Announcements

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!

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.