Registration Open, Preprints Available!

A view of the UIST 2021 program on the SIGCHI Program website

Registration for UIST 2021 is now open, and with it starts what I hope will be an interesting experiment for holding a virtual conference. That is because this year the opening of registration also marks a soft opening for the conference as a whole. If you register today, within an hour or so, you’ll get access to the vast majority of the papers that have been accepted to the conference, and you can start interacting immediately with paper authors and other conference attendees on our Discord server. I’m looking forward to seeing momentum build towards the main 5 days of the conference coming up in October!

I have a bunch of other things to share and no clear way to structure it, so please forgive the following bulleted list:

• If you’re on the fence about registering, the full list of accepted papers with abstracts has been made available to everyone on the SIGCHI program website.
• If you work or study in a developing country, we have dramatically lower registration rates for you. We also have a Registration Scholarship for students currently studying in developing countries. Check out our registration web page to learn more about both programs.
• Myself and the Digital Participation Chairs have written an onboarding guide to help you get started with the technology for our virtual conference. It currently covers getting preprint papers and discussing them on Discord, but we will add more content as we get closer to the main conference.
• Whether you register or not, you can still use the “Add to Reading List” feature in the SIGCHI program tool to mark the papers that you are interested in seeing at the conference. We hope to use anonymized data from this feature as one of many inputs to create the schedule for the conference, so please consider using it if you want to give us some signal about which papers should not be scheduled at overlapping times.

I hope that you’re as excited as I am for UIST 2021! I’m sure that I’ll see many of you on the UIST Discord server in the days and weeks ahead.