Quick Facts
The CHI 2025 Doctoral Consortium (DC) is an event for mentoring and sharing research among a small group of Ph.D. students. Given that the full CHI 2025 conference is a blend of remote attendance on-line and physical on-site attendance, there will be two separate DC events: (1) a remote DC taking place in April and (2) an in-person DC taking place in Yokohama before the on-site conference. Ph.D. students are allowed to submit their DC proposals to only one of the events. Please choose the right event track for your submission in PCS – “CHI 2025 Remote Doctoral Consortium” for this track.
The primary goal of the DC, whether remote or in-person, is to provide a forum for in-depth research discussions and to build a mentoring and peer network for participants.
This page is the call for remote DC. For the separate in-person DC at CHI 2025, please see this page.
Important Dates
All times are in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone. When the deadline is day D, the last time to submit is when D ends AoE. Check your local time in AoE.
- Submission deadline: Thursday, January 23, 2025
- Notification: Thursday, February 20, 2025
- e-rights completion deadline: Thursday, February 27, 2025
- Publication-ready deadline: Thursday, March 6, 2025
- TAPS Closes: Thursday, March 13, 2025
Submission Details
- Online submission: PCS Submission System
- Template: ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column)
- Submission: Up to 6 pages (excluding references)
- The submission should include a research description.
- In addition to the research description, the submission must include a benefits statement, a letter of recommendation, and CV (see detailed instructions below).
- These materials are not counted towards the 6-page limit above.
- Submissions are not anonymous and must be single-authored by a doctoral student. Submissions should include the author name, affiliation, and contact information. The advisors and collaborators of the students cannot co-author submissions.
- Doctoral students who already attended or are accepted to another Doctoral Consortium or equivalent events are not prioritized.
Selection Process
Message from the Doctoral Consortium Chairs
The CHI 2025 Doctoral Consortium is an event for Ph.D. students to share their Ph.D. research. Ph.D. students who are about midway through their Ph.D. programs will join a panel of distinguished HCI researchers. The aim is for students to learn from one another and from experienced HCI researchers from other institutions.
The goals are that the selected Ph.D. students will:
- Gain new ideas and perspectives on your research directions;
- Support each other by constructively offering your feedback to the other attending Ph.D. students;
- Form new friendships with the other attendees, together becoming a supportive cohort of emerging scholars with a spirit of collaborative research; and
- Engage with the full CHI conference by participating in many of the events and opportunities that CHI offers, and by enjoying interactions with other CHI attendees.
ACM’s Publication Policies
It is critical that authors review ACM’s publications policies. Please read this separate page for them.
Preparing and Submitting your Doctoral Consortium Proposal
The Virtual DC event is intended for participants who are unable to attend the CHI conference in person. Participants can be accepted only by either the in-person or remote DC. Participants already accepted by an in-person DC are not allowed to submit to a remote DC. If a participant accepted by the in-person DC submits to the remote DC, their acceptance by the in-person DC will be considered withdrawn, and their submission to the remote DC will be desk rejected. There are no possibilities for transferring your submission between tracks after the submission deadline and acceptance unless there are exceptional and unavoidable reasons (e.g., visa denial).
Tip: You’re at the right stage for this event if you have a plan for the things you’ll do to finish your dissertation, have made some progress in carrying out that plan, and can still change the plan based on feedback. Please ensure that your proposal helps us see that you are indeed at this stage.
Each proposal should be a single PDF with four required components: (1) a six-page description of your Ph.D., (2) an expected benefits statement, (3) a recommendation letter, and (4) a two-page curriculum vitae. If you are unable to obtain a letter of recommendation from your thesis advisor, please include a short explanation.
To be considered, you must submit your Doctoral Consortium proposal by the submission deadline.
- Six-page research description (excluding references): Use the ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column) template and include the following:
- Your name, and the university where you are conducting your doctoral work. Submissions should NOT be anonymous.
- Current year of study and projected completion date (plus information about the regulations of your PhD program regarding length, any part-time study, etc.)
- Have you ever attended another doctoral consortium? If so, at what conference? Note: we can’t accept you if you’ve already participated in a doctoral consortium at a previous CHI, UIST, CSCW, DIS, UbiComp. If you have attended a doctoral consortium at another conference, please name it, link to the conference homepage, and give the size of the conference (number of participants overall and the number of participants in the DC. Then we will assess whether attending another DC makes sense.
- The background and motivation for your research, including the key related work that frames your research
- Specific research objectives, goals, or questions; try to explain how your work differs from related work
- Research approach, methods, and rationale
- Results and contributions to date
- Expected next steps, as well as open questions and challenges that you face in your research
- Dissertation status and long-term goals
- Benefits and Contribution statement (two paragraphs)
- Describe what you hope to gain by participating in the Doctoral Consortium, and how your participation will benefit other students and faculty.
- Letter of Recommendation (from primary thesis advisor)
- Describe your interaction with the student and your assessment of the quality of their work. Explain how the CHI 2025 doctoral consortium would benefit this student at this point in their doctoral program, as well as the contributions you expect the student to make to the group.
- The doctoral consortium is targeted towards students who have a clear idea of their research plans and started their research, but have not yet executed most of their research plan. Please explain the structure of your student’s program and their expected level of progress by April 2025.
- As stated above, if a student is unable to obtain a letter of recommendation from their thesis advisor (or the equivalent), please include a short explanation and a description of where you are in your doctoral progress and anticipated timeline.
- Curriculum Vitae: (maximum two pages)
- Provide a concise summary of your current curriculum vitae, including research publications. Please separate published papers from those under review or in press.
Please ensure that your submission is complete and conforms to the format and content guidelines above. Because the Doctoral Consortium chairs expect to receive many applications, submissions that do not meet these requirements will be desk rejected.
Metadata Integrity
All submission metadata, including required fields in PCS like the author name and the affiliation, must be complete and correct by the submission deadline. This information is crucial to the integrity of the review process and author representation. The submission deadline is a hard deadline for the author name; there are no exceptions. Minor changes to the title and abstract are permitted during the Publication-Ready submission phase.
Policy on Use of Large Language Models
Text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, must be clearly marked where such tools are used for purposes beyond editing the author’s own text. Please carefully review the April 2023 ACM Policy on Authorship before you use these tools. The SIGCHI blog post describes approaches to acknowledging the use of such tools and we refer to it for guidance. Note that the LaTeX template will default to hiding the Acknowledgements section while in review mode – please make sure that any LLM disclosure is available in your submitted version. While we do not anticipate using tools on a large scale to detect LLM-generated text, we will investigate submissions brought to our attention and desk reject papers where LLM use is not clearly marked.
Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects
Any research in submitted manuscripts that involves human subjects must go through the appropriate ethics review requirements that apply to the authors’ research environment. As research environments vary considerably with regards to their requirements, authors are asked to submit a short note to reviewers that provides this context. Please also see the 2021 ACM Publications policy on research involving humans before submitting.
Accessibility
Accessible submissions are essential for reviewers and are good practice. Authors are expected to follow SIGCHI’s Guide to an Accessible Submission. If you have any questions or concerns about creating accessible submissions, please contact the Accessibility Chairs at accessibility@chi2025.acm.org early in the writing process (the closer to the deadline, the less time the team will have to respond to individual requests).
Selection Process
Overview: As soon as the submission deadline passes, the Doctoral Consortium committee will review and select candidates via an ACM reviewed process that considers both research quality and the goal of identifying a set of students who will benefit significantly from the event and support each other. We will seek diversity in backgrounds, identities, abilities, intellectual viewpoints, topics, and geographic areas.
Supporting a wide group of institutions/advisors: Besides the selection criteria above, kindly note that even if your submission is excellent, we might not be able to accept you because of our goals of having attendees across many institutions. For example, we probably cannot accept more than 2 students from the same institution, and definitely cannot accept more than 1 student with the same advisor.
Confidentiality of your submission: Submissions should not contain sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at publication time. Before publication time, we will keep your submission confidential in these ways:
- During the review process: Confidentiality of submissions will be maintained throughout the review process.
- If your submission is accepted: Your accepted submission will be kept confidential until the start of the doctoral consortium activities, except for title and author information, which will be published on the website before the conference. The research description will be published as CHI Extended Abstracts. All other materials (Benefits and Contribution Statement, Letter of Recommendation, and Curriculum Vitae) will be kept confidential in perpetuity.
- If your submission is not accepted: Your submission will be kept confidential in perpetuity.
- All submissions will receive a light review along with decisions.
Upon Acceptance of your Doctoral Consortium Proposal
The author of a submission has to follow the instructions on preparing and submitting a final version by the Publication-Ready Deadline. If the author cannot meet these requirements by the Publication-Ready deadline, the venue chairs will be notified and may be required to remove the paper from the program. The publication-ready version has to follow the LaTeX and Word templates from ACM. Should you need technical assistance, please direct your technical query to: publications@chi2025.acm.org.
Furthermore, the corresponding author will also receive information about registration and attending the conference.
At the Conference
Accepted submissions can be presented at the remote DC. The remote DC will take place before the physical DC. The remote DC will take place over multiple sessions (to account for time zones and also preserving participants’ focus and maximize participation). Participants will be expected to participate actively in multiple of these sessions, including a fun remote social event./p>
Each student will present their work to the group, with substantial time allowed for discussion and questions by the faculty and other students. Being accepted into the CHI Doctoral Consortium is a prestigious honor which involves a commitment to giving and receiving thoughtful commentary with an eye towards shaping the field and upcoming participants in the field.
After the Conference
Doctoral Consortium description papers will be published as CHI Extended Abstracts in the ACM Digital Library.
Contact Us
Virtual Doctoral Consortium Chairs
Paweł W. Woźniak, Munmun De Chaudhury
