Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote | Hacker News Reader

Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote

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47 pointsluu10 comments

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.

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.

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.

The scope of HCI has changed because how people use computers has also changed dramatically since the 1980s, when the CHI conference started.

The disciplines that fall under the HCI umbrella has also changed dramatically. In the 1980s, it was cognitive psychologists and computer scientists. Social psychology came in, then design, then ethnography, developing countries, social justice, public policy, and many many more. Having been in the field for almost 30 years, I think that this breadth is part of HCI's strength, though also it's weakness.

Aside: I saw Tom Mitchell (of Machine Learning fame) give a talk about how the field evolved over the past 40 years. What I found fascinating is that, for the most part, there was a single question that drove the field: how to make computers learn from experience (or data)? However, there isn't a single such question for HCI. Again, it's part of its strength and its weakness.

HCI started as a field before the idea of "personal" computers was realized. Now most humans on earth have a computer in their pocket, often with constant access to a global network and infinite addictive feeds of content to consume. I wouldn't call it scope creep, it seems like a natural evolution.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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