Pre-CHI Day 2026
1 April 2026
University of Stirling
Date
1 April 2026, 9:30-16:45 GMT
Location
Stirling Court Hotel, University of Stirling, Airthrey Rd, Stirling, FK9 4LA
About
The ACM CHI conference is the premier publication venue in the field of HCI, and Scotland-based researchers are contributing extensively to the programme for the 2026 conference which will be held in Barcelona, Spain in mid-April. The Pre-CHI Day is a chance for the Scottish HCI community to see some of the world-leading research going on across Scotland, and allow those not travelling to Spain to talk to authors first-hand and hear about their work.
Programme
Over the day, we will have presentations from ACM CHI 2026 full paper authors, with the potential for also having a poster or interactivity session as well (depending on numbers).
The event will be hybrid, and virtual attendance and virtual presentation will both be supported. We expect a mixed audience, including researchers of the Scottish HCI community as well as interested students, designers, industry, practitioners etc., as well as newcomers to the field of HCI.
Submit a paperOrganisers
The event is being organised by HCI Theme Leads, Dr Daniel Hernandez Garcia of Heriot-Watt University and Dr John NA Brown of Robert Gordon University with support from SICSA. Please email SICSA if you have any questions.
Submissions welcome
Students and academics at any Scottish institution are welcome to submit CHI-related work to showcase at Pre-CHI 2026. Please provide details of your work here by 22 March 2026 to be included in the programme.
View abstracts on our SIGCHI reading list.
09:30 – 10:00
10:00 – 10:10
Registration & Coffee
Welcome & Opening remarks
Daniel Hernandez Garcia, Heriot-Watt University
10:10-11:20
Session 1
Is there no way home when near-optimal models explain the same data differently?
Adarsa Sivaprasa, University of Aberdeen
From Squishing to Meaning: Exploring Data Physicalization Through Children’s Embodied Experiences
Andres Alberto Ramirez-Duque, University of Glasgow
Holding MenstaRay: Expressing Menstrual Pain through Tactile and Knitted Soft Robotic Interactions
Yixun Li, University of Edinburgh
Caring about Care: A Meta-Narrative Review of HCI Research on Care
Melody Wang, University of Edinburgh
Personal Health Data Communication
Sarah Dunn, University of Edinburgh
11:20 – 11:30
Short break
11:30 – 13:00
Session 2
CreatureConnect: Exploring Shared Control of Multimodal Interaction By People and Lemurs
Jiaqi Wang, University of Glasgow
EmotiV: Exploring Automatic Emotion Sharing through Facial Expression Recognition for Online Co-Watching
Yusen Zhang, University of Glasgow
Investigating Bystander Privacy in Chinese Smart Home Apps
Shijing He, King’s College London
Digital Proxemics as Measures of Social Interaction in Hybrid XR
Iain McLean, University of Glasgow
Characterizing Scam-Driven Human Trafficking Across Chinese Borders and Online Community Responses on RedNote
Jiamin Zheng, University of Edinburgh
Wearing Many Avatars: How Users Express, Shift and Perceive Identity Across Contexts in Social VR
Hongxiang Yang, University of Glasgow
13:00 – 14:00
Lunch
14:00 – 15:30
Session 3
Child-Centred AI-Mediated Collaborative Agency by Design
Vidminas Vizgirda, University of Edinburgh
ORAgen Fables: Advancing the Design and Management of Content Attribution
Chris Elsden, University of Edinburgh
The People’s Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with Users and Experts
Yaxiong Lei, University of St Andrews
Empowering Stakeholders with Participatory Auditing of Predictive AI: Perspectives from End-Users and Decision Subjects without AI Expertise
Patrizia Di Campli San Vito & Eva Fringi, University of Glasgow
“I think this is fair”: Uncovering the Complexities of Stakeholder Decision-Making in AI Fairness Assessment
Lin Luo, University of Glasgow
The (Anti-)Affordance Problem: Effects of Physical Context on Collaborator Placement in Augmented Reality Meetings
Diego Drago, University of Glasgow
15:30- 16:30
Coffee & Poster Session
WebPerceptor: An Open Source Chromium Plugin for Real-Time LLM-Based In-Line, In-Browser Re-Writing of Website Content
Joseph O’Hagan & Mark McGill, University of Glasgow
MathTales: Designing and Studying an AI Agent-Based Story Generation System for Teaching Mathematical Problem Solving to Children
Kejia Zhang, University of Edinburgh
TinyGaze: Lightweight Gaze-Gesture Recognition on Commodity Mobile Devices
Xinya Gong, University of St Andrews
The Content Authorship-Generation Continuum: A Framework for Classifying AI-Mediated Content
Sebastian Vowles, University of Strathclyde
16:30 – 16:40
Closing remarks
John NA Brown, Robert Gordon University