1st Aachen CHI Paper Writing Workshop
When: Thu July 3, 2025 at 12:30 until Fri July 4, 2025 at 14:00. We will provide lunch on both days.
Where: Main seminar room at our lab in Aachen (directions).
Workshop Slides
250703-CHI-Writing-Workshop.pdf (public version)
Video recordings of the talk segments are linked after each item in the schedule below.
About the Workshop
Publishing your work is part of your job as a scientist, and you want to disseminate your best work at the most impactful international venues, such as the CHI conference in the field of Human–Computer Interaction. This workshop will provide you with an array of tools, techniques, and tips to help you maximize your chances of getting your paper accepted at such top venues. You will get to try out our techniques in hands-on activities throughout the two days.
This workshop is organized by Jan Borchers' Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University, as part of the DFG SPP 2199 "Scalable Interaction Paradigms" Coordinated Research Program.
About the speaker: Jan Borchers has been a full professor in HCI at RWTH Aachen University since 2003, after teaching at Stanford University and ETH Zurich. He sent his first paper to CHI'97, where, miraculously, it got accepted. Since then, he has published around 40 archival papers at CHI, including numerous award-winning papers. He has been an Associate Chair (AC) on the CHI Program Committee for more than 10 years, and he introduced the Interactivity demo format to CHI in 2005. With his lab, Jan works on technical HCI contributions ranging from interactive textiles, soft robots, personal fabrication, and electronics, to interaction techniques for AR and VR, to deceptive pattern countermeasures.
Preliminary Schedule
Thu July 3
- 12:30 Welcome and Lunch (free)
- 13:15 Identifying good research topics and questions: Finding your Unfair Advantages (video recording)
- 13:45 Activity: Discover Your Lab
- 14:15 Wobbrock’s Wisdom: Understanding CHI paper structure and avoiding common pitfalls (video recording)
- 14:30 Activity: Find Your Paper Pitfalls
- 15:00 Coffee Break
- 15:30 The Storyline Technique (hci.ac/storyline) (video recording)
- 16:00 Activity: Your Storyline
- 17:00 Life as an AC: Why We Reject or Accept Your Papers (video recording)
- 17:30 Reflection on Day One
- 18:00 Transfer to Dinner
- 18:30 Dinner at SmashUp! Burgers, Schmiedstr. 5, Aachen (next to Aachen Cathedral)
- 21:00 Drinks at Grotesque Absinth Bar, Rennbahn 1 (around the corner from SmashUp)
Fri July 4
- 09:00 Best Of #chi-authors: Concrete tips from years of advising students writing CHI papers (video recording)
- 09:30 Activity: Debugging Your (Current or Last) Paper
- 10:00 Time Management Techniques: Getting Things Done (GTD) (video recording)
- 10:30 Coffee Break
- 11:00 Activity: GTD Mindsweep and Processing "In"
- 11:30 How To Use AI Writing Tools Without Becoming A Vegetable (hci.ac/biotext) (video recording)
- 12:00 Lunch (free)
- 13:00 CHI Paper Writing: More Vetted Resources (from Lennart Nacke and others) (video recording)
- 13:30 Reflection on Day Two
- 14:00 End