Every year the CHI conference reluctantly rejects submissions from people unfamiliar with the HCI community, because authors do not understand how to communicate their work effectively to the CHI community. We do not want to miss these interesting viewpoints. If you have not previously had a submission accepted to CHI or are unsure how to write a successful CHI submission, you may ask for a mentor. A mentor is a person who will help focus your submission to the CHI audience through one-on-one advising, usually via email. A mentor will also familiarize you with the high standards and strict deadlines of the CHI submission process. Mentors are volunteers familiar with successful submissions in each participation category.

Mentors are available for Papers, Panels, the Doctoral Consortium, Design and Usability, Short Papers, Interactive Posters, and Student Posters. You may request a mentor by sending email to chi2003-mentoring@acm.org. Please include a description of your work (an abstract is a minimum requirement) and an indication of which specific participation category you are interested in.

If you want to ask for a mentor, we strongly encourage you to contact us by:

7 June 2002 for Design and Usability, Demonstrations, Panels and Papers
27 September 2002 for Short Papers and Interactive Posters, Doctoral Consortium, and Student Posters

We recommend that you request a mentor even earlier. A mentor's feedback will be most useful to you if it can influence the way you focus your work, not just the way you write it up for the conference.