Designing a technical programme for a conference like CHI is complex, often with many directly competing needs and wants. Given how many constraints need to be balanced, all of our decisions in designing the technical programme are guided by the following key principle.

Travel is Not Required to Publish

Decoupling publishing of archival work from travel and in-person presentation is an important step to support more inclusive publishing. There are many reasons why someone can’t or won’t be able to travel to CHI 2025, and we want to send a clear message that traveling is not required for disseminating knowledge and participating in scholarly discourse. All the Calls for Participation have had clear details around what requirements are in place for participation and what modes of presentation are available for all venues.

Why We Attend Conferences

Fundamentally, we attend conferences to share knowledge and participate in scholarly discourse. What this looks like will be a little bit different for every person, where some people want to soak up new knowledge all week, some want to ask questions and have debates, and others want to focus on reconnecting and expanding their networks. Everyone conferences differently, so we are designing a hybrid programme that supports key activities in synchronous and asynchronous ways. Registering for the conference, in-person or remotely, is how you gain access to the conference, disseminate your work, and participate in scholarly discourse at CHI 2025.

Disseminate Your Work

Our primary mode of dissemination is through publication in the ACM Digital Library. All authors, regardless of in-person or remote registration, will have their work published in the ACM Digital Library, in the ACM CHI Proceedings, or ACM CHI Extended Abstracts.

• ACM Digital Library
• ACM CHI Proceedings and Extended Abstracts

Authors also have the opportunity to give a presentation during the conference. Further details about presentation formats for in-person and remote attendees are described in the following sections for each venue.

Asking and Answering Questions

One of the most important parts of participating in scholarly discourse is to respond to questions about your own work. Contributing questions to the scholarly discourse is crucial, offering new perspectives, challenging ideas, and advancing the field. We will use a progressive web application (PWA)  for collecting and archiving questions for all authors, which will provide opportunities to respond to questions about your work during the conference and ask questions for all the conference content.

PWA is not only a compilation of the CHI Conference program, but also an application that brings together papers, videos, and other content in one place. In the PWA, you can leave comments on each presentation and react to them. Here is the link to the working demonstration of PWA for CHI 2024. You can find out how it works and what will be available for each presentation. PWA for CHI2025 will be available before the conference.

Networking and Making New Connections

What is special about a conference week is that everyone has committed time and energy to being present in-person or remote. For all attendees, we aim to create opportunities for face-to-face, remote, and hybrid interactions that help people nurture their networks during the conference week. More details will be announced later.

Presentation format

Oral presentations (papers, journals, alt.chi, case studies)

As the archival and largest track in the CHI conference, Papers is often a special case. We have given particular attention to designing a Papers programme and invited Journal presentations to support in-person and remote attendees. Remote questions and discussions for all authors will use the SIGCHI Conference Programmes progressive web application (PWA), allowing participation of all attendees.

In-person presenters will give a live presentation in sessions organized by topic. Questions will be facilitated by the session chair from the platforms available to ensure quality dialogues after paper presentations. Authors will also be able to respond to questions on these platforms throughout the conference week.

Remote presenters will be organized into remote sessions by topic.The programme will include dedicated remote presentation timeslots, during which there are no competing in-person presentations. Early morning sessions are expected to accommodate presenters in American time zones (20:00 – 21:30 EDT, 17:00 – 18:30 PDT). Late afternoon sessions are expected to accommodate presenters in European time zones (7:00 – 8:30 GMT, 8:00 – 9:30 CET, 15:00 – 16:30 CST). Questions for remote presenters will be facilitated by the session chair in a similar manner to in-person presentation sessions. 

Late Breaking Work

Late Breaking Work authors have the option to present remotely, but in-person attendance is strongly encouraged because poster presentations benefit significantly from in-person discussions. Both in-person and remote presenters will have poster locations. In this manner, both presenters will be treated equally at least in terms of exposure of their posters.

In-person presenters may bring their posters by themselves and put them on the assigned poster board, where they can have in-person discussions with attendees. 

For remote presenters, the poster presentation chairs will print their posters out and put them on the assigned poster board. In this manner, all late break work authors will have the same level of poster exposure to in-person attendees. Remote presentations will be done by their pre-recorded videos, which will be linked by a QR code in each poster.

Remote attendees will be able to watch pre-recorded videos regardless of whether authors are in person or remote.  

Besides in-person discussion, questions can be asked and shared via PWA.

Keynotes

Keynotes will be on-site and will be streamed live for remote attendees, with questions facilitated on Slido.

Panels and Award Talks

Panels and Award Talks have a flexible format so that the organizers have the choice of running them as in-person only, or hybrid with remote panelists. All panels and Award Talks will be live streamed for the remote audience.

Workshops

Workshops will be in-person, but workshop organizers may include hybrid elements at their own responsibility.  In principle, workshops are in-person. Organizers may choose to support simultaneous hybrid participation for part or all of a workshop. However, the conference will not provide technical, equipment or SV support, and workshop organizers take full responsibility for running hybrid elements. 

Courses and Doctoral Consortium

Courses can be either fully in-person or fully remote depending on the choices of the organizers. Organizers can use tools like Zoom and PWA to deliver their course in person or remote.

The Doctoral Consortium will run in two complementary formats to support students who attend in-person or remotely. The In-person DC will be a live event during the conference where in-person attendance is expected, while the Remote DC will run synchronously online for remote attendees.

Interactivity and Student Competitions, and SIGs

• Interactivity
  Interactivity presenters are expected to attend the conference and give a live demonstration of their work. Remote presentation is not possible for this venue, but remote attendees will be able to see video demonstrations and the extended abstract that describes the demonstration.
• Student Competitions
  The Student Research Competition, Student Design Competition, and Student Game Competition will run as in-person sessions, where students are expected to participate in person. Remote attendees will be able to see the extended abstract that describes each project, and winners will be announced at the live streamed closing keynote.
• SIGs
  SIGs are a place for attendees to share common interest to meet informally for 75 minutes of facilitated discussion during a scheduled session at the conference. It is thus important to have in-person attendance, in particular for SIG organizers, to ensure smooth discussions and discourse.

As above, in Interactivity, Student Competitions, and SIGs, the in-person attendance of presenters and organizers is critical. In case presenters or organizers cannot attend in person, please immediately contact the corresponding track chairs. They may be asked to find another person who can attend in person to present the work or run an SIG.

Video Showcases

Video showcase is a collection of accepted videos, and all videos will be screened during the “video showcase” session at the conference. Therefore, in-person attendees may watch collections of videos at a video showcase session during the main conference. Remote attendees may watch video showcases through PWA. Accepted authors of video showcases do not need to attend the conference in person for their presentations.