CHI 2026: HAII in Barcelona

From April 13 to 17, 2026, the HAII team headed to Barcelona for CHI 2026, our first CHI since the chair was established in 2025. The group made the trip to the Barcelona International Convention Centre, and a lot was going on at once: Lisa Townsend presented our first CHI paper, which received an Honorable Mention Award; Prof. Dr. Sven Mayer served as Analytics Chair, co-presented the working group's proposal on the future of CHI peer review, and stepped in to present two further papers; and the rest of us spread across workshops, paper sessions, and community meetups.

On Wednesday morning, Lisa Townsend took the stage to present our first CHI paper, “A Tree’s Perspective: Enhancing Nature Connectedness Through Transitional and Multisensory Virtual Reality Experiences,” in the VR and Immersive Technologies for Mental Health session. The paper earned a CHI 2026 Honorable Mention Award (top 5% of submissions), and if you want all the research details, check out the full post we wrote about it.

Lisa not only presented the paper but also served as a student volunteer. She pulled double duty throughout the week as part of the Media Team, meaning many of the conference photographs were actually taken by her.

On Wednesday afternoon, Prof. Mayer also joined Regan Mandryk, Anna Cox, and Marta Cecchinato on stage in the Auditorium for the Upcoming Changes to the CHI Full Paper Peer Review Process: Community Feedback Session. For more information, see the CHI Steering Committee blog post. In the preparation for the conference, he was also an Analytics Co-Chair, surfacing data-driven insights into CHI’26, see the blog posts.

With respect to research, Prof. Mayer appeared twice in the main-program paper sessions, to present joint work on behalf of co-authors who could not attend the conference: "Anticipation Before Action: EEG-Based Implicit Intent Detection for Adaptive Gaze Interaction in Mixed Reality" and "Balancing Accuracy and Embodiment: A Hybrid Perspective for Complex Visuomotor Tasks in VR.”

Matthias Schmidmaier joined the (Re-)Thinking Empathy's Materiality in HCI workshop, which Prof. Mayer co-organized this year alongside long-time hosts Andrea Mauri, Himanshu Verma, and others. We contributed a workshop paper on empathic embodied agents, and the day's socio-material framing of empathic interaction lined up closely with our ongoing work in this space.

A short walk down the hall, Aria Kalforian attended the workshop on “Restoring Human Authenticity in AI-Mediated Communication.” Building on her position paper, she was grouped with researchers exploring closely related questions, and together they discussed challenges around voice, tone, and what it means to stay authentic when AI is involved.

Ankur Bhatt presented at the workshop on Human–AI UI Modalities Across Modalities, where he gave "Collaborative Design of Human-Artificial Intelligence Interaction," joint work with Prof. Dr. Sven Mayer. The paper proposes three interdependent design requirements for human-AI collaboration: multimodal alignment for accurate intent interpretation, interaction-centric explainability, and agency-preserving mechanisms that let users accept, reject, or modify AI suggestions at any point.

A different kind of week for Soumik Bhattacharjee and Toan Nguyen, both of whom spent time on workshops where the medium of interaction was the point.

Soumik attended Embodying Relationships with TUIs, a workshop on human-human communication through tangible interfaces, where teams translated interaction metaphors into low-fidelity prototypes meant to support communication when words are not enough, and the prototypes themselves became the conversation starters.

Toan moved across the PhysioCHI program (another meetup Prof. Mayer helped organise), which gathered the physiological computing community across workshops, meetups, and related paper sessions. On top of that, he also attended the NeuroHCI meetup and the Wearable HCI workshop. Toan also presented his work with Prof. Mayer, titled ‘When Noticing Is Not a Command: Negotiated Agency in AI-Driven Assistive Household Cleaning Robots’ at the BiAlign workshop. In summary, the honest conversations around what still does not work well, signal quality, inter- and intra-subject variability, and real-world deployment were as valuable as the advances themselves, and Toan came back with a sharper sense of his own research direction.

Fiona Lau spent more of her week in paper sessions like “AI for Task Augmentation” than in workshops, working through talks relevant to her research on the cognitive dynamics of human-AI collaboration. Between sessions, she had a number of one-on-one conversations with senior researchers and was struck by how approachable and open to discussion they were, leaving Barcelona with several concrete project ideas and the start of a few international collaborations.

Between sessions and evening socials, we made time for the city: the Sagrada Família with the TU Darmstadt group, a long tapas dinner after an even longer conference day, and some slower hours by the waterfront.