CHI

Welcome to the CHI 2005 Papers proceedings. We believe the technical papers you will find here represent the latest and most significant work in the diverse and dynamic field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

As the leading comprehensive conference in the field, creating a CHI papers program requires a tremendous amount of effort and time from the research community. Many of you have contributed as authors, reviewers, or as volunteers supporting the papers process -- including the newly formed CHI Papers Support Committee. We thank all of you for the dedication and seriousness with which you undertook this work. For each of the nearly 400 submissions received this year, thousands of words of reviews, discussion among reviewers, and meta-reviews were written. We are particularly indebted to the papers program committee members, also known as the Associate Chairs (ACs). Balancing areas of expertise and geography, ACs are selected from the field's leading researchers, and in some special cases senior practitioners responsible for the user experience of major products. This year we made several changes to the review process, beginning with expanding CHI papers to 10 pages and using a subcommittee to hand-assign submissions to ACs. Most significantly, the AC role was expanded to include recruiting all reviewers, moderating and supervising the review process to ensure a high-quality set of reviews was obtained, initiating and organizing author rebuttal and reviewer discussions, shepherding revisions for papers needing extra attention, and approving final submissions. All ACs came to Portland in December, 2004 at their own expense and from all around the world for two intense days of review, debates, and deliberation. The expected time expenditure to serve as an AC was 11 days of full-time work and many committee members spent even more time than that. The committee was extremely serious and careful in making CHI paper decisions, with many papers receiving multiple discussions throughout the meeting. While no review process can execute perfectly in every case, we believe this year's process took several steps in the right direction to improve the consistency and quality of CHI reviews and the resulting papers. This year's program committee certainly has our everlasting gratitude, and deserves the sincere appreciation of the entire HCI community.

CHI is both a journal-quality archival forum and a community-building conference. In selecting this year's papers we emphasized "contribution and substance" over "perfection and format" throughout the process -- from the Call for Papers to reviewer instructions to the program committee meeting. Focusing on contribution is critical to the vitality of our field. In order to better support the exposure and discussion of work-in-progress, this year we were able to give a small number of rejected full paper submissions a "ticket" to the 4-page short paper program. To encourage quality in the written presentation of accepted work, all of the 93 full paper and 34 short paper acceptances were provisional. As a result, authors actively responded and incorporated feedback from the reviews into the final versions of the papers that appear here. We believe that the sum of these changes, effectively making the CHI long paper review process more like a journal review while remaining within the constraints of a conference timeline, has had a salutary effect on the quality of the final papers. We hope you will agree.

Finally, this year SIGCHI initiated a "CHI Best Paper" program. 20 of the accepted papers deemed to make an especially noteworthy contribution to human-computer interaction research were designated by the program committee as nominees for Best Paper Awards; these nominated papers are identified in the Final Program. At the conference, 4 of these will be announced as winners of a CHI Best Paper Award. While all papers accepted into the CHI technical papers program are the result of a rigorous review process, the Best Paper Awards gives our community a welcome mechanism for collectively taking notice of particularly outstanding contributions in each year.