CHI

Welcome to the CHI 2007 proceedings. We believe the technical papers and notes herein present some of the best current work in the diverse and dynamic field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

CHI is the leading HCI conference. Creating the technical program requires a huge investment of time and effort from members of the research community. 840 submissions were processed (571 papers, 269 notes), requiring over 3000 reviews. We thank all the reviewers for the dedication with which they undertook this task. We are particularly indebted to the papers and notes program committee members, also known as the Associate Chairs (ACs). Balancing areas of expertise, ACs were selected from the field's leading researchers. The AC role included recruiting all reviewers, moderating and supervising the review process to ensure a high-quality set of reviews was obtained, initiating and organizing author rebuttal and reviewer discussions and approving final submissions. The estimated time expenditure to serve as an AC was 11 days of full-time work; many committee members spent more time than that. Papers ACs came to San Jose in December 2006 from around the world for two intense days of review, debates, and deliberation; Notes ACs who could not attend the parallel notes meeting in San Jose engaged in a virtual conference. The committee was extremely serious and careful in making CHI paper and note decisions, with many submissions receiving multiple discussions, before and during the program committee meetings. No review process can guarantee perfect decisions, but we are confident that every possible effort was made to ensure fair process and high quality decision-making. This year's program committee certainly has our respect and gratitude, and deserves the sincere appreciation of the entire HCI community. We would also like to thank the ACs and their organizations for underwriting the travel expenses for meeting.

CHI is both a journal-quality archival forum and a community-building conference. To encourage quality in the written presentation of accepted work, all of the 142 full paper and 40 note acceptances were provisional. As a result, authors actively responded and incorporated feedback from the reviews into the final versions of the papers that appear here.

Twenty-eight accepted papers and four accepted notes (5% of submissions) deemed to make an especially noteworthy contribution to human-computer interaction research were nominated by the program committee for Best Paper and Best Note Awards; these nominated papers and notes are identified in the Final Program. At the conference, up to six of these will be announced as winners of a CHI Best Paper Award (1% of submissions), and one note will be selected as an exemplary note. While all papers accepted into the CHI technical papers program have passed a rigorous examination of their quality, the Best Paper and Best Notes Awards signal and reward particularly outstanding contributions in each year.