Below are the answers to some key questions we’ve been getting from our participants. Check back again before the conference; we’ll add more tips as they come up.
General Questions
What are the guidelines for my “full paper”?
In your acceptance email, we referenced a due date for a “full paper.” To clarify, this need not be a publication-ready draft. These versions of your projects will be circulated to the discussants for your session, so that they may give more in-depth feedback. The draft you submit for the discussants should represent a more detailed and revised version of your project. For projects that are in later stages, this could mean including a level of results and analysis that could not be fit into a 1,000-word abstract. For projects in earlier stages, this could mean updating your paper to the state-of-the-art of your project and including some preliminary results. For all projects, we highly encourage you to take your reviews into account when revising. Format-wise, you should maintain the same format as your abstract submission (ACM-style papers are welcome to switch from the extended abstract to the full paper template). There is no strict length requirement, but in general length should be commensurate with contribution, and your paper should not exceed proceeding and/or journal article size.
What parts of the conference can I be involved in?
You will only present at the event indicated in your acceptance email. For example, if you were invited for a panel, you will not be a workshop participant. If you are invited to present a poster, you will not be presenting your work on a panel or in the workshop. However, whether you are a panelist, workshop participant, or poster presenter, we invite you to join us for all the events of the conference, Friday and Saturday. The conference is a small one, and you will have ample opportunity to meet fascinating students and faculty from around the country and from Northwestern.
Your Presentation
What kind of presentation should I be prepared to give?
It is entirely up to you how to structure your presentation, but we suggest keeping three guidelines in mind: 1) Your presentation is not your paper. It’s a way to introduce people to your paper and get them excited for more. As such, you should avoid trying to cram all the detail of a paper into the talk. Seriously consider what the most interesting parts of your paper are, and focus on them. 2) This is an interdisciplinary audience – just because a key term is commonly understood in your home discipline does not mean our audience will be familiar. Carefully consider which foundational concepts in your work need defining. 3) If you are reporting results, or especially evaluating the results of statistical tests, be mindful of any critical values that may be different across disciplines. Explain this when you think it might be helpful. For example, if you are reporting personality-based results using psychology-style methods, it may be helpful to note how this work is expected to have an r2 maxing out around 0.3, as many statistical approaches in HCI would expect an r2 of 0.7 or higher to be a good fit.
What is the panel format?
Panels will put four papers with a common theme in conversation with each other and a distinguished discussant from a relevant field. Presentations should be 10 minutes maximum, with an additional five minutes reserved for audience questions. You are free to use any visual aids you wish. We will have a backup laptop available with PowerPoint, but suggest that you bring equipment that you are comfortable with. Make sure to bring any adapters you need – our room system can support an HDMI connection.
What is the workshop format?
More information on the workshop format will be forthcoming as we finalize our plans and faculty mentors. However, we can confirm that there will be no audience for this session, and it will focus on working in small groups and one-on-one with faculty to refine the ideas in your abstract. To start preparing, we recommend using your paper’s reviews to move some of the conceptual work forward on your own.
For the poster session, can I present a PowerPoint in place of a poster?
Possibly. We have a limited number of monitors available; email infosocial@u.northwestern.edu if you interested. However, it is key to note that the monitors would be desktop size; a physical poster may have more impact.