chi-submission

CHI Submission

Run this audit before uploading to PCS (Precision Conference Solutions) — CHI does not

use OpenReview or CMT. Every date and cap below was read from the CHI 2027 Papers pages

on 2026-07-08 through search-engine renderings (direct fetches of chi2027.acm.org

were blocked in the verification environment); reopen the live pages before acting on

any number.

What the CHI 2027 cycle posted

• Full Papers deadline: Thursday, September 10, 2026, on PCS, *including videos and

supplementary materials* — CHI collects everything on one date, unlike venues with a

later supplement window. No separate abstract-registration deadline was found for

2027; confirm on the live page rather than assuming (待核实).

• Review format: the single-column ACM submission template (CHI has used

single-column reviewing since 2021). The two-column look happens later, in TAPS.

• Length is governed by words, not pages. The posted norm: roughly 5,000–8,000 words

for a typical paper (excluding references), submissions at or above 12,000 words

face extra scrutiny and desk rejection when the length is not justified, and papers of

about 5,000 words or fewer are welcomed as short papers reviewed with expectations

commensurate with their size. CHI's standing phrase is that a paper should be the

length appropriate to its contribution.

• The submission form requires you to designate a reviewing subcommittee (up to two

choices) — a strategic decision, not paperwork; see chi-topic-selection.

• Anonymization is mandatory and extends beyond the PDF: supplemental materials and

external links to datasets or code repositories that reveal identity are posted

desk-reject grounds.

The anonymization trap specific to CHI

CHI's policy is anonymized review of an HCI paper, which creates leak channels that ML

venues rarely have: consent-form headers naming the lab, screenshots of a deployed

system showing a university logo, video figures with a narrator saying "at our

institution," OSF or GitHub links registered to a named account, and app-store pages

for the studied prototype. Cite your own prior studies in the third person and keep

the citation; scrub everything else.

# Mechanical pre-upload sweep on the PCS package
pdfinfo paper.pdf | grep -Ei 'author|creator|producer'      # PDF metadata identity
pdftotext paper.pdf - | grep -nEi 'github|osf\.io|our (lab|university|institution)' | head
texcount -inc -sum main.tex | tail -3                        # word count vs the norms
ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration,size video-figure.mp4   # video sanity
unzip -l supplement.zip | grep -Ei 'consent|irb|ethics|\.git/' | head  # named forms

Treat consent forms and ethics-approval letters as the highest-risk files: they carry

institution names by design, so upload templated, de-identified versions.

Desk-reject triage, CHI edition

CHI 2026 formalized an assisted desk reject step run jointly by subcommittee chairs

and ACs, with expanded criteria — desk screening is now a real stage, not a formality.

| Finding at audit time | CHI severity | Realistic fix |

|---|---|---|

| Wrong template or altered format | Desk reject | Recompile on the current ACM single-column class |

| Identity leak in PDF, supplement, or link | Desk reject | De-identify; replace links with anonymized archives |

| ~12,000+ words without justification | Desk reject risk | Cut or explicitly justify length in the submission |

| No plausible HCI contribution for any subcommittee | Desk reject at SC/PC screening | Re-frame or re-route before the deadline |

| Video figure missing captions | Review-stage damage | Add a .srt/.sbv file (see chi-supplementary) |

| Weak subcommittee match | Quiet mis-review | Change the designation, not the paper, if the work is sound |

Deadline-week order of operations

1. Lock the subcommittee pair first; it determines who reads everything else.
2. Freeze the manuscript at a defensible word count and record the texcount output.
3. Render and caption the video figure early — encoding and captioning always take

longer than the writing team budgets.

1. Assemble supplements from a clean export, then run the mechanical sweep above on the

exact files going into PCS.

1. Fill every PCS field (title, abstract, authors, subcommittees, contribution

statement fields if asked) a day before; PCS has no post-deadline mercy.

1. Re-download the submitted package and open it cold, the way a 1AC will.

Length is an argument, not a quota

Because CHI reviews words against contribution, padding is a visible defect: a 9,500

word paper whose study supports 7,000 words of claims reads as inflated, and reviewers

say so. Cut the third restatement of the findings, move instrument details to the

supplement, and keep the method section exactly as long as replication requires — no

longer.

Cycle-volatile items — reverify every year

• The September date, the no-abstract-deadline reading, and all word-count wording.
• Subcommittee list and count for the live cycle (the 2026 list is posted on

chi2026.acm.org; the 2027 list was not yet published at check time — 待核实).

• Desk-reject criteria wording, which changed as recently as August 2025.
• Whether PCS asks new form questions (AI-use disclosure, data-availability fields).

Output format

[CHI submission status] ready / blocked / needs work
[Word count] <n> words vs posted norms; justification needed? yes/no
[Subcommittees] first: <name> / second: <name or none>
[Anonymity sweep] clean / leaks: <pdf | supplement | links | video | forms>
[Desk-reject exposure] <highest-risk item>
[Fix queue] <ordered actions before September upload>