Simone: Hi,
I'm Simone Barbosa a professor at the Pontifícia Catholic
University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and general co-chair for
CHI 2022.
Cliff: My name is Cliff Lampe. I'm a professor at the School of
Information at the University of Michigan. And I am proud to
serve as one of this year is general chairs for CHI 2022.
Caroline: Hello,
I'm Caroline Appert from Université Paris
Saclay Frane.
And I'm one of the two technical program chairs for CHI 22.
Ayman: Hi I'm David Ayman Shamma from Toyota Research Institute,
and I am one of the technical program co-chairs for CHI 2022
Cliff: Hi this is Cliff Lampe, one of your co general chairs
for CHI 2022. I want to just take a second to welcome you to
CHI 2022 and tell you how excited we are to be putting on
this program for you. I want to thank you on behalf of myself,
my co chair Simone Barbosa the technical program chairs
Caroline Appert and David Ayman Shamma. And then at the equity,
justice and access chairs Katta Spiel and Christina Harrington.
We've already been working hard for you for the past several
months trying to get CHI 2022 ready. literally dozens of
volunteers have been working on different parts of the
conference, from the experience to the technical tracks and
everything else like that. And we're very proud of the program
we're starting to put into place. It's up to you. And we
understand how much volunteer effort is going to come from
reviewers and authors and content creators of all types
for CHI 2022, to really make it a success. And I hope that we
can count on you to be part of the team. As of now, we are
anticipating a hybrid conference. What that really
means the technical program chairs will talk a little bit
more about later in this video, we're not sure is the short
answer. And we're going to do our best to adapt to what the
CHI 2021 experiences and all the wisdom that they've learned, as
well as listen to you and to your voices. What do you want
from a hybrid conference? That's the big question here. We do
expect that we will at least have part of the conference that
take place in New Orleans, Louisiana. Now if you haven't
visited New Orleans or had the opportunity to it's one of
America's finest and it's an incredible sight of culture,
history, creativity, it's got world class food. if you
haven't had it beignet, or chicory coffee down at a Cafe Du
Monde, it is an experience unlike any other It is really
just a special place to be the art, the music, everything about
New Orleans, screams, creativity, culture, community.
And that's what we want our theme to be this year, the theme
we have for CHI 2022 is cultivating communities. And we
want to think of ourselves as how do we build just equitable,
fair communities of research and practice across the CHI world.
A couple of highlights from CHI 2022 things that we're
particularly proud of. One is that we've added equity, justice
and access chairs to the executive chair team. What that
means is that Katta and Christina sits in on every
meeting, and that they have been part of the process from the
very beginning. So we build these principles into every part
of the CHI 2022 experience. And we are trying to be informed by
the voices of the community as we are making these decisions.
As part of that, for instance, this year, another thing that we
tried to do was to have open calls for organizing committee
positions. I think this is a fantastic success, the community
really responded. We had over 200 volunteers for positions to
serve on the organizing committee. And we picked from a
wide variety of huge opportunity of people from all across the
planet, from industry from academia, early in their careers
later in their careers, I am incredibly proud of the
diversity of our organizing committee and how many different
places that committee represents. And you can see how
that's been paid off and the conversations we have about
different kinds of experiences. Like I said, we're working hard
on what hybrid will mean. But what I'm great can tell you is
that we're committed to no second class experiences. We
want all the online experiences, we want all the in person
experiences to be rich, meaningful and fulfilling for
you, the participant and contributor to the CHI
community. So I look forward to seeing you in New Orleans. And
if it's online, I will hopefully see you there too. And yeah,
thank you so much for all of your efforts for CHI, and we
look forward to a great guy 2022.
Ayman: Thanks for that Simone and Cliff, I'd like to talk a
bit about the technical program and how we're designing it with
the general chairs and then my co chair Caroline and myself as
technical program chairs. One thing that kept on coming up and
that we've seen year and year at CHI is this question about
rebuttals and how effective are they do they even matter? And to
kind of address that, we decided to just think about a better
process overall. And so we'll be moving in CHI 22 to revise and
resubmit process. We're very excited about that. Because what
that means is that shepherding and rebuttaling is turned into a
full revision cycle with the hopes that we can getting higher
quality papers, better equity and better decision and better
engagement between our authors and reviewers and ACs. Now, one
of the things with rebuttals was, they were sort of these
promises that you would leave, maybe they were shepherded,
maybe they weren't. And so promises to the ACs in this sort
of compartmentalised fast dialog, or if we go to a revise
and resubmit process, we can have better attention and actual
revisions that can be evaluated, we can sort of get better paper
and have better connections between the authors and the
reviewers and the ACs. Also, shepherding is a varying
experience, I've had shepherds who are very hands on, I've had
shepherd to kind of phoned it in at the end of the day. And so
really going through a revision cycle lets us make sure everyone
gets good engagement with that reviewers and ACs. And those
reviewers are important, because those external reviewers are
often the experts for some of the vertical things that we
touch into in our papers. And so really getting them into the R &
R cycle, where there is more conversation where there's more
back and forth for that revision, we believe will lead
to better papers and better decisions. And really, we're
very excited about it. However this comes at the cost of time.
As a result, many you don't want to hear this we are lengthening
the timeline a little bit here. So we're gonna see submissions
now due in early September. And then we'll have a round one
decision point in November, where papers will be rejected,
or flagged for R & R or a few may be fast tracked. And then
for the second round, will be a couple of months there. And then
we'll have second round submissions due in January of
2022. With those decisions coming back rather quickly in
February, as they should be. And that will kind of squeeze into a
quick count ready turnaround for those R & R papers, although
we're optimistic about making those timelines work. Because
the event is going to be virtual or personal or in person or
both. And actually, we're going to be sort of pushing towards
both. But we want to make sure we designed this right for
everyone with everyone. And so a couple of the considerations
that come up is this notion of hybrid, we have an on site
event, what does that mean? Well, we can actually reach to
remote attendees, hopefully in the same or as rich capacity as
possible, as well as the onsite attendees. And really, that's
what the key of hybrid is. But there's some challenges, some
demos won't work. Some poster sessions are hard to meander,
the hallway conversations, all the things we've been realizing
with virtual, they're just going to extend that hybrid. And we
know those challenges that are there. Also, when we're hybrid,
it, we can't really have a 24 hour program, because we're
bound to the time zones and working hours of New Orleans,
Louisiana. And so we don't have that 24 hour ness of in a hybrid
venue as we would in a virtual venue, which is why we want to
do both. And we will be doing both. And so we're planning for
early April to have a fully virtual event with full and
premium content, and then the end of April to have an on site
event that will also be hybrid. So remote attendees can also log
into that.
This is very important that we're trying to make sure there
is no second tiering event that both both the virtual and the on
site slash hybrid have rich, premium content. And it's not a
second experience. It's actually both will be full experiences.
And it'll be a richer pie. But it's gonna take, you know, two
events and more time. And how do we balance that out? How do we
structure those calls, something we've been looking at very
closely in the last couple of months with all of our venue
chairs. Thank you all venue chairs. And we'll be also
monitoring CHI 2021 very closely, looking to see what
works, what doesn't work, what feels right, what doesn't, and
we want feedback. We want to hear from everybody we want, you
know, as much as we can understand to help make 22 as
great as access as possible. And it's good to rely on that
feedback. And so with that, I think I have the pleasure of
closing up this virtual Town Hall session. We can see on the
slide here, there's Simone and Cliff and how to contact them
Caroline and myself how to contact us also Katta and
Christina, how to contact them. And feel free to reach out
looking forward to hearing more and we're looking forward to a
great CHI 2022 and thank you so much.