Subcommittees

CHI 2009 anticipates submission of over 1,000 Papers and Notes. The review process needs to handle this load while also improving the quality of reviews. The organization of the CHI program committee into topical subcommittees helps achieve this by having you, the author, select the best subcommittee to review your submission.

The subcommittees offer authors a better target for choosing what community of researchers will review your paper. An important thing to consider in selecting a subcommittee is that you are not describing your paper, you are instead providing information about the type of researchers who you feel are most qualified to review your paper.

CHI will employ the subcommittee organization for review purposes only. Paper sessions at the conference will not be tracked or grouped based on the subcommittees.

Guidance for selecting the subcommittee for your submission

The author decides which subcommittee reviews his or her submission. As an author, this empowers you to choose the appropriate audience to review your research. When you submit a paper or note, you will designate which subcommittee you want to handle your submission. You will see a list of subcommittees, descriptions and examples of the topics they are covering, the name of each SubcommitteeChair, and the names of some of the AssociateChairs serving on each subcommittee. Using all of this information, it is your responsibility to select the subcommittee that best matches the expertise needed to assess your research, and that you believe will most fully appreciate your contribution to the field of HCI.

CHI has traditionally supported diverse and interdisciplinary work and continues to expand into new topics not previously explored. We recognize that as a result, you may find several different subcommittees which are plausible matches for aspects of your work. Hence it may be difficult to choose between subcommittees. However, for a number of reasons it will be necessary for you to select one target subcommittee, and you should strive to find the best match to your submission that you can.

Note that the scope of each subcommittee is not rigidly defined. Each has a broad mandate and most subcommittees cover a collection of different topics. Further, SubcommitteeChairs are all seasoned researchers, experienced with program committee review work, and each is committed to a process which seeks to assign each paper reviewers who are true experts in whatever the subject matter of the paper is. SubcommitteeChairs recognize that many papers, or perhaps even most papers, will not perfectly fit the definition of their subcommittee's scope. Consequently, papers will not be penalized or downgraded because they do not align well with a particular subcommittee. Interdisciplinary, multi-topic, and cross-topic papers are encouraged, and will be carefully and professionally judged by all subcommittees.

In making a subcommittee choice you should make careful consideration of what the most central and salient contribution of your work is, even if there are several different contributions. As an example, let's say you are writing a paper about Ergonomic Business Practices for the Elderly using Novel Input Devices. Perhaps this is a very new topic. It covers a lot of ground. It's not an exact fit for any of the subcommittees, but several choices are plausible. To choose between them, you need to make a reasoned decision about the core contributions of your work. Should it be evaluated in terms of the usage context for the target user community? The novel methodology developed for your study? The system and interaction techniques you have developed? Each of these evaluation criteria may partially apply, but try to consider which is most central and which you most want to highlight for your readers. Also look at the subcommittees, the people who will serve on them, and the kind of work they have been associated with in the past. Even if there are several subcommittees that could offer fair and expert assessments of this work, go with the one that really fits the most important and novel contributions of your paper. That committee will be in the best position to offer constructive and expert review feedback on the contributions of your research.

What are the subcommittees?

Subcommittees are listed and described below. Each has a title, short description, an indication of who willChair and serve on the subcommittee (currently to be determined), and a list of keywords indicating some of the topics most central to it. Subcommittees have been constructed with an eye to maintaining logically coherent clusters of topics. However, you may note that some seemingly similar overall topics have been split into two subcommittees, whereas in other cases multiple high level topics may appear in one subcommittee. This is in part a result of the need to roughly balance the expected number of papers for each subcommittee. (This has been estimated based on keyword selections from papers submitted to CHI 2008, consequently the keywords listed here are those used in 2008.)

The subcommittee structure listed below is currently still tentative, and is subject to refinement based on data collected about its understandability for authors and their ability to find matches for their papers.