Typical phases and timeline for a CHI/UIST paper
Prof Dr. Jan Borchers
| Starting Point A | The Hunch | There's an idea, or a problem, that fascinates you and ideally contributes towards your PhD plans |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Point B | Define Research Question | Turn your hunch into an academic question. Sometimes you can start here because you already have a RQ, ideally from your PhD plans |
| 3 weeks | Literature Research | How has this been addressed, and how does your RQ change as a result? |
| 1 week | Idea | How could you add knowledge to the scientific community, and (partly) answer the RQ? |
| 2 weeks | Experimental Design | What study do you need, if any, and what hypothesis would it answer? |
| 1 week | System Design | What technology, if any, do you need to run the experiment? |
| 2 weeks | "Strong" Paper Outline | An outline of your paper with bullet points filled in (except for the actual results of course) |
| x weeks | System Implementation | Build it! |
| 1-4 weeks | User Study / Evaluation | Run the study |
| 1 week | Analysis | Did your experiment validate your hypothesis? Other surprising findings? How to explain them? |
| 2 weeks | Paper Draft | Fill in your outline with what you know by now |
| 1 week | Circulate Draft | Get feedback (on your writeup) from your colleagues internally, then possibly externally |
| 1 week | Final Paper Submission | Condense writing (more punch per page), integrate feedback, proofreading |
| 1 week | Video Submission | Storyboard, texts, scenes, video and still image raw material, voice recording, music where appropriate |
| 19 + x weeks | Total (x = time to build a system) | |
| 1 week | Rebuttal | Write it and have it reviewed internally |
| 2 weeks | Camera-Ready Copy | Clean up the paper and video, address reviewer's comments, de-anonymize |
You can download this Project Outline as an Omni Outliner Pro Template file.
- Above times assume typical i10 workload can squeeze into fewer weeks if you have few other tasks (unlikely)
- Great way to get more resources into a project: work with another PhD student - most of our successful CHI/UIST papers were done by 2 or more PhD students
- Check with your Hiwis and thesis students when they will need to disappear to prepare for and write exams or fulfil other duties.
- It takes Jan 2 full days to completely fine-tune and optimize the writing of a submission-ready, complete paper draft. This means that, if there are multiple submissions due on the same date, you need to have your paper complete for this final review 2 weeks before the final deadline to ensure that it can get that review. If it doesn't, Jan may decide that we withdraw the submission, to avoid submitting sub-par work to the community.