FY 2023 Annual Report

SIGCHI Annual Report for 2022-2023

ACM SIGCHI is the leading international community of students, researchers, and professionals interested in research, education, and practical applications of Human-Computer Interaction. The SIG enables its members to create and shape how people interact with technology and understand how technologies impact people’s lives.

1. SIGCHI is a healthy and viable organization.

Now completing 41 years, SIGCHI continues to be on solid financial ground and maintains a healthy membership. The SIG’s sponsored and co-sponsored conferences are running smoothly and the portfolio is growing, including new emerging areas within the research community. Changes in membership demonstrate a growing interest for the SIG and its activities: as of November 2023, SIGCHI counts approximately 5,340 members, almost a 100% increase over the last 2-2.5 years.

Our flagship CHI conference remains the premier venue for HCI research. In April 2023, CHI was held in Hamburg, Germany, and had the largest number of onsite attendees in its history (3,888). There were additionally 782 online attendees. The conference was well attended and well organized, and was recognized for being especially inclusive and sustainable. All attendees, for instance, had access to free public transportation for the duration of the conference, which was widely appreciated.

Our 25 specialized conferences have also been thriving, reviving their communities post the pandemic. Most conferences are continuing to be hybrid, although this comes at significant financial costs and costs regarding volunteering efforts. Conferences are working hard towards being increasingly equitable and bolstering the accessibility, sustainability, safety, and global fronts.

Overall, SIGCHI has successfully survived the COVID-19 pandemic with relatively small financial dents. The SIGCHI Development Fund (SDF) and the Gary Marsden Travel Awards (GMTA), our mechanisms for providing support to our conferences and communities, have been well used in the past years (details below). Broad input of the community towards shaping key decisions for the SIG and its conferences is also growing, evident from activity across social media, and through participation in virtual events and initiatives organized by the Executive Committee (EC).

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

SIGCHI is constantly making strides when it comes to efforts related to DEI. Below we list just a few efforts that our EC members tasked with Community Support, Sustainability, Equity, and Accessibility have been working towards.

This past year, the SIGCHI Development Fund (SDF) has financially supported dozens of events and initiatives focused on the following: equitable participation at conferences, regional community-building, hybrid innovation, accessibility, mentorship, and nurturing new research communities. We have also established guidelines for enabling SDF-funded events and initiatives to better and more easily align with EC priorities of accessibility, safety, sustainability, global participation, equity, and hybrid participation. In Fiscal Year ‘23 (FY23), the SDF supported 34 proposals with USD 206K.

The Gary Marsden Travel Awards (GMTA) program has been supporting reimbursement for childcare expenses, a travel companion ticket, and mobility aids, in order to better support parents and disabled participants. In FY23, the GMTA program supported 245 awardees with USD 480K.

The SIGCHI Sustainability Committee has begun to create a set of resources to support SIGCHI members in their work. This includes an archive of sustainable HCI curricular resources, a blog series disseminating information about how SIGCHI members could bring sustainability into their work, a mailing list that aims to connect those in the community who care about sustainability initiatives in the field, and more.

The SIGCHI Equity Committee is currently preparing material for streamlining safety programming across all conferences and SIGCHI activities. From these documents, we are further devising educational resources and concepts for equity-related volunteer training; programming that is intended to happen twice a year for volunteers interested in acquiring and updating sensitivities regarding safe conduct and support. Additionally, we are in the process of reviewing and streamlining our policies to make them more equitable and applicable to modern technological developments (i.e., Large Language Models).

The SIGCHI Accessibility Committee is creating new conference guidelines for enhancing accessibility of our conferences. We have already established new guidelines for smaller-scale events for which accessibility is a key component. Now, with help of the members of our community and advocacy organizations such as AccessSIGCHI, we are in the process of expanding and enforcing these guidelines for larger conferences. We’ve also continued to cover all accessibility requests that fell outside the budget of our current conferences (e.g., sign language interpreting,real-time captioning), continued our PDF remediation program (taking help of an external vendor to make conference PDFs accessible), and have established a new dedicated EC position for accessibility, the SIGCHI VP for Accessibility. A blog post summarizes our plans and accomplishments.

We have three regional committees: our Asia Committee, Latin America Committee, and Mediterranean Committee. These committees have been set up to foster regional activity and growth of our discipline. These are overseen by our VP at Large (Global) who also ensures that they remain in conversation with each other.

3. Awards and Recipients

SIGCHI gave out the following awards in 2023:

SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award Gregory Abowd

SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award Deborah J. Mayhew

SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award Elizabeth Churchill

SIGCHI Social Impact Award Shaowen Bardzell Munmun De Choudhury Nicola Dell

SIGCHI Academy Hrvoje Benko Marc Hassenzahl Steve Hodges Cliff Lampe Uichin Lee Regan Mandryk Florian “Floyd” Mueller Phoebe Sengers

SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award Megan Hofmann Dhruv “DJ” Jain Kai Lukoff

4. Significant Papers from the SIG (Best Paper Award Recipients at CHI 2023)

These are the Best Paper Award recipients at our flagship conference CHI in 2023:

Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower: A Large-scale Analysis of Patent Citations to HCI Research – Hancheng Cao, Yujie Lu, Yuting Deng, Daniel McFarland, Michael S. Bernstein
Changes in Research Ethics, Openness, and Transparency in Empirical Studies between CHI 2017 and CHI 2022 – Kavous Salehzadeh Niksirat, Lahari Goswami, Pooja S. B. Rao, James Tyler, Alessandro Silacci, Sadiq Aliyu, Annika Aebli, Chat Wacharamanotham, Mauro Cherubini
ChartDetective: Easy and Accurate Interactive Data Extraction from Complex Vector Charts – Damien Masson, Sylvain Malacria, Daniel Vogel, Edward Lank, Géry Casiez
CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context – Joseph Chee Chang, Amy X. Zhang, Jonathan Bragg, Andrew Head, Kyle Lo, Doug Downey, Daniel S Weld
Collaborating Across Realities: Analytical Lenses for Understanding Dyadic Collaboration in Transitional Interfaces – Jan-Henrik Schröder, Daniel Schacht, Niklas Peper, Anita Marie Hamurculu, Hans-Christian Jetter
Contestable Camera Cars: A Speculative Design Exploration of Public AI That Is Open and Responsive to Dispute – Kars Alfrink, Ianus Keller, Neelke Doorn, Gerd Kortuem
DataParticles: Block-based and Language-oriented Authoring of Animated Unit Visualization – Yining Cao, Jane L E, Zhutian Chen, Haijun Xia
Deceptive Design Patterns in Safety Technologies: A Case Study of the Citizen App – Ishita Chordia, Lena-Phuong Tran, Tala June Tayebi, Emily Parrish, Sheena Erete, Jason Yip, Alexis Hiniker
Disentangling Fairness Perceptions in Algorithmic Decision-Making: the Effects of Explanations, Human Oversight, and Contestability. – Mireia Yurrita, Tim Draws, Agathe Balayn, Dave Murray-Rust, Nava Tintarev, Alessandro Bozzon
Envisioning the (In)Visibility of Discreet and Wearable AAC Devices – Humphrey Curtis, Zihao You, William Deary, Miruna-Ioana Tudoreanu, Timothy Neate
Evaluating Large Language Models in Generating Synthetic HCI Research Data: a Case Study – Perttu Hämäläinen, Mikke Tavast, Anton Kunnari
FIDO2 the Rescue? Platform vs. Roaming Authentication on Smartphones – Leon Würsching, Florentin Putz, Steffen Haesler, Matthias Hollick
Full-hand Electro-Tactile Feedback without Obstructing Palmar Side of Hand – Yudai Tanaka, Alan Shen, Andy Kong, Pedro Lopes
Going, Going, Gone: Exploring Intention Communication for Multi-User Locomotion in Virtual Reality – Julian Rasch, Vladislav Dmitrievic Rusakov, Martin Schmitz, Florian Müller
Infrastructuring Care: How Trans and Non-Binary People Meet Health and Well-Being Needs through Technology – Lauren Wilcox, Renee Shelby, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Oliver L. Haimson, Gabriela Cruz Erickson, Michael Turken, Rebecca Gulotta
Investigating the Role of Context in the Delivery of Text Messages for Supporting Psychological Wellbeing – Ananya Bhattacharjee, Joseph Jay Williams, Jonah Meyerhoff, Harsh Kumar, Alex Mariakakis, Rachel Kornfield
Kaleidoscope: A Reflective Documentation Tool for a User Interface Design Course – Sarah Sterman, Molly Jane Nicholas, Janaki Vivrekar, Jessica R Mindel, Eric Paulos
LipLearner: Customizable Silent Speech Interactions on Mobile Devices – Zixiong Su, Shitao Fang, Jun Rekimoto
Paying the Price: When Intimate Partners Use Technology for Financial Harm – Rosanna Bellini
Playing with Feedback: Unpredictability, Immediacy, and Entangled Agency in the No-input Mixing Desk – Tom Mudd
Probing a Community-Based Conversational Storytelling Agent to Document Digital Stories of Housing Insecurity – Brett A. Halperin, Gary Hsieh, Erin McElroy, James Pierce, Daniela Rosner
Rethinking "Risk" in Algorithmic Systems Through A Computational Narrative Analysis of Casenotes in Child Welfare – Devansh Saxena, Erina Seh-Young Moon, Aryan Chaurasia, Yixin Guan, Shion Guha
SAWSense: Using Surface Acoustic Waves for Surface-bound Event Recognition – Yasha Iravantchi, Yi Zhao, Kenrick Kin, Alanson P. Sample
Sensorimotor Simulation of Redirected Reaching using Stochastic Optimal Feedback Control – Eric J Gonzalez, Sean Follmer
Take My Hand: Automated Hand-Based Spatial Guidance for the Visually Impaired – Adil Rahman, Md Aashikur Rahman Azim, Seongkook Heo
The Halting problem: Video analysis of self-driving cars in traffic – Barry Brown, Mathias Broth, Erik Vinkhuyzen
The Nuanced Nature of Trust and Privacy Control Adoption in the Context of Google – Ehsan Ul Haque, Mohammad Maifi Hasan Khan, Md Abdullah Al Fahim
The Walking Talking Stick: Understanding Automated Note-Taking in Walking Meetings – Luke Haliburton, Natalia Bartłomiejczyk, Albrecht Schmidt, Paweł W. Woźniak, Jasmin Niess
Understanding Context to Capture when Reconstructing Meaningful Spaces for Remote Instruction and Connecting in XR – Hanuma Teja Maddali, Amanda Lazar
Understanding Frontline Workers’ and Unhoused Individuals’ Perspectives on AI Used in Homeless Services – Tzu-Sheng Kuo, Hong Shen, Jisoo Geum, Nev Jones, Jason I. Hong, Haiyi Zhu, Kenneth Holstein
Understanding the Benefits and Challenges of Deploying Conversational AI Leveraging Large Language Models for Public Health Intervention – Eunkyung Jo, Daniel A. Epstein, Hyunhoon Jung, Young-Ho Kim
What Do We Mean When We Talk about Trust in Social Media? A Systematic Review – Yixuan Zhang, Joseph D Gaggiano, Nutchanon Yongsatianchot, Nurul M Suhaimi, Miso Kim, Yifan Sun, Jacqueline Griffin, Andrea G Parker
Who Do We Mean When We Talk About Visualization Novices? – Alyxander Burns, Christiana Lee, Ria Chawla, Evan Peck, Narges Mahyar
'Treat me as your friend, not a number in your database': Co-designing with Children to Cope with Datafication Online – Ge Wang, Jun Zhao, Max Van Kleek, Nigel Shadbolt
“My Zelda Cane”: Strategies Used by Blind Players to Play Visual-Centric Digital Games – David Gonçalves, Manuel Piçarra, Pedro Pais, João Guerreiro, André Rodrigues

5. Conference Activity

SIGCHI has a large portfolio of conferences (now 26, including CHI). Below we list some efforts that our EC has been working on to strengthen knowledge sharing practices across our conferences, provide financial support to conferences, and provide guidance on hybrid programming.

5.1 Council of Steering Committees (CSCC)

Following the pandemic, SIGCHI introduced the Knowledge Series in which monthly or bimonthly the VP Conferences works with other EC members to dedicate a meeting slot to a topic that conference leaders and organizers (the CSCC) can get advice on. This, we believe, works better than meeting once a year, since it allows us to address different topics and also reach out to different time zones. These meetings are scheduled on different weekdays and time slots. Examples of topics discussed include: Budgets 101, the ACM Sanctions Database, Pandemic Preparedness of SIGCHI Conferences, Hybrid Conference Formats, Publications, Guidelines for Conferences Leaders, Conference Handbooks, and Overhead. The meetings were well received and attended. We aim to continue this kind of knowledge sharing in the coming years.

Another change was the introduction of a joint CSCC Slack Channel in which we offer a channel for short and quick exchange of conference leaders with each other and the Executive Committee.

We have intensively discussed and introduced a set of Guidelines for SIGCHI-Sponsored and Co-Sponsored Conferences to ensure that our conferences feel better oriented and supported when it comes to organizing our conferences. These guidelines aim to help in steering our conferences, ensure high quality in the leadership and development of our conferences, make the responsibilities of conference leaders transparent, and achieve similar standards of steering and leading in all our 26 SIGCHI conferences.

5.2 SIGCHI Development Fund for Conferences

We have streamlined all our funding activities through the SIGCHI Development Fund as noted above. All funding activities for Community Development, Conferences, and Chapters are now managed by the SDF committee. Conferences are therefore able to request funds for particular activities, depending on how well they align with our priorities around hybridity, global, safety, accessibility, sustainability, and equity.

5.3. In-Person and Hybrid Conferences

We have had intense discussion with conferences around the return to in-person events, particularly on the topic of hybridity. Most conferences are experimenting with different levels of hybrid and have been sharing this with each other. Thus, we have formed a new Hybrid Working Group, which is working on Hybrid Guidelines for Conferences. The idea is to harvest the existing experience from conferences and events and compile these into guidelines of how to run a good hybrid conference. We currently have a set of guidelines for running a low-budget hybrid event, to start with.

6. Special Projects and Non-Conference Programs that Provided Service

Refer to Section 2 regarding:

SIGCHI Development Fund
Gary Marsden Travel Awards
Sustainability Committee

We have also formed the Futuring SIGCHI committee, which supports students and early career professionals in implementing creative pilot projects that expand the offerings and potential of the SIGCHI community, while building community and supporting leadership skills. The committee is working on three projects:

An event for new scholars (first-time conference attendees who have not published before) to build community and get feedback on research; outcomes will include takeaways for reducing barriers to participation for new scholars and a plan for sustainability of the event
An initiative to diversify the knowledge formats used within the SIGCHI community, in order to support the reach and use of knowledge we produce; the initiative will involve community conversations with diverse stakeholders within and outside of the community and outcomes will include best practices for supporting, creating, and disseminating creative formats.
A podcast series on community-building and research in the Global South to expand awareness of the value of HCI globally; outcomes will include the series itself and learning modules drawing on the podcast series.

7. Key Issues Facing SIGCHI

We highlight a few key challenges and areas of growth facing our SIG below. These are some areas within which we have started projects and initiatives and set up committees and working groups.

Making SIGCHI Hybrid: As noted above, we have a Hybrid Working Group led by an Adjunct Chair for Hybrid on the EC. We recognized that this is an area conferences need support on right now, as they are figuring out how to navigate rising costs and hybrid needs. Many conferences are struggling to break even because of the cost of the efforts to cover remote participation. Our goal is to provide them with key supports that can help them determine their best approach to hybrid participation.
Making SIGCHI Sustainable: Our Adjunct Chair for Sustainability, alongside a committed and ambitious Sustainability Committee, has been actively working to engage SIGCHI members in discourses around sustainability and what that means for our community.
Making SIGCHI Accessible: We had changes to our bylaws approved in January 2023 that allow us to have an elected VP Accessibility on the EC. This new VP is working with our Accessibility Committee, and with advocacy organizations such as AccessSIGCHI, to ensure that our conferences, EC and community events, publications, website, etc. remain responsive to needs around accessibility. As part of developing new conference guidelines, we are strongly encouraging conferences to recruit an accessibility chair early and to include a fund for accessibility in their budgets.
Growing Engagement with a Global SIGCHI: We aim to have greater reach globally, and this means being intentional about organizing events and initiatives across regions. Last year, we sponsored a symposium in Mumbai, India, for “HCI and Friends”, which was a very successful event. We will be continuing this effort in other parts of the world, namely Africa and Latin America, this year. Our EC is considerably globally diverse and we aim to leverage this as much as possible to establish stronger ties across regions. In addition, we are working towards establishing our first SIGCHI Mediterranean Committee for HCI students and professionals in the Mediterranean region. We are also aiming for greater community ties in Africa along similar lines.
Growing Best Knowledge Practices: To increase SIGCHI members’ access to, and awareness of, information and knowledge about these critical aspects, as well as to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of best practices to be curated and shared, we have established a new Best Practices Working Group, and have been actively working on curating best practices from experienced community members and producing video contents for knowledge sharing and mentoring. We have also recruited a new Chair for the Education Committee to broaden and deepen SIGCHI’s efforts on HCI education. We are planning to hold a series of SIGCHI summits annually for community leaders to discuss, reflect and advance the community’s best practices, starting with a summit on sustaining our conferences and knowledge production practices in February 2024.