UIST

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2013, held from October 8-11th, in the historic town and University of St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom.

UIST is the premier forum for the presentation of research innovations in the software and technology of human-computer interfaces. Sponsored by ACM's special interest groups on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) and computer graphics (SIGGRAPH), UIST brings together researchers and practitioners from many areas, including web and graphical interfaces, new input and output devices, information visualization, sensing technologies, interactive displays, tabletop and tangible computing, interaction techniques, augmented and virtual reality, ubiquitous computing, and computer supported cooperative work. The single-track program and intimate size, makes UIST 2013 an ideal place to exchange results at the cutting edge of user interfaces research, to meet friends and colleagues, and to forge future collaborations.

We received a record 317 paper submissions from more than 30 countries. After a thorough review process, the program committee accepted 62 papers (19.5%). Each anonymous submission was first reviewed by three external reviewers, and meta-reviews were provided by two program committee members. If any of the five reviewers deemed a submission to pass a rejection threshold we asked the authors to submit a short rebuttal addressing the reviewers' concerns. The program committee met in person in Pittsburgh, PA, on May 30-31, 2013, to select the papers for the conference. Submissions were finally accepted only after the authors provided a final revision addressing the committee's comments.

In addition to the presentations of accepted papers, this year's program includes a keynote by Raffaello D'Andrea (ETH Zurich) on feedback control systems for autonomous machines. A great line up of posters, demos, (the ninth) annual Doctoral Symposium, and (the fifth) annual Student Innovation Contest (this year focusing on programmable water pumps called Pumpspark) complete the program. We hope you enjoy all aspects of the UIST 2013 program, and that you get to enjoy our wonderful venues and that your discussions and interactions prove fruitful.