CHI Madness

Quick Facts

Message from the Madness Chairs

CHI Madness is a fast-paced session offering a preview of the day’s talks, with each author given 20-25 seconds to talk or show a video. (Check out some examples of previous presentations.) It’s an opportunity for the audience to get an overview of the day, and to raise awareness of your work. Two tips: try and give an overview of the work, not just a teaser, and no need to end with the implied 'come to my talk to see more' (after 150 times, the audience gets it!).

Changes! Following on some experiments last year, we're continually trying to manage the competing interests of giving an overview of the program, the increasing number of accepted papers, the length of the session, and the length of individual talks. To keep the session time to a manageable 45 minutes, this year just the refereed content will be presented at Madness (Papers and Notes). Papers will have 25 seconds to present, Notes will have 20 seconds.

If you have questions or need more information, please feel free to contact the Madness chairs:
Petra Sundström, University of Salzburg

Paul André, Carnegie Mellon

madness@chi2012.acm.org

Participating in CHI Madness

As above, to fit within a number of constraints this year Madness will consist of refereed content: Papers and Notes. Papers will have 25 seconds to present, Notes will have 20 seconds. Instructions below are intended for presenters from these venues. Coordinating more than 300 presentations is not easy and we need your help! Here are your action items:

Prepare and Submit Your 20-second CHI Madness Presentation

Deadline: 23 March 2012, 11:59pm 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 on the day. If you use multiple slides, you need to pre-program them to advance automatically and to finish within 25 or 20 seconds. To minimize time loss between presentations, we will compile all slides into four master slide decks - one for each day.

Accepted Papers and Notes will be able to upload CHI Madness presentation files through PCS. Use the 'Madness materials' box in the Final Submission form for your paper. If you have any questions, please contact us at madness@chi2012.acm.org

To simplify the process of assembling slide decks and ensuring successful playback at CHI, we have to place restrictions on the material that may be submitted. Thanks to everyone who pointed us to online video converters last year, hopefully this should help everyone.

Requirements for CHI Madness Presentations

• Ensure that your presentation takes 25 seconds (if a Paper), or 20 seconds (if a Note). 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).
• We will be showing your slides on a stock Windows machine provided by Logistics. This means:
• Be wary of your font choices. 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 will be lost.
• NOTE: If you do not have access to 0owerPoint, try Open Office, 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.
• (Fallback format: AVI using the XVid compressor.)
• We unfortunately cannot accept other formats or codecs. This is for your benefit, as it reduces the chances of automatic playback failure in 0owerPoint on the day.
• <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.
• Try http://www.online-convert.com/ or http://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/ or http://www.convertfiles.com/

Double-check your Madness presentation at CHI

We will offer CHI Madness "office hours" during the afternoon break on each day of CHI and for part of the day 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. Due to the time and number of presenters involved, we are not able to allow late changes, or delivery of new slides. We will not modify or test presentations in the morning of the Madness session.

Giving Your 20-Second Presentation

CHI Madness is supposed to be fast-paced, but we will make sure it doesn’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 speakers, and you should move from the line to the appropriate marked location as instructed by the madness organisers and student volunteers. Be ready to speak the moment that the speaker before you finishes. Your slides will be visible for exactly 20 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 madness@chi2012.acm.org