The CHI 2019 Papers track, which is bigger by submission volume and organizational effort than the rest of the CHI tracks combined, closed last Friday. In this blog post we look at what has happened so far with submissions and to give you an idea of what will happen next and to encourage you to be part of the ‘chi circle of kindness’ by contributing to the community review effort.
On the 14th of September, 3784 abstracts were submitted to PCS, the conference’s submission system. By the deadline on the 21st of September, there were 2966 complete submissions left in PCS. This means that 22% of submissions at the abstract phase were either deleted or left incomplete by the deadline.
Excepting any submissions that are rejected early in the process, these 2966 papers (a 14% increase in complete paper submissions compared to CHI2018) will each receive four reviews: two external reviews, one internal review from the 2AC and one meta-review from the 1AC. Therefore, the submissions will require almost 12,000 reviews. This is a huge amount of work.
We need your help as part of the community to get through this work. Last year 2651 reviewers produced 5105 reviews. But most people only wrote one. This meant that 1053 reviewers produced 3621 reviews. Remember that this year we will need additional external reviews to ensure everyone’s submissions get the kind of attention that makes CHI a high-quality venue for publishing.
So we’d love you to volunteer to review here, especially so if you are an author as each paper you have submitted generates four reviews: https://new.precisionconference.com/review_volunteering
We’re doing all of this with the added ‘excitement’ of using PCS 2.0 for the first time for CHI – please be patient as we deal with the inevitable teething problems that come with using a new system. And dealing with teething problems also takes a huge additional effort over and above the huge volunteer effort already involved in making CHI happen. For this we already owe a huge debt of thanks to the papers chairs (and many other members of the committee and the SIGCHI EC) who have been working on our behalf to make it all happen!
TPC chairs for CHI 2019, Anna Cox and Vassilis Kostakos
Analytics chair for CHI 2019, Sandy Gould
