chi-submission

name	chi-submission
description	Use when auditing an ACM CHI Papers submission for PCS readiness, covering the September full-paper deadline, the anonymized single-column template, word-count norms instead of page limits, subcommittee designation, supplementary and video upload, anonymization of external links, and CHI's desk-reject triage before upload.

CHI Submission

Run this audit before uploading to PCS (Precision Conference Solutions) — CHI does not use OpenReview or CMT. Every date and cap below was read from the CHI 2027 Papers pages on 2026-07-08 through search-engine renderings (direct fetches of chi2027.acm.org were blocked in the verification environment); reopen the live pages before acting on any number.

What the CHI 2027 cycle posted

• Full Papers deadline: Thursday, September 10, 2026, on PCS, including videos and supplementary materials — CHI collects everything on one date, unlike venues with a later supplement window. No separate abstract-registration deadline was found for 2027; confirm on the live page rather than assuming (待核实).
• Review format: the single-column ACM submission template (CHI has used single-column reviewing since 2021). The two-column look happens later, in TAPS.
• Length is governed by words, not pages. The posted norm: roughly 5,000–8,000 words for a typical paper (excluding references), submissions at or above 12,000 words face extra scrutiny and desk rejection when the length is not justified, and papers of about 5,000 words or fewer are welcomed as short papers reviewed with expectations commensurate with their size. CHI's standing phrase is that a paper should be the length appropriate to its contribution.
• The submission form requires you to designate a reviewing subcommittee (up to two choices) — a strategic decision, not paperwork; see chi-topic-selection.
• Anonymization is mandatory and extends beyond the PDF: supplemental materials and external links to datasets or code repositories that reveal identity are posted desk-reject grounds.

The anonymization trap specific to CHI

CHI's policy is anonymized review of an HCI paper, which creates leak channels that ML venues rarely have: consent-form headers naming the lab, screenshots of a deployed system showing a university logo, video figures with a narrator saying "at our institution," OSF or GitHub links registered to a named account, and app-store pages for the studied prototype. Cite your own prior studies in the third person and keep the citation; scrub everything else.

# Mechanical pre-upload sweep on the PCS package
pdfinfo paper.pdf | grep -Ei 'author|creator|producer'      # PDF metadata identity
pdftotext paper.pdf - | grep -nEi 'github|osf\.io|our (lab|university|institution)' | head
texcount -inc -sum main.tex | tail -3                        # word count vs the norms
ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration,size video-figure.mp4   # video sanity
unzip -l supplement.zip | grep -Ei 'consent|irb|ethics|\.git/' | head  # named forms

Treat consent forms and ethics-approval letters as the highest-risk files: they carry institution names by design, so upload templated, de-identified versions.

Desk-reject triage, CHI edition

CHI 2026 formalized an assisted desk reject step run jointly by subcommittee chairs and ACs, with expanded criteria — desk screening is now a real stage, not a formality.

Finding at audit time	CHI severity	Realistic fix
Wrong template or altered format	Desk reject	Recompile on the current ACM single-column class
Identity leak in PDF, supplement, or link	Desk reject	De-identify; replace links with anonymized archives
~12,000+ words without justification	Desk reject risk	Cut or explicitly justify length in the submission
No plausible HCI contribution for any subcommittee	Desk reject at SC/PC screening	Re-frame or re-route before the deadline
Video figure missing captions	Review-stage damage	Add a .srt/.sbv file (see chi-supplementary)
Weak subcommittee match	Quiet mis-review	Change the designation, not the paper, if the work is sound

Deadline-week order of operations

1. Lock the subcommittee pair first; it determines who reads everything else.
2. Freeze the manuscript at a defensible word count and record the texcount output.
3. Render and caption the video figure early — encoding and captioning always take longer than the writing team budgets.
4. Assemble supplements from a clean export, then run the mechanical sweep above on the exact files going into PCS.
5. Fill every PCS field (title, abstract, authors, subcommittees, contribution statement fields if asked) a day before; PCS has no post-deadline mercy.
6. Re-download the submitted package and open it cold, the way a 1AC will.

Length is an argument, not a quota

Because CHI reviews words against contribution, padding is a visible defect: a 9,500 word paper whose study supports 7,000 words of claims reads as inflated, and reviewers say so. Cut the third restatement of the findings, move instrument details to the supplement, and keep the method section exactly as long as replication requires — no longer.

Cycle-volatile items — reverify every year

• The September date, the no-abstract-deadline reading, and all word-count wording.
• Subcommittee list and count for the live cycle (the 2026 list is posted on chi2026.acm.org; the 2027 list was not yet published at check time — 待核实).
• Desk-reject criteria wording, which changed as recently as August 2025.
• Whether PCS asks new form questions (AI-use disclosure, data-availability fields).

Output format

[CHI submission status] ready / blocked / needs work
[Word count] <n> words vs posted norms; justification needed? yes/no
[Subcommittees] first: <name> / second: <name or none>
[Anonymity sweep] clean / leaks: <pdf | supplement | links | video | forms>
[Desk-reject exposure] <highest-risk item>
[Fix queue] <ordered actions before September upload>