Late Breaking Results and Informal Presentations

CHI 97 Guide To Successful Late Breaking Submissions

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All submissions will be reviewed based on the basis of a two-page Extended Abstracts Summary, using a high standard of content and presentation. If the submission is a poster the review will also be based on a one page visual sketch of the poster. You should have something new and significant to say and you should state it very clearly because of the restricted space available.

Late Breaking Submissions of all types will be evaluated on the basis of

• originality
• importance of the contribution
• soundness of rationale or demonstration
• quality of written and visual presentation
• adequate citation of the most relevant literature

All submissions should describe the context, contribution, content and consequences of the work with adequate focus on the problem you address.

Context (subject area and the perspectives of you and your intended audience).

• domain of HCI: the task being done, the class of users doing it and the technology being used
• author perspective(s): e.g. researcher, developer, user, manager
• audience perspective(s): e.g. researcher, developer, user, managers

Contribution (the relationship of this work to similar work in the field)

• background and related work: who has studied this before and from what perspectives
• lessons learned: how does this go beyond what has been done before, and from what perspectives
• innovation: what are the new ideas of this work

Content (your central message and why you and the audience ought to believe it)

• claims: what is the question or issue that you are addressing
• description: what was done and by which method
• justification: given the authors perspective, why should the audience believe the authors claim; this support for your claims is a central part of your submission; the authors perspective will determine the established standards for these justifications (e.g., experimental psychology requires statistical proof, implementations require resource usage statistics, field experience might use videotape analysis or questionnaires, design ideas require some form of usability testing)

Consequences (the practical implications of the audience believing the content)

• action: what should the audience do differently if and when they have accepted your message
• directions: what are the directions for future work based on this work (new questions, next studies, new experiences)

Due to the two page restriction avoid too general statements and too long introductory discussions. Be as precise as possible to show the value of the work presented. Do not try to describe everything. It is better to focus on specific and most important parts of the solution.

Some typical mistakes reported by reviewers of submissions from previous conferences include:

• The work was not truly late breaking. The authors just didn't get around to writing it up and submitting it in September.
• the work was not finished, the outcome was unknown or still in doubt, so the claim was not supported
• the work did not compare and contrast the author's work with important work as recorded in the published literature of the human computer interaction field
• the author did not demonstrate a good understanding of the state- of-the-art as documented in the literature (e.g. CHI proceedings from previous years) and in industrial products (e.g. a "new" idea should not already be available in some two-year old commercial product)
• the work did not draw conclusions or focus the lessons learned for the reader
• the work did not state the research results, but merely provides background information and discussion on the importance of the topic
• the author made unsupported claims; the conclusions were beyond the results of the work reported
• a practice and experience oriented work did not describe the lessons learned; the more general the lessons learned the more important for the conference; the lessons learned must advance over existing knowledge in the field
• the work was commercial; the problem is the promotion of a product where there is no need to do so
• the work contained too many unexplained or unnecessary technical terms; the HCI field includes many areas of work, therefore define terms from a subfield for the overall audience

A general piece of advice is to have the submission reviewed by somebody outside the group that did the work. If they have some problems with it, then the reviewers will probably not understand it either.

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The Review Process

A secondary input into assignments will be title and abstract -- in cases when the keywords aren't enough to produce a decision, we will browse this information to get a better idea of what the interactive poster is about. So make sure that the title is revealing, and that the abstract provides a concise and accurate summary of the submission content. Remember that we anticipate many submissions. We cannot promise to read each one in full before we assign to reviewers.

Reviewers write and submit their reviews electronically. We have found that this increases the quality of the reviews, encouraging more explanatory material to substantiate the reviewers' opinions.

We have included the review form for late breaking submissions. We encourage you to look at this form and to try to imagine how a reviewer might answer each question concerning your submission.

Tips:

Make sure your abstract contains a concise summary of your work. This will guide reviewers in providing their summaries.

Make sure you've provided a rationale for the work, clearly connected your work with prior results, and clearly conveyed the originality of your work.

Make sure that the topic of the work is one of current interest to the CHI community.

If you present lessons learned, make sure these are useful for the CHI community at large.

Writing and presentation quality is important. Use clear, concise, jargon-free language.

Posters are also judged on the fashion in which the material will be presented to the audience.