Significant Papers from the SIG (Best Paper Award Recipients at CHI 2022)

• AirRacket: Perceptual Design of Ungrounded, Directional Force Feedback to Improve Virtual Racket Sports Experiences — Ching-Yi Tsai, I-Lun Tsai, Chao-Jung Lai, Derrek Chow, Lauren Wei, Lung-Pan Cheng, Mike Y. Chen

• Care Infrastructures for Digital Security in Intimate Partner Violence Papers — Emily Tseng, Mehrnaz Sabet, Rosanna Bellini, Harkiran Kaur Sodhi, Thomas Ristenpart, Nicola Dell

• Causality-preserving Asynchronous Reality — Andreas Rene Fender, Christian Holz

• Designing for the Bittersweet: Improving Sensitive Experiences with Recommender Systems — Caitlin Lustig, Artie Konrad, Jed R. Brubaker

• EmoBalloon - Conveying Emotional Arousal in Text Chats with Speech Balloons — Toshiki Aoki, Rintaro Chujo, Katsufumi Matsui, Saemi Choi, Ari Hautasaari

• Including the Experiences of Physically Disabled Players in Mainstream Guidelines for Movement-Based Games — Liam Mason, Kathrin Gerling, Patrick Dickinson, Jussi Holopainen, Lisa Jacobs, Kieran Hicks

• Interrupting Merit, Subverting Legibility: Navigating Caste In ‘Casteless’ Worlds of Computing — Palashi Vaghela, Steven Jackson, Phoebe Sengers

• Investigating Daily Practices of Self-care to Inform the Design of Supportive Health Technologies for Living and Ageing Well with HIV — Caroline Claisse, Bakita Kasadha, Simone Stumpf, Abigail C Durrant

• Investigating the Tradeoffs of Everyday Text-Entry Collection Methods — André Rodrigues, Hugo Nicolau, André R.B. Santos, Diogo Branco, Jay Rainey, David Verweij, Jan David Smeddinck, Kyle Montague, Tiago Guerreiro

• Jury Learning: Integrating Dissenting Voices into Machine Learning Models — Mitchell L. Gordon, Michelle S. Lam, Joon Sung Park, Kayur Patel, Jeff Hancock, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Michael S. Bernstein

• Math Augmentation: How Authors Enhance the Readability of Formulas using Novel Visual Design Practices — Andrew Head, Amber Xie, Marti Hearst

• Meander Coil++: A Body-scale Wireless Power Transmission Using Safe-to-body and Energy-efficient Transmitter Coil — Ryo Takahashi, Wakako Yukita, Tomoyuki Yokota, Takao Someya, Yoshihiro Kawahara

• Mobile-Friendly Content Design for MOOCs: Challenges, Requirements, and Design Opportunities — Jeongyeon Kim, Yubin Choi, Meng Xia, Juho Kim

• Mouth Haptics in VR using a Headset Ultrasound Phased Array — Vivian Shen, Craig Shultz, Chris Harrison

• Neo: Generalizing Confusion Matrix Visualization to Hierarchical and Multi-Output Labels

• Papers — Jochen Görtler, Fred Hohman, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Donghao Ren, Rahul Nair, Marc Kirchner, Kayur Patel

• Squeezy-Feely: Investigating Lateral Thumb-Index Pinching as an Input Modality

• Papers — Martin Schmitz, Sebastian Günther, Dominik Schön, Florian Müller

• Still Creepy After All These Years: The Normalization of Affective Discomfort in App Use — John S. Seberger, Irina Shklovski, Emily Swiatek, Sameer Patil

• The TAC Toolkit: Supporting Design for User Acceptance of Health Technologies from a Macro-Temporal Perspective — Camille Nadal, Shane McCully, Kevin Doherty, Corina Sas, Gavin Doherty

• Towards Relatable Explainable AI with the Perceptual Process — Wencan Zhang, Brian Y Lim

• Weaving Stories: Toward Repertoires for Designing Things — Doenja Oogjes, Ron Wakkary

• When Confidence Meets Accuracy: Exploring the Effects of Multiple Performance Indicators on Trust in Machine Learning Models — Amy Rechkemmer, Ming Yin

• Zoom Obscura: Counterfunctional Design for Video-Conferencing — Chris Elsden, David Chatting, Michael Duggan, Andrew Carl Dwyer, Pip Thornton

• 3D Printed Street Crossings: Supporting Orientation and Mobility Training with People who are Blind or have Low Vision — Leona M Holloway, Matthew Butler, Kim Marriott

• "I Wanted to See How Bad It Was": Online Self-screening as a Critical Transition Point Among Young Adults with Common Mental Health Conditions — Kaylee Payne Kruzan, Jonah Meyerhoff, Theresa Nguyen, Madhu Reddy, David C. Mohr, Rachel Kornfield

• "It's Kind of Like Code-Switching": Black Older Adults' Experiences with a Voice Assistant for Health Information Seeking — Christina Harrington, Radhika Garg, Amanda Woodward, Dimitri Williams

5. Conference Activity 

SIGCHI-sponsored conferences were conducted in virtual and hybrid formats in 2021-2022.  As opposed to events having to pivot when pandemic conditions worsened, conferences planned to go fully virtual or hybrid from the onset. CHI, our flagship and largest conference, was hybrid for the first time. We have also added to our family of conferences, with COMPASS and CUI becoming SIGCHI-sponsored. 

We held monthly/bimonthly meetings with our Conference Steering Committee Chairs to create and curate resources that they could use and share with their conference General Chairs on topics such as accessibility, hybridity, COVID-19 preparedness, publications, and more. 

We are additionally working to consolidate the conference support fund into the SIGCHI Development Fund, to support conference events and initiatives that need support for community engagement. 

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 communities 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.