SIGCHI Annual Report

July 1, 2025 — June 30, 2026

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

0. The SIGCHI Executive Committee

The SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC), having begun its term on July 1, 2024, is now in its final year. It includes the following 17 members. The first eight were elected in the SIG elections that concluded in June 2024. The remaining nine were appointed according to the SIGCHI bylaws.

Neha Kumar, President
Luigi De Russis, Executive Vice-President
Susan Dray, Vice-President at Large
Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Vice-President at Large
Dragan Ahmetovic, Vice-President for Accessibility
Naveena Karusala, Vice-President for Communications
Hao-Chuan Wang, Vice-President for Finance
Adriana S. Vivacqua, Vice-President for Membership
Jeni Paay, Vice-President for Chapters
Matt Jones, Vice-President for Conferences
Carla Griggio, Vice-President for Operations
Cosmin Munteanu, Vice-President for Publications
Helena Mentis, Past President
Kentaro Toyama, Adjunct Chair for Awards
Anna Cox, Adjunct Chair for CHI
Dani Raju, Adjunct Chair for Community Support
Ignacio Avellino, Adjunct Chair for Conferences
Jerry Alan Fails, Adjunct Chair for Conferences

This year, Carla Griggio and Kentaro Toyama took over from Kashyap Todi and Niklas Elmqvist as Vice-President for Operations and Adjunct Chair for Awards, respectively. We also created a new role on the EC — Adjunct Chair for CHI, who also serves as the Chair of the CHI Steering Committee; Anna Cox took on this role. We extend our deepest gratitude to Kashyap and Niklas for their years of service on the EC, and are delighted to add Carla’s, Kentaro’s, and Anna’s expertise to the EC.

1. Health and Viability

Now completing 44 years, SIGCHI remains one of ACM’s largest SIGs. The number of members has been steadily on the rise, alongside increased participation at CHI, our flagship conference. We currently have 5,999 members, with 38.5% student members and 37% SIG-only members. The top 10 countries that our members come from are distributed across the world, including USA (37%), Germany, UK, and China (at 7%), Republic of Korea and Canada (at 5%), Japan (4%), Australia (3%), and India and the Netherlands tied (at 2%).

We are an active SIG. We produced approx. 7,100 publications this year, more than the previous year. We currently have 29 conferences, and expect to cross 30 in the coming months. This year, we welcomed three new conferences, on interactive health, HCI education, and computational fabrication, supporting the many different facets of a rich and interdisciplinary field that we recognize as HCI. We have 78 active chapters, spanning 6 continents.

We are also a volunteer-rich SIG. Our SIG is governed via 207 volunteer roles at present [1], organized into 17 committees that are aligned in their focus on three strategic areas: (a) conferences and publishing, to ensure and deliver high-quality knowledge production, (b) community and care, to enrich and care for our members’ experience, and (c) global and local, to establish a global SIG, grounded in the local communities. These committees are collectively overseen by the SIGCHI EC (see above).

Between August and October 2025 we performed a committee reset for 16 committees — including those described above, working with chairs to discuss committee goals and remits, and to identify how they might best, collectively, support the SIG. This was done through an open call, and resulted in new volunteers and energy, while ensuring continuity of efforts and goals and increasing global diversity and reach. Former volunteers still keen to contribute were welcomed as well.

This year also saw a restructuring of the CHI Steering Committee (SC), after 10 years from its inception. This was a significant effort led by Matt Jones (VP Conferences) in consultation with members of the EC, current/former members of the SC, external advisers from the SIGCHI community, ACM leaders and staff, and leaders of other SIGs. It brought a revision of the committee roles and responsibilities, with dedicated roles on the EC and SC to oversee coordination between the committees, and facilitate joint decision-making on chair/site selection. Ultimately, this structure is aimed at better equipping the EC and SC to make SIG- and CHI-wide decisions. Open calls will be held annually to recruit a third of the SC members, as terms reach conclusion every three years. The newly restructured CHI SC consists of 12 members and starts on July 1, 2026 [2].

The new SC has been constituted at a point when CHI faces a set of linked strategic pressures that cannot be solved through annual operational decisions alone. The SC must develop a medium-term vision for CHI 2030 to be sustainable at scale, and a longer-term vision for CHI 2036 to consider whether the conference remains a single large annual event or moves toward a different model (e.g., hub-and-satellite, multi-site structure, separates archival publication from presentation format). Simultaneously, it will be continuing its routine work: supporting upcoming conference chairs, identifying future chairs, securing future sites, overseeing conference data, and maintaining continuity across years.

2. Efforts related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

SIGCHI is consistently making strides when it comes to efforts related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Broadening equitable participation is a core value for us, and many EC members and committees work towards this goal. We are glad to have been able to maintain these programs through multiple years, despite various factors such as post-pandemic conference attendance changes and inflation. Below we list just a few efforts that our EC members worked towards in 2025–2026.

The SIGCHI Development Fund (SDF) [3], overseen by Community Support Chair Dani Raju, has, since it was formalized in 2018, financially supported hundreds of events and initiatives held by conferences, chapters, and the HCI community more broadly. SDF grants have enabled SIGCHI-sponsored conferences to experiment with new initiatives that make them more accessible, globally inclusive, sustainable, hybrid, equitable, etc., helping work towards these goals even in the midst of recent financial pressures on conference planning. During the fiscal year for this report (FY26) [4], we supported our conferences with $38K for 5 events. SDF grants have also supported our chapters in growing and connecting to one another, nurturing global participation in the field. Grants for chapters were approximately $20K, supporting 6 events. Other community initiatives supported by the SDF brought diverse research areas and career stages together at workshops, mentorship initiatives, and in-cooperation or regional conferences, adding to the richness of the field. Grants awarded in this category were approximately $27K, supporting 10 events. In addition, to help build a stronger SIGCHI community in Africa and in preparation for CHI 2028 (which will be held in Cape Town, South Africa), we awarded a grant of approximately $14K for African Champions, enabling their participation at CHI 2026.

The Gary Marsden Travel Awards (GMTA) [5] program, also overseen by Community Support Chair Dani Raju, has continued to support SIGCHI members with financial need in attending our sponsored conferences. In FY26, we awarded approximately $34K to 67 members. We continued to sustain the changes implemented since 2020, to make the program more flexible and inclusive. Participants can indicate interest in virtual registration in case we are unable to award them support for in-person attendance and, working with ACM, we still have a process to request that an award be disbursed through an advance rather than reimbursement, allowing us to support awardees with acute financial constraints. We have continued to reimburse expenses that support applicants’ care and accessibility needs, such as childcare, mobility aids, and companion travel tickets. As an experimental initiative, we also received $500 in support from the Timothy B. Campbell Memorial Scholarship Foundation, which enabled us to provide additional travel support to one participant.

The SIGCHI Accessibility Committee, under the oversight of our VP Accessibility Dragan Ahmetovic, has continued working with SIGCHI stakeholders towards enhancing accessibility of our conferences. We have maintained guidelines for smaller-scale events created in prior years and continued the collaborative efforts with members of our community and advocacy organizations such as AccessSIGCHI. As in the past, we supported many of the accessibility requests falling outside the budgets of our conferences (e.g., for sign language interpreting, real-time captioning, etc.), as well as continued our PDF remediation program (taking help of an external vendor to make conference PDFs accessible).

SIGCHI’s Regional Committees are fueling community engagement globally. Our Latin America, Mediterranean, and Asia ad hoc regional committees have been actively working across chapters in these regions to identify challenges and opportunities they can work towards to grow SIGCHI’s global presence and success. The EC supported the Asia committee and the Mediterranean committees in hosting summer schools in Thailand and Italy, respectively. Special thanks to Zhicong Lu (Asia), Maristella Matera (Mediterranean), Heloisa Candello and Gustavo Lopez (Latin America) who led the regional committees, with Hao-Chuan Wang, Luigi De Russis, and Adriana S. Vivacqua as their respective EC Liaisons. VP at Large Susan Dray has also been working with members based in Africa and VP Chapters Jeni Paay to continue discussions on strengthening chapters, and forming a regional committee for the continent, also in preparation for CHI 2028 in Cape Town.

The SIGCHI Equity Committee conducted equity training for volunteers across SIGCHI conferences, utilizing the curriculum they developed and refined in the past; the training is intended to support volunteers who are interested in understanding equity issues within the community and ways to support fellow members. SIGCHI CARES (led by Co-Chairs Michael Muller, Celine Latulipe, and Karrie Karahalios) continues to promote safety of members across our conferences. The Research Ethics Committee (led by Melissa Densmore) and the Publications Committee (led by VP Publications Cosmin Munteanu) aim to provide support to authors and reviewers regarding ethical research practices and ACM policies. The Chapters Committee (led by VP Chapters Jeni Paay) works to support SIGCHI members across the world, and particularly in the Global South, to create and nurture local communities. The Communications Committee (led by VP Communications Naveena Karusala) makes sure that all the work of our volunteer leaders and their committees is visible to the larger community (see below for Voices of SIGCHI, the newsletter launched in 2024–2025).

The efforts above, together with the permanent open call for volunteers on our Submittable, aim to broaden and improve participation as well as continue to enrich our SIG-wide activities.

3. Awards and Recipients

As in 2024–2025, the Awards Committee generously and enthusiastically recognized more nominees than in the past, in particular to align with the rate at which the community is growing. This year we saw two Lifetime Research Awardees, 11 Academy inductees (exceeding the prior cap of 10), and five Outstanding Dissertation Awardees, three Societal Impact Awards, and two Lifetime Service Awards. Since discussions have been underway regarding new awards that might be introduced, we continued to experiment with Special Recognitions, allowing people to be nominated for various outstanding contributions to SIGCHI and the HCI field. We awarded eight Special Recognitions. You can find the names and affiliations of the awardees below and more information about them on our blog [6] and website [7]. We are thankful to our Awards Chair Kentaro Toyama and the Awards Committee he leads for doing the work to arrive at this excellent list of awardees.

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award

Lorrie Faith Cranor — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Joseph A. Konstan — University of Minnesota, USA

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award

Cliff Lampe — University of Michigan, USA
Helena Mentis — Drexel University, USA

ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award

Jon E. Froehlich — University of Washington, USA
Jacki O’Neill — Microsoft Research Africa, Kenya
Volker Wulf — University of Siegen, Germany

ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award

Affiliations below indicate doctoral degree institutions. They may differ from current affiliations.

Humphrey Curtis — King’s College London, UK
Martin Feick — Saarland University, Germany
Eunkyung Jo — University of California, Irvine, USA
Sukran Karaosmanoglu — Universität Hamburg, Germany
Ben Zhang — University of Michigan, USA

ACM SIGCHI Academy

Jeffrey P. Bigham — Carnegie Mellon University / Apple, USA
Laura Dabbish — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Niklas Elmqvist — Aarhus University, Denmark
Darren Gergle — Northwestern University, USA
Kaj Grønbæk — Aarhus University, Denmark
Chris Harrison — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Kori Inkpen — Microsoft Research, USA
Katherine Isbister — University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Per Ola Kristensson — University of Cambridge, UK
Joseph J. LaViola Jr. — University of Central Florida, USA
Eric Paulos — University of California, Berkeley, USA

ACM SIGCHI Special Recognition

Given their exploratory nature, each special recognition is given with a brief explanation.

AVELA (A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access) — USA — for building an impactful mentorship ecosystem that empowers thousands of underrepresented youth and strengthens community-rooted STEM learning and workforce development. Co-founders: Kyle Johnson — University of Washington, USA; Vicente Arroyos — University of Washington, USA; Liban Hussein — Boeing, USA.

Sonya S. Kwak — Korea Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea — for industry-academia collaborations that resulted in award-winning robotic systems, patented interaction technologies, and real-world deployments.

Shaimaa Lazem — City of Scientific Research and Technological Applications, Egypt — for leadership in the international HCI community, playing key roles in strengthening HCI communities in both the Arab world and Africa.

Maristella Matera — Politecnico di Milano, Italy — for impactful mentorship in HCI, and HCI community leadership in Italy and more broadly in the Mediterranean.

Brennan Schaffner — Georgetown University, USA — for research on dark patterns and key contributions to a major dark-patterns court case.

Phoebe Toups Dugas — Monash University, Australia — for research on gender diversity and efforts to make SIGCHI and ACM safer for transgender people.

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Finally, this past year, SIGCHI and SIGACCESS collaboratively proposed the SIGACCESS/SIGCHI Vicki L. Hanson Early Career Research Award in Computing Accessibility [8]. The proposal has been approved by the SIG Governing Board Awards Committee and ACM Council and will be awarded starting from the next fiscal year. The award seeks to recognize and encourage outstanding research contributions in computing accessibility by individuals in early stages of their careers. Early-career recognition plays an important role in professional visibility, career development, and retention of talented researchers. Neither SIG had an award specifically focused on early-career research contributions in computing accessibility. Establishing this award fills an important gap while affirming ACM’s commitment to fostering excellence and sustaining the long-term vitality of this research community. Vicki L. Hanson is an especially appropriate namesake for this award, honoring two main dimensions of her legacy: support of newer researchers, and building of institutions and community structures that make early-career success in computing accessibility possible.

4. Significant Papers

With conferences and 7K+ publications, it would be a gargantuan task to share all significant contributions from the SIG. For simplicity, we share below the Best Paper Award recipients from CHI 2026 — our flagship conference — offering a window into the wide array of research undertakings that make up our field:

1. “An Experience That Could Not be Found Anywhere Else”: Resonance as an Explanatory Concept for Player Experience Research and Game Design — Jaakko Väkevä, Jan B. Vornhagen, Heidi Rautalahti, Janne Lindqvist
2. “Families are messy”: From Parent-Child Tensions to Family-Centered Design of Smart Home Technologies — Kaiwen Sun, Jade Xiaoyi Li, Irene Chung, Jenny Radesky, Jason Yip, Christopher Brooks, Florian Schaub
3. “I Don’t Think RAI Applies to My Model” — Engaging Non-champions with Sticky Stories for Responsible AI Work — Nadia Nahar, Chenyang Yang, Yanxin Chen, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Ken Holstein, Motahhare Eslami, Christian Kästner
4. “Social Media Killed Our Generation”: Teenagers’ Felt Experiences of Harm on Social Media — Ritika Gairola, Colin M. Gray, Jingxin Dong, Kyung Jin Jeong, Ege Otenen, Juan J. Sarria
5. A Cantilevered DeltaXY Positioning Mechanism Enabling Rackable Digital Fabrication Form Factors — Ilan E Moyer, Leo McElroy, Quentin Bolsée, Joshua Rivera Camacho, Jennifer Jacobs, Maria Yang
6. A decision-theoretic representation of assistive interfaces — Julien Gori, Aurelien Nioche, Christoph A. Johns, Antti Oulasvirta
7. AI Sensing and Intervention in Higher Education: Student Perceptions of Learning Impacts, Affective Responses, and Ethical Priorities — Bingyi Han, Ying Ma, Simon Coghlan, Dana McKay, George Buchanan, Wally Smith
8. AI That Moves With You: A Review of Interactive Technologies Powered by Large Foundation Models for Mobility Impairment — Duosi Dai, Yuchong Zhang, Yong Ma, Danica Kragic
9. Are Semantic Networks Associated with Idea Originality in Artificial Creativity? A Comparison with Human Agents — Umberto Domanti, Lorenzo Campidelli, Sergio Agnoli, Antonella De Angeli
10. Becoming Watchful on the Trail and at Home: Understanding Experiential Outcomes of Capra in Long-Term Use — William Odom, Samuel Barnett, Jordan White, MinYoung Yoo, Nico Brand, Henry Lin
11. Bloom: Designing for LLM-Augmented Behavior Change Interactions — Matthew Jörke, Defne Genç, Valentin Teutschbein, Shardul Sapkota, Sarah Chung, Paul Schmiedmayer, Maria Ines Campero, Abby C King, Emma Brunskill, James A. Landay
12. BRIDGE: Borderless Reconfiguration for Inclusive and Diverse Gameplay Experience via Embodiment Transformation — Hayato Saiki, Chunggi Lee, Hikari Takahashi, Tica Lin, Hidetada Kishi, Kaori Tachibana, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Hanspeter Pfister, Kenji Suzuki
13. Characterizing Scam-Driven Human Trafficking Across Chinese Borders and Online Community Responses on RedNote — Jiamin Zheng, Yue Deng, Jessica Chen, Shujun Li, Yixin Zou, Jingjie Li
14. Chasing Meaning and/or Insight? A Survey on Evaluation Practices at the Intersection of Visualization and the Humanities — Alejandro Benito-Santos, Florian Windhager, Aida Horaniet Ibañez, Rabea Kleymann, Alfie Abdul-Rahman, Eva Mayr
15. Civil Data Disobedience: Navigating Data Interaction Challenges in Human Rights Defense Organizations — Maria Normark, Karin Hansson, Mattias Jacobsson
16. CoBRA: Programming Cognitive Bias in Social Agents Using Classic Social Science Experiments — Xuan Liu, HaoYang Shang, Haojian Jin
17. Cocoa: Co-Planning and Co-Execution with AI Agents — K. J. Kevin Feng, Kevin Pu, Matt Latzke, Tal August, Pao Siangliulue, Jonathan Bragg, Daniel S Weld, Amy X. Zhang, Joseph Chee Chang
18. Crafting Remembrance Beyond the Self: Older Adults’ Digital and Material Legacies — Ramprabu Thangaraj, Jed R. Brubaker, Emma Dixon, Alisha Pradhan
19. Designing for Long-Term Emotion Regulation: A Breathing Biofeedback Game for Women in Compulsory Isolation Drug Rehabilitation Centers — Qi Chen, Jiachen Du, Zhihao Yao, Michael Detsiang Li Jr, Haoran Liu, Yu Cheng, Yijie Guo, Yanzhi Yang, XiJing Chen, Haipeng Mi
20. Do Children Trust AI, and Should They? Designing and Validating a Child-Centred K-AI Trust Scale for Intelligent Systems — Grazia Ragone, Paolo Buono, Judith Good, Rosa Lanzilotti
21. Friend, Foe, or Bot? Exploring Intergroup Dynamics in Hybrid Human-Bot Teams — Assem Zhunis, Ziqi Pan, Yuanhao Zhang, Xiaojuan Ma
22. From Overload to Convergence: Supporting Multi-Issue Human–AI Negotiation with Bayesian Visualization — Mehul Parmar, Chaklam Silpasuwanchai
23. From Preference to Performance: Patient-Centered Design of Multimodal Cueing in Parkinson’s Disease Gait Training — Xinjin Li, Wenjie Wang, Kai Wang, Houzhen Tuo, Xiaolong Ma, Xiaohui Tan, Wei Sun, Feng Tian, Xiaojuan Ma
24. From Using to Infrastructuring: Grassroots VPN-Building in Iran’s Women–Life–Freedom Movement — Sarvin Qalandar, Philip Engelbutzeder, Dave Randall, Volker Wulf
25. Generative Muscle Stimulation: Providing Users with Physical Assistance by Constraining Multimodal-AI with Embodied Knowledge — Yun Ho, Romain Nith, Peili Jiang, Steven He, Bruno Felalaga, Shan-Yuan Teng, Rhea Seeralan, Pedro Lopes
26. GeoVisA11y: An AI-based Geovisualization Question-Answering System for Screen-Reader Users — Chu Li, Rock Yuren Pang, Arnavi Chheda-Kothary, Ather Sharif, Henok Assalif, Jeffrey Heer, Jon E. Froehlich
27. How are Vibrotactile Experiences Visually Represented? A Taxonomy of Illustration Characteristics — Bruno Fruchard, Dennis Wittchen, Nihar Sabnis, Paul Strohmeier, Donald Degraen
28. How They Type: Eye and Finger Movement Strategies in Typing of Individuals with Cerebral Palsy — Tingting Song, Liangyue Han, Yunfei Bi, Jingting Li, Mingming Fan, Yan Wang, Ranran Hao, Su-Jing Wang, Xiaolan Fu
29. Interactive Explainable Ranking — Chao Zhang, Abe Davis
30. iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility — Peya Mowar, Aaron Steinfeld, Jeffrey P Bigham
31. Let’s Make a Community [of Practice]: Using Community-Based Participatory Design to Support Interdependence — Elaine Czech, Dan Bennett, Grace Jane Stangroome, Vanessa Aisyahsari Hanschke, Amy Ingold, Paul Marshall, Oussama Metatla
32. Localized Imaginaries, Global Assets: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Assetization of Data Centers in Singapore — Tanmaie Kailash, Cindy Kaiying Lin
33. Managing Medication Plans When Information Is Scattered: Clinicians’ Strategies and Tools — Anastasiya Zakreuskaya, Ignacio Avellino, Wendy E. Mackay
34. Mining Player Experience Trends From Game Reviews Using Large Language Models — Supriya Dutta, Joel Oksanen, Jaakko Väkevä, Shamit Ahmed, Markus Kirjonen, Perttu Hämäläinen
35. MlondaCam: Designing Context-Aware Smart Cameras for Supporting Domestic Security and Privacy in Malawian Homes — George Chidziwisano, Yewande Ojo, Thandiwe Jere
36. Narratives and Perspectives: How AI Summaries Steer Users’ Opinions and Engagement on Social Media — Jarod Govers, Cherie Sew, Eduardo Velloso, Vassilis Kostakos, Jorge Goncalves
37. Novobo: Supporting Teachers’ Peer Learning of Instructional Gestures by Teaching a Mentee AI-Agent Together — Jiaqi Jiang, Kexin Huang, Huan Zeng, Duo Gong, Roberto Martinez-Maldonado, Pengcheng An
38. PerEye: Co-Designing Extended Reality Rendering Attributes for Vision Health Diagnosis and Education — Howe Yuan Zhu, Jacinta Anne Walz, Nguyen Thanh Trung Le, Raymond Chia, Wenjing Su, Nissi Faith Obra, Ian Chivers, Kristine Nussbaum, Christopher Hodge, Chin-Teng Lin, Vincent Nguyen
39. PleaSQLarify: Visual Pragmatic Repair for Natural Language Database Querying — Robin Shing Moon Chan, Rita Sevastjanova, Mennatallah El-Assady
40. Promise or Peril? Exploring Black Adults’ Perspectives on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Health Contexts — Andrea G Parker, Laura M Vardoulakis, Christina Harrington
41. RAG Without the Lag: Enabling “What-If” Analysis for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Pipelines — Quentin Romero Lauro, Shreya Shankar, Sepanta Zeighami, Aditya Parameswaran
42. Reacquainting with Everyday Urban Nature: Exploring Natural Soundscape Restoration with Personal Audio AR — Yu Chen, Yu-Cheng Chang, Yu Lun Hsu, Mike Y. Chen
43. Scene2Hap: Generating Scene-Wide Haptics for VR from Scene Context with Multimodal LLMs — Arata Jingu, Easa AliAbbasi, Sara Safaee, Paul Strohmeier, Jürgen Steimle
44. Sensemaking in User-Driven Algorithm Auditing: A Case Study on Gender Bias in an Image Captioning Model — Behnoosh Mohammadzadeh, Jules Françoise, michele gouiffes, Baptiste Caramiaux
45. Sex after Cancer: Co-Designing Bespoke Care Technologies for Post-Cancer Bodies — Céline Offerman, Francesca Maria Mauri, Alessandro Bozzon, Jacky Bourgeois
46. Small Talk, Big Impact? LLM-based Conversational Agents to Mitigate Passive Fatigue in Conditional Automated Driving — Lewis Cockram, Yueteng Yu, Jorge Pardo, Xiaomeng Li, Andry Rakotonirainy, Jonny Kuo, Sebastien Demmel, Mike Lenné, Ronald Schroeter
47. Sound2Hap: Learning Audio-to-Vibrotactile Haptic Generation from Human Ratings — Yinan Li, Hasti Seifi
48. Starting From Scratch Again and Again: Tracing the Origins of High Schoolers’ Negative Perceptions of Block-Based Programming — Caryn Tran, Kristin Fasiang, Max Kanwal, Eleanor O’Rourke
49. Stress Mindset Matters: Rethinking Mental Stress Detection with Multimodal Wearable Sensors — Lakmal Meegahapola, Marios Constantinides, Zoran Radivojevic, Hongwei Li, Michael S Eggleston, Daniele Quercia
50. The Words That Can’t Be Shared: Exploring the Design of Unsent Messages — Michael Yin, Robert Xiao
51. ThreeTopo: Focused Interactive Navigation for Multi-Pitch Rock Climbing — Ben Pearman, Kurtis Danyluk, Wesley Willett
52. Touching Emotions, Smelling Shapes: Exploring Tactile, Olfactory and Emotional Cross-sensory Correspondences in Preschool-aged Children — Tegan Joy Roberts-Morgan, Min Susan Li, Priscilla Y. Lo, Zhuzhi FAN, Dan Bennett, Oussama Metatla
53. Towards Fluent Interaction with Cyber-Physical Architecture — Jesse T Gonzalez, Neeta M Khanuja, Michael Mingxuan Li, Maggie Guo, Layomi Olaitan, Emily Lau, Jenny Pugh, Alexandra Ion, Scott E Hudson
54. Trauma-Informed Digital Evidence Collection: A Design Inquiry into Evidence Practices for Technology-Facilitated Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence — Sophie Stephenson, Naman Gupta, Kyle Huang, David Youssef, Kayleigh Cowan, Rahul Chatterjee
55. Unit-Less Measurements with StoryStick++: Rethinking Measurement as Interactive Processes — Stig Konings, Maties Claesen, Danny Leen, Mannu Lambrichts, Xander Vaes, Raf Ramakers
56. When Plants Play: Rethinking Plant Materiality in Digital Games — Yoonji Lee, Chang Hee Lee
57. When Scaffolding Breaks: Investigating Student Interaction with LLM-Based Writing Support in Real-Time K-12 EFL Classrooms — Junho Myung, Hyunseung Lim, Hana Oh, Hyoungwook Jin, Nayeon Kang, So-Yeon Ahn, Hwajung Hong, Alice Oh, Juho Kim
58. When Workout Buddies Are Virtual: AI Agents and Human Peers in a Longitudinal Physical Activity Study — Alessandro Silacci, Mauro Cherubini, Arianna Boldi, Amon Rapp, Maurizio Caon
59. Who Controls the Conversation? User Perspectives On Generative AI (LLM) System Prompts — Anna Neumann, Yulu Pi, Jatinder Singh
60. With Visual Integrity and Care: A Framework for Mixed Methods Research on Visual Social Data — Nina Lutz, Joseph S. Schafer, Priya Dhawka, Phil Tinn, Kate Starbird
61. Writing with AI Can Reduce Gender Bias in Hiring Evaluations — Alicia T.H. Liu, Mina Lee, Xuechunzi Bai
62. µCap: Instrumental Music Captions for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Individuals — SooYeon Ahn, In-Chang Baek, KyungJoong Kim, Khai N. Truong, Jin-Hyuk Hong

5. Conference Activity

Our flagship CHI conference remains the premier venue for HCI research. In April 2026, CHI was held in Barcelona, Spain, and hosted 5,339 attendees, maxing out the venue capacity of approximately 5,000 people. The CHI Conference Steering Committee (led by Aaron Quigley until June 2026) found via a post-CHI conference survey that attendees drew value from attending the conference due to opportunities for networking and engaging with timely, quality scientific content.

This year, after significant work by the CHI Steering Committee, the conference experienced a new format, with the goal of simplifying the track structure and increasing the time spent in discussion-focused sessions with the aim of “putting the confer back into the conference”. Overall, appreciation for the new format is positive, with 60% liking it and only about 20% of participants not liking it. A majority of participants, in addition, reported being satisfied or very satisfied with the scheduling model of presentation-focused mornings and discussion-focused afternoons. Some attendees highlighted issues related to lack of food options for special diets, room-capacity limitations, and some difficulties in navigating the conference venue. The analysis of the post-conference survey is available on our Medium publication [9].

In addition, to deal effectively with the ongoing rise in submissions to the conference, the CHI Steering Committee has designed a new review process. The proposed plan was shared via a blogpost [10] and via special sessions at CHI 2026. Feedback was generally positive, though some concerns were raised particularly with regard to the proposed Screening/Triage via Rubric-Based Assisted Desk Reject process [11]. As a result, the Paper Chairs team for CHI 2027 are developing a suite of AI tools [12] that will support both Subcommunity and Associate Chairs in dealing with the ~10,000 paper submissions anticipated for 2027, and which will serve as an alternative to the rubric-based process that was proposed. To ensure that Paper Chairs are sufficiently resourced, two people involved in the restructuring of the review process are members of the five-person Paper Chairs team. They will lead a team of ~60 Subcommunity Chairs and ~600 Associate Chairs.

Our 28 specialized conferences have, for the most part, been doing well in terms of nurturing thriving communities and becoming financially stable. The Conferences Team, composed of Matt Jones (VP Conferences), Ignacio Avellino, and Jerry Fails (both Adjunct Chairs for Conferences), has done extensive work to enable and maintain this, creating streamlined processes, support structures, and forums for knowledge exchange to enable conferences to plan efficiently and responsibly. With a solid foundation for communication and collaboration, our conferences and the Conferences Team have been working hard and thinking creatively to assess how best to secure sustainable futures amidst the transition to ACM Open, inflationary pressures, changing geopolitical landscapes, among other changes. Meanwhile, we have also been able to welcome new conferences and approve a new specialized conference to submit a TMRF, as mentioned above, and we are thankful for the efforts of the Conferences Team for helping the launch of these conferences stay on track.

Many more EC committees aim to serve and nurture our conferences and conference communities. There are efforts to regularly communicate with conference leaders via the Council of Steering Committee Chairs (overseen by the SIGCHI Conferences Team), to iterate on accessibility guidelines and best practices via the Accessibility Committee (see above), and more [1].

We have also continued to make a concerted effort to communicate about ACM Open, writing blog posts [13,14] and emails, hosting open sessions and town halls [15], and reaching out to the chairs of each conference leadership to provide resources to help communicate with their conference community. We will continue these efforts to ensure our membership is aware of the coming changes and the support structures we will have in place to ensure the SIG and ACM do not lose authors. To that end, we have also budgeted to ensure that we cover Article Processing Charges for papers that do not have ACM Open coverage.

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

Please refer to Section 2 regarding the SIGCHI Development Fund, Gary Marsden Travel Awards, and other DEI efforts, as examples of initiatives that provided service. We list one additional special project here.

We are continuing Voices of SIGCHI, a quarterly newsletter (led by VP Communications Naveena Karusala) aimed at archiving the SIG’s rich and varied initiatives, activities, and matters of concern. We have published four issues on the ACM Digital Library so far, with one more issue forthcoming. We continue using our Medium blog for immediate publication of information, while the newsletter will serve to share some of this news but also updates from committees (such as our column on research ethics, written by the Research Ethics Committee), shareouts from SIGCHI-supported events, member spotlights, and more.

SIGCHI was also an active participant in the inaugural ACM AI Leadership Summit [16], held in Atlanta, USA, in August-September 2026. SIGCHI President Neha Kumar was one of the General Co-Chairs, and SIGCHI’s presence was visible in the panels, doctoral consortium, papers presented, and the audience. SIGCHI was a co-sponsor of the event, and supported 10 active SIG/conference leaders and volunteers in attending. Human-centeredness was a core priority throughout the planning and execution of this event, as a key contribution of our SIG.

7. Key Issues Ahead

We highlight three key issues that have our attention at present: ACM Open, the SIG’s growing number of attendees and conferences, and AI, each of these requiring care to ensure the SIG’s continued wellbeing. We elaborate below.

Continuing to support ACM Open: With ACM’s transition to open access earlier this year, we are continuing to learn, listen, and support where we can, regarding the impact on our publishing, conferences, community, and finances. As mentioned above, we have been communicating about the changes with members and conference leaders, consulting with the ACM for any updates and additional resources. We are also supporting authors who may not be able to cover their Article Processing Charges (APC) during these initial years and are working with our conferences and ACM in this process. We continue to set aside a budget for smoothing out the transition.

Supporting Growth: SIGCHI has grown in recent years in its membership, specialized conferences, attendance, and associated publications in the ACM DL. While this growth reflects increasing interest in the field, it also brings challenges, including: (a) finding suitable conference venues, (b) maintaining fruitful conversations and scientific exchanges among attendees, © ensuring SIG members’ voices are heard, and (d) sustaining the volunteer efforts required (e.g., with peer review), among others. We will be organizing our second SIGCHI Futures Summit to bring community and conference leaders together to build awareness around and better understand and tackle the challenges growth brings, such as new conference formats, e.g. SIGCHI Pods [17].

Dealing with AI: In the coming year, we are also prioritizing conversations around dealing with the rapid growth in AI use in the knowledge production process. This includes publication authorship and peer review challenges. Some of this work is already underway within the SIG, such as the changed peer review process for CHI 2027 (see Section 5). More work remains regarding building awareness and responsibility into the use of AI throughout our SIG. This will also be a key priority at the upcoming SIGCHI Futures Summit.

References

1. SIGCHI: All Committees. https://sigchi.org/people/all-committees/
2. Kumar, N. (2026, August 8). The New CHI Steering Committee. https://medium.com/sigchi/the-new-chi-steering-committee-d664183a25ea
3. SIGCHI Development Fund. https://sigchi.org/resources/sigchi-development-fund/
4. SIGCHI: FY 2026 SDF Recipients, https://sigchi.org/resources/sigchi-development-fund/recipients/fy-2026/
5. Gary Marsden Travel Awards. https://sigchi.org/resources/gary-marsden-travel-awards/
6. Toyama, K. (2026, February 24). 2026 ACM SIGCHI Awards and Special Recognitions. https://medium.com/sigchi/2026-acm-sigchi-awards-and-special-recognitions-d942983d9228
7. SIGCHI: Awards Recipients. https://sigchi.org/people/award-recipients/
8. Kumar, N. (2026, June 18). Announcing the Vicki L. Hanson Early Career Research Award in Computing Accessibility. https://medium.com/sigchi/announcing-the-vicki-l-hanson-early-career-research-award-in-computing-accessibility-5dfad5c5f3ab
9. Appert, C. (2026, June 26). CHI ’26: Overview of the Post-Conference Survey. https://medium.com/sigchi/chi-26-overview-of-the-post-conference-survey-e2b2033d11ba
10. Mandryk, R. (2026, March 24). CHI Conference Peer Review Restructuring. https://chi.acm.org/chi-conference-peer-review-restructuring/
11. Cox, A. (2026, May 4). Peer Review Changes: April 2026 Summary of Feedback Gathered, our Initial Responses, and Next Steps. https://chi.acm.org/peer-review-changes-april-2026-summary-of-feedback-gathered-our-initial-responses-and-next-steps/
12. Cox, A., Tang, T., Kosch, T., Solovey, E., Isenberg, P., Mandryk, R. (2026, August 29). AI-Assisted Tools in the CHI 2027 Papers Review Process: What They Do, What They Do Not Do, and How Humans Remain Responsible. https://chi2027.acm.org/2026/08/29/ai-assisted-tools-in-the-chi-2027-papers-review-process-what-they-do-what-they-do-not-do-and-how-humans-remain-responsible/
13. Kumar, N. (2025, December 19). ACM Open and Financial Hardship Waivers for SIGCHI. https://medium.com/sigchi/acm-open-financial-hardship-waivers-for-sigchi-5a9f6e4a482f
14. Williamson, J. R., (2026, January 13). Getting to Sustainable Open Access. https://medium.com/sigchi/getting-to-sustainable-open-access-09cd47fe207d
15. Kumar, N. (2025, November 13). SIGCHI Quarterly Town Hall: Awards, ACM Open, and Accessibility. https://medium.com/sigchi/sigchi-quarterly-town-hall-awards-acm-open-and-accessibility-e7f7fcf1d90f
16. ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026. https://aisummit.acm.org
17. Kumar, N. (2026, August 10). Announcing SIGCHI Pods. https://medium.com/sigchi/announcing-sigchi-pods-f268c2573e8c

Logos of the SIGCHI family of conferences as of July 2026