This week, the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026) took place at the Barcelona International Convention Center. CHI is widely regarded as the leading international conference in Human-Computer Interaction. As I did for KDD 2024, I had the privilege of contributing as local co-chair, this time alongside Davinia Hernández-Leo.
My collaborators Viviane Ito and Anna Beers presented our recent Big Data & Society paper on Refractive Datasets at a workshop on Sensemaking and AI. Unfortunately, I missed their presentation, as I was only able to attend the final day of the conference due to personal and family circumstances. That said, I still had the chance to attend several engaging talks, including two excellent Wikimedia Research projects: one by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on contextualizing the benefits of broadband through contributor dynamics on Wikipedia, and another by colleagues from the Wikimedia Foundation Research team on fueling volunteer growth based on the case of Wikipedia administrators.
This was my first formal interaction with the CHI community, hopefully the first of many 🙂
Pablo Aragón 