Announcements

UIST 2026 is offering Travel Scholarships to support students and early-career researchers who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference in person due to financial constraints. We are especially committed to increasing participation from people who are from historically underrepresented or marginalized groups in STEM, are based in regions or institutions with limited access to travel funding, or are attending UIST or an international HCI conference for the first time.

The scholarship covers up to $1,000. Depending on the awardee’s needs and ACM conditions, the funding can go toward flights or other travel expenses, accommodation and meals, and registration as needed. Recipients must register for the conference—this can be done after award notifications go out—and must attend in person and sign an attendance form at the registration desk. Reimbursement is processed after the conference by the ACM.

To apply, submit a CV/résumé and a one-page document covering your background, whether you have attended UIST or other HCI conferences before, why you want to attend UIST 2026, your financial need, and an approximate breakdown of your anticipated travel expenses. Materials are reviewed in confidence and shared only with the UIST 2026 Community and General Chairs.

Application deadline: September 15, 2026. Results will be announced on September 22, 2026. Apply via the application form, and see the Travel Scholarships section of the Attending page for the full details. Questions can go to the UIST Community Chairs at community2026@uist.org.

We are excited to announce the eleven workshops that will take place at UIST 2026 on Monday, November 2:

• Bobapedia: A Workshop on Archiving Living Flavor Experiences (full-day)
• Cyber-Physical Systems for Accessibility and Ability Augmentation: Bridging Diverse Communities (full-day)
• Enriching Writing Ecosystems at The Fifth Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (full-day)
• Revibing HCI: Agentic Reimplementation as Community Practice (full-day)
• The World as a Canvas: Materializing Imagination through Prompting the Physical (full-day)
• The AI-Augmented Maker: Challenges and Opportunities in Designing Intelligence for Community-driven DIY Cultures (half-day, morning)
• Haptics beyond Vibration: Generative AI to Advance Multisensory Interfaces (half-day, morning)
• The Personalized Computer for the 21st Century (half-day, morning)
• Drawing on Materials and Processes: A Hands-on Workshop on Building Creative Tools with Grain Spaces (half-day, afternoon)
• Proxemics of Physical AI: Opportunities and Challenges of Augmenting Intimate, Personal, Social and Public Spaces (half-day, afternoon)
• Workshop on Augmenting Human Dexterity: From Multisensory Feedback and Motor Capabilities to Skill Acquisition (half-day, afternoon)

Full-day workshops run 9:00 AM–5:00 PM at the conference venue. Half-day workshops run either in the morning (9:00 AM–12:15 PM) or the afternoon (1:45–5:00 PM), and are held off-site at the University of Michigan Detroit Center in Midtown Detroit, a short QLine ride north of the venue. Room assignments will be announced closer to the conference.

Joining a workshop does not require a separate paper submission. UIST workshops work differently from those at many other HCI venues: organizers cannot require a position paper or any similar longer submission, and there is no expectation that you submit your own previously published work in order to take part. Where space is limited, a workshop may ask you to apply by answering a few open-ended questions with short answers, and that is the extent of what is asked of participants.

Workshop attendance requires a Full Conference + Workshop or Workshop Only registration—see the Attending page for details. If you have already registered, you can still add a workshop afterward by modifying your registration on the CVENT registration site. Spaces will be limited, so we encourage you to sign up early to secure your spot.

We're excited to announce that registration for UIST 2026 is now open!

UIST 2026 takes place November 2–5, 2026 at the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center in Detroit, MI. Workshops and the Doctoral Symposium will be held on Monday, November 2, with the main conference running November 3–5.

Full Conference registration deadlines:

• Early bird: by September 4, 2026
• Regular: by October 2, 2026
• Late / on-site: from November 2, 2026

Early-bird rates start at $500 for student members and $900 for ACM/SIGCHI members. See the Attending page for the full fee schedule, including Full Conference + Workshop and workshop-only options.

A block of rooms is available at the conference hotel—the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, connected directly to the venue—at a special UIST 2026 rate. Rooms are first-come, first-served, so we encourage you to book early.

We look forward to seeing you in Detroit!

We are excited to announce the keynote speakers for UIST 2026!

Pattie Maes (MIT Media Lab) and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) will revisit their landmark 1997 debate in Direct Manipulation vs. Interface Agents: The Debate Continues. Nearly three decades after they first argued whether people are better served by interfaces they directly control or by software agents that act on their behalf, the two will continue the conversation for the age of AI agents. Ben Shneiderman will join the session remotely.

Mark Ackerman, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Michigan, will also deliver a keynote; his talk title will be announced soon.

The UIST 2026 Student Volunteer (SV) program is now accepting applications! Being an SV is a chance to attend the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces, build lasting connections with fellow volunteers and the organizing committee, and engage with the broader UIST community.

Key dates:

• Lottery application opens: June 20, 2026
• Lottery application due: August 1, 2026
• Acceptance notification: August 7, 2026

Apply through the lottery application form. There is also an alternate route: the SV T-shirt design contest—the winner secures an SV spot and has their design printed on the SV T-shirt.

See the full Student Volunteer call for eligibility, duties, and details. We look forward to seeing you at UIST 2026 in Detroit!

Note: students who are accepted as Student Volunteers will receive free conference registration (and will be reimbursed if they have already registered). However, Student Volunteers are responsible for their own travel and lodging.

The UIST 2026 papers track received a record number of submissions this year: 1,259 complete submissions, a 33% increase from UIST 2025. 84 (6.7%) of these papers were rejected prior to full reviews as they were determined to meet "Desk Reject" criteria (27 papers) or "Assisted Desk Reject" criteria (57 papers) (see the CFP for the criteria).

In total, 1,175 papers received 4 reviews: two from committee members (ACs) and two from external reviewers. Each reviewer assigned the paper a score from 1.0 (lowest) to 5.0 (highest). The mean of these scores is called the "Overall Score". For the purpose of analysis, all papers that were Desk Rejects or Assisted Desk Rejects were assigned an Overall Score of 1.0.

The plot below shows the Overall Score across all complete submissions.

The mean of Overall Scores across all complete submissions is currently 2.46 (SD = 0.66) and the median is 2.5. If your paper has an Overall Score of 3.0 or higher, your paper is in the top 23.03% of complete submissions, close to the UIST 2025 acceptance rate of 22.22%. If your paper has an Overall Score of 3.5 or above, your paper is in the top 7.86% of submissions.

Authors should avoid interpreting these statistics as acceptance thresholds or acceptance probabilities, as the Overall Scores are not used directly to determine acceptance or rejection decisions. Instead, acceptance and rejection recommendations are made by Program Committee members considering the content of the submission and rebuttal (if provided), the content of the reviews, discussion among the reviewers, and discussion among Program Committee members at the PC meeting. The PC meeting this year will be held in person for the first time since 2019, in three different locations (Seoul, Ann Arbor, and Copenhagen).

Please see the review announcement email for guidance on deciding whether to prepare a rebuttal, and see the UIST 2026 author guide for more information on the review process.

We wish you the best in preparing your rebuttal and the next phase of the review process.

The UIST Student Innovation Contest (SIC) invites student teams to create compelling interactive systems using novel hardware and software kits. This year, UIST SIC is partnering with EmotiBit to provide selected teams with biosignal sensing kits. Whether in health and wellness, retail, sports, art and music, entertainment, education, or entirely new domains—the possibilities are wide open!

Up to 10 teams will be selected and will showcase their final demos in person at UIST 2026 in Detroit, competing for Jury Awards and the People's Choice Award. All teams get to keep the hardware kits.

Key dates:

• Proposal deadline: June 15, 2026
• Acceptance notification: June 22, 2026
• Final demo: In-person at UIST 2026, November 2–5, 2026

See the full Call for Participation for eligibility, submission format, and more details. Join the UIST SIC and turn your ideas into reality!

Dear prospective UIST 2026 authors,

The best UIST papers have always been dense with ideas, not pages, and we're bringing back the limit to keep it that way. The success of our conference has also meant a steady increase in submissions, and a page limit will help ensure a manageable workload for our reviewers and program committee members.

We recognize that many members of our community do work that is better communicated through images than through text. One alternative would be to provide a word limit rather than a page limit. However, words are difficult to count for both authors and reviewers, while page count can be seen at a glance. To accommodate visually heavy contributions, we are flexible about the length of the appendix within the submitted PDF, where extra supporting images, figures, code snippets, and other supporting material can be placed. However, do note that the main paper body should be fully readable without referring to the appendix. We also encourage authors to explicitly reference the accompanying video from the paper. The videos have always been essential to many UIST contributions.

If your paper is accepted, the reviewers will likely request some changes. To make space for this, you will be allowed to increase the paper by 10% for the final version (1 page for standard length papers, half a page for short papers).

We hope you will embrace this change and distill your excellent research into focused gems.