RE: A Cry for More Tech at CHI

 

The Blogpost in the March + April issue of interactions by Kristina Höök, technical program chair for CHI 2012, struck a nerve. While the column starts out well, the direction it heads down isn’t that fruitful. Here’s my view: People don’t bring tech to CHI because CHI doesn’t respect tech (in pretty much any form: novel tech, systems that test new tech, among others).

As a tech-oriented researcher, I cannot get papers published easily at CHI. I’ve had a few, but those were outliers that only “squeaked” in. The metrics CHI reviewers use for tech papers are not appropriate for technology-focused research. (Where’s the study? Where’s the killer app for this tech, validated by ethno-whatever studies of some important domain?) Indeed, “real” tech papers have such a low chance of acceptance at CHI that nobody in their right mind would submit them to the conference. I think the CHI community knows and largely accepts this, which is why conferences like UIST were created. Fine.

But the idea that the same folks should bring their demos to CHI and show them off is absurd. A CHI demo is not refereed; therefore, our peers do not respect it. Doing a demo at a conference, when you have a paper published about the work, is great. You have a respected contribution, and you are letting folks experience it.

But just doing a demo at CHI is like paying a ton of money to be a “dancing bear” in a circus. If the CHI research community does not want the work in the papers track, why would technology researchers go to the extreme trouble and significant expense of doing a demo at CHI? It’s much more economical and effective to do demos at conferences that will publish the work.

So there you have it. If you want technology at CHI, start accepting the work into the papers track, and stop trying to create new venues for dancing bears.

Blair MacIntyre

School of Interactive Computing Georgia Institute of Technology

Author’s Response I totally agree! This is why CHI changed this year, electing to have two kinds of demos:

“only” demo and paper + demo. I think the Interactivity chairs worked really hard to raise the level of demos as well as raise the respectability of them.

I do wish we could make the demos archival, and not just refer to papers as archival and demos as “add-ons.” But how can we make them archival? And how can we raise their status? This is a really important discussion. Right now, we are having it behind the scenes of CHI. I wish we could bring it out into the open. I believe that CHI will become less relevant unless and until we address this situation.

Kristina Höök

Small Steps First

I’m curious as to why demos are perceived as not peer reviewed?

I am one of the co-chairs of the Interactivity Explorations track at CHI this year. We went to great deal of effort to assemble a cast of high-quality reviewers for this track. Submissions went through a rigorous reviewing process (with a minimum of three reviews per), except in cases where we invited works and the authors were happy to not go through the review process. In these

 

May + June 2012