UIST

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 21st ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology -- UIST'08. This year's symposium continues its tradition of being the premier forum for innovations in the software and technology of human-computer interfaces. UIST is an intimate, single-track conference designed to make it easy to exchange both research results and implementation experiences.

Last year's symposium celebrated the first 20 years of UIST. This year's symposium looks forward to the next 20 years. What will our technology interfaces look like 20 years from now? This year's keynote speakers will help us address this question. Dan Olsen, the "father of UIST", will kick off the conference with his perspective on the next 20 years. On Wednesday, Cynthia Breazeal will give a perspective on human-robot interaction, an upcoming field that will become important as the number of robots interacting with humans increases over the next two decades.

UIST'08 attracted 177 submissions (115 papers and 62 technotes) from all over the world. The program committee accepted 34 submissions (25 papers and 9 technotes) after a thorough review process: Each submission was assigned to two program committee members, a primary and a secondary. For each submission, the primary assigned at least two external reviewers and the secondary at least one. After the reviews were received, both program committee members wrote a meta-review for every submission. Authors were then given access to their reviews and metareviews and allowed to write a short rebuttal. The program committee then met face-to-face in San Francisco on 20-21 June 2008 to examine each submission and select the best ones. Submissions were finally accepted only after the authors provided a final version that took committee members' comments into account and was approved by at least one program committee member.