UIST

Welcome to the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), held from October 22nd to October 25th 2017, in Québec City, Canada.

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 diverse areas including graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, fabrication, wearable computing and CSCW.

UIST 2017 received 324 technical paper submissions. After a thorough review process, the 42-member program committee accepted 73 papers (22.5%). Each anonymous submission that entered the full review process was first reviewed by three external reviewers, and a meta-review was provided by a program committee member. If, after these four reviews, the submission was deemed to pass a rebuttal threshold, we asked the authors to submit a short rebuttal addressing the reviewers' concerns and a second member of the program committee to review the paper. The program committee met in person at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA on June 23rd and 24th, 2017, to select the papers to invite for the program. Submissions were accepted only after the authors provided a final revision addressing the committee's comments. Three papers (<1% of submissions) were recognized by the reviewers and the program committee as Best Papers and eight (2.5%) received Honorable Mentions.

In addition to papers, our program includes 26 posters, 56 demonstrations, and 8 student presentations in the thirteenth annual Doctoral Symposium. Our program also features the ninth annual Student Innovation Contest - teams from all over the world will compete in this year's contest, in which we explore how novel input, interaction, actuation, and output techniques can augment experiences that literally "reach out" into the world. Student teams will develop novel input and output techniques for an Arduino Braccio, a desktop-sized and fully-customizable, multi-DOF robotic arm.

The opening keynote will be given by Prof. Gabriella Coleman from McGill University and the closing keynote will be given by Prof. Niki Kittur from Carnegie Mellon University. Both will highlight impactful and sometimes unexpected ways in which interactive technology can be used to shape our society.

Once again: Welcome to Québec City and to UIST 2017!