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CHI Madness

CHI Madness is a fast-paced experience offering a preview of many of the upcoming sessions, condensed into a single block. Each CHI Madness session is a vibrant, fast-paced concatenation of in-person 25-second talk previews. Still not convinced? Check out some examples of previous presentations. It’s an opportunity to provide more reasons, beyond the scheduling details in the conference program, for why people should come to your talk!

If you have questions or need more information on CHI madness, feel free to contact the madness chairs at madness@chi2010.org.

Participating in CHI Madness

If you are presenting one of the following publications at CHI 2010, you have an opportunity to present during madness:

  • Paper
  • Note
  • Case Study
  • TOCHI Paper

The instructions below are intended for presenters from these venues.

Finalists in the student design and research competitions, alt.chi presentations, and Interactivity demonstrations are also invited to participate. Presenters in these venues will be submitting their presentations through a different process than the one described here, however and should expect to receive additional information about CHI Madness from their venue chairs.

Coordinating more than 300 authors is not easy and we need your help. Here are your action items:

Prepare and Submit Your 25-second CHI Madness Presentation

Deadline: March 5, 2010, 5pm PST

Getting your idea across is easy with the right visual material! Many presenters choose a single slide, while others use multiple auto-advancing slides or a video (CHI Madness Example Gallery). Due to the logistics of Madness you will not have control over the timing of the slides. If you use multiple slides, you need to pre-program them to advance automatically and to finish within 25 seconds. To minimize time loss between presentations, we will compile all slides into four master slide decks - one for each day.

This year, we plan to use a new submission process for CHI Madness. All authors with accepted papers will be able to upload CHI Madness presentation files through the PCS. We will post more details on the process soon. If you have any questions, please contact us at madness@chi2010.org.

To simplify the process of assembling slide decks and ensuring successful playback at CHI, we are placing some restrictions on the material that may be submitted. These restrictions are different from last year, so please check them carefully.

Requirements for CHI Madness Presentations

Ensure that your presentation takes 25 seconds or less. Presentations taking longer will be automatically truncated. This includes videos, powerpoint slides, etc.

You may submit either:

  • a PowerPoint slide deck in either ppt or pptx format (embedded videos are allowed)
  • a video (see video format restrictions below)

Requirements:

  • If there are multiple slides, ensure that the slides automatically advance on a timer.
  • If you embed movies, ensure that the movies are embedded from the same directory as the PowerPoint file. This will help avoid linking problems when we import your slides into our master deck. In this case, please upload a zipped directory of the presentation and video.
  • You must submit any embedded videos (see video format restrictions below).
  • Be wary of your font choices. We will be showing your slides during Madness on a stock Windows machine, with the default selection of fonts. When in doubt, use images instead.
  • If you construct your slides on a Mac, you should test playback on a Windows machine. We will be assembling and showing slides from a Windows machine using the latest version of PowerPoint.
  • Also be wary of including content in the slide master. When we import your slides into our deck, content from the slide master may be lost.
  • NOTE: If you do not have access to PowerPoint, try OpenOffice, which allows you to save a PowerPoint file.

All submitted videos, including those embedded in PowerPoint, must meet the following requirements:

  • Required format: WMV file with standard WM codec. We are not accepting other formats or codecs, due to the increased chances of automatic playback failure in PowerPoint.
  • <100MB in total size for all submitted videos.
  • Video filenames must be less than 128 characters.
  • NOTE: We will contact you if we have problems with your video.
  • NOTE: There are plenty of video format converters available online for all platforms. By converting the video yourself, you will be confident that the conversion process has occurred correctly.
    • On Windows we recommend using Windows Media Encoder (a free download from Microsoft).
    • For those of you on a mac, you can convert a Quicktime MOV file with Flip4Mac. The free version will let you export up to 30 seconds of your MOV file to WMV. Alternatively, you can export your movie as an uncompressed AVI and use Windows Media Encoder to compress as WMV.

Double-check your Madness presentation at CHI

We will offer CHI Madness "office hours" in the speaker prep room during the afternoon break on each day of CHI and 4-6pm on the Sunday before the first Madness session. This is your one and only opportunity to check your madness slides, so please take advantage of it. You will only be allowed to fix compilation errors. This is not a time for you to make late changes or deliver an improved idea.

We will not modify or test presentations in the morning before the Madness session.

Giving your 25 second presentation

CHI Madness is supposed to be fast paced, but we will make sure it won't get hectic. Student volunteers will tell you when it is time to leave your seat and get in line at the stage. Locations will be marked for the speaker and the next two people who will be speaking, and you should move from the line to the appropriate marked location as the speakers ahead of you finish. Be ready to speak the moment that the speaker in front of you finishes. Your slides will be visible for exactly 25 seconds; this is the time you have to get to the microphone and to present.

There are many ways to give a great CHI Madness presentation. Please watch the CHI Madness Example Gallery. The slide deck will be set to auto advance, and you will not have an opportunity to run longer. You can finish early though, in which case we will advance the deck for you.

Thank you for working on this with us. If you have questions, please free to email us at the address linked below.

New This Year: CHI Madness YouTube Channel

This year we are trying something new. We have created a CHIMadness YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/CHIMadness2010. You are invited to submit a madness video to this channel. Please follow the rules of Madness and keep your videos to 25 seconds. This video is not a replacement for a Madness presentation. You must still come to Madness to give your presentation.

We are looking forward to your presentation!

Co-Chairs

Mira Dontcheva, Adobe
Matt Jones, Swansea University
Max L. Wilson, Swansea University
Contact us: madness@chi2010.org