Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote

Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote countingfromzero.blog

In the very first paper session at CHI 2026, I found myself thinking, “I wish I wrote this paper!” And then I found myself thinking that a few times more. Since I’m on the hunt fo…

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emil-lp1 day ago

FMI (for my information)

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the leading international conference on Human-Computer Interaction. CHI 2026 will take [SIC] place in Barcelona.

emil-lp1 day ago

TLDR

1. “Writing with AI Can Reduce Gender Bias in Hiring Evaluations” Alicia T. H. Liu, Mina Lee, and Xuechunzi Bai.

2. “‘It Didn’t Feel Right but I Needed a Job so Desperately’: Understanding People’s Emotions & Help Needs During Financial Scams” Jake Chanenson, Tara Matthews, Sunny Consolvo, Patrick Gage Kelley, Jessica McClearn, Sarah Meiklejohn, Abhishek Roy, Renee Shelby, Kurt Thomas, and Amelia Hassoun.

3. “How Does My Time Use Align With My Values? Personal Informatics for Connecting Abstract Values to Everyday Life” Michael J. Hoefer, Raegan Rychecky, and Stephen Voida.

4. “Participatory, Not Punitive: Student-Driven AI Policy Recommendations in a Design Classroom” Kaoru Seki, Manisha Vijay, and Yasmine Kotturi.

glitchc1 day ago

These appear to be sociology topics more so than computer science. HCI started as a field for how humans directly interact with machines (ex. new pointing devices). I guess scope has creeped substantially since then.

AlanYx1 day ago

It's been a while since I've followed CHI, but didn't it used to be a slightly more technical conference? The second paper in particular ("It Didn’t Feel Right but I Needed a Job so Desperately’: Understanding People’s Emotions and Help Needs During Scams") seems like something that might be more appropriate for a sociology or applied psych journal.

Has it become more of a social-sciences adjacent tech research conference these days? (I'm not being critical, just curious.)

jasonhong1 day ago

CHI has evolved a lot over time, due to changes in how people use computers. CHI is a large umbrella conference with many subfields (Design, Privacy and Security, Accessibility, Healthcare, Education, Visualization, Games, novel hardware, novel interaction techniques, and more.

Note that CHI still has some technical papers. There are also other specialized adjacent conferences that focus more on technical aspects of HCI, like UIST and IMWUT.

eclarkso1 day ago

CHI has been a pretty big tent (and it's gotten to be a big conference) from the beginning and has always had a strong social/psych contingent. I believe the author is from such a background, so "papers I wish I wrote" is going to be skewed towards those kinds of contributions.

But there have been and still are plenty of what I would technical papers; just skimming the program there were sessions on pose/gesture tracking, haptics, VR, and of course zillions of AI things.

ktallett1 day ago

So many papers from conferences like these fascinate me. Of course you get those who are clearly doing research that was easier to get funding for but then you get questions like these where people obviously have some interesting viewpoints on the world.

Computing within limits is another conference that I'm often reading all the papers for whilst being in awe.

jazzpush21 day ago

"I’ve been avoiding GenAI research because I feel so conflicted about it, but I don’t think I’ll be able to avoid it forever. As an educator, I’m still working out my own thinking on the role of GenAI in work by students and faculty."

It's the final quarter of 2026. Academics really do live in a self-created bubble.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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