Four CHI '26 Papers I Wish I Had Written
Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote
A researcher reflects on four standout CHI 2026 papers, explaining why each sparked envy and what they reveal about the future of HCI. The papers cover AI writing tools that reduce gender bias in hiring, emotional dynamics in online scams, personal informatics for aligning time use with values, and more. The author candidly assesses whether they could have produced similar work and outlines next steps each paper inspires.
It’s a natural post-LLM follow-up to the currently-abandoned project Reading for Gender Bias, to which I contributed in summer 2020.
- emil-lp
FMI (for my information)
The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the leading international conference on Human-Computer Interaction. CHI 2026 will take [SIC] place in Barcelona.
- AlanYx
It's been a while since I've followed CHI, but didn't it used to be a slightly more technical conference? The second paper in particular ("It Didn’t Feel Right but I Needed a Job so Desperately’: Understanding People’s Emotions and Help Needs During Scams") seems like something that might be more appropriate for a sociology or applied psych journal.
Has it become more of a social-sciences adjacent tech research conference these days? (I'm not being critical, just curious.)
- ktallett
So many papers from conferences like these fascinate me. Of course you get those who are clearly doing research that was easier to get funding for but then you get questions like these where people obviously have some interesting viewpoints on the world.
Computing within limits is another conference that I'm often reading all the papers for whilst being in awe.