Insights Into the Program Committee
Authors: Jesse Grootjen, Andrii Matviienko (Analytics Chairs)
Date: 2026-10-21
With the papers’ deadline behind us and the review process started, we would like to give the community a look into the CHI 2027 paper program committee (excluding external reviewers). CHI 2027 organizes the papers track differently from previous years: there are no subcommittees; however, the committee is structured in a more agile subcommunity structure. Therefore, six Paper Chairs, 57 Subcommunity Chairs (SCs), and 642 Associate Chairs (ACs) form one program committee. See a list of all program committee members at https://chi2027.acm.org/authors/papers/program-committee/. Papers are matched to ACs through the expertise areas that authors select at submission. Data used for this post was provided by the committee members and is compared with the committee lists for CHI 2005 to CHI 2026. A separate post will look at the areas of expertise the ACs rated.
A Smaller Committee
After years of steady growth, the committee is considerably smaller than last year. CHI 2026 had 1,109 ACs, while CHI 2027 had 642, a decrease of 42.1%. The main reason is the new review process: CHI 2027 moves away from the 1AC/2AC structure. This year, each paper in full review is managed by one AC and receives three full reviews by external reviewers (How the CHI 2027 Papers Review Process Will Work). The number of SCs stayed about the same (55 in 2026, 57 in 2027), so each SC now manages 11.3 ACs on average, compared to 20.2 last year.
Figure 1: Associate Chairs and Subcommittee Chairs (Subcommunity Chairs in 2027) per year, counted as unique people.
Where the Committee Comes From
Compared to last year, the committee is more Asian and less European, see Figure 2. Members affiliated in Asia make up 18.9% of the committee (11.8% in 2026), Europe 29.5% (35.2%), North America 45.6% (48.7%), and Oceania 5.4% (3.8%). South America (0.5%) and Africa (0.1%) remain barely represented. When a member lists multiple affiliations, we split them equally across the countries of those affiliations.
Figure 2: Continent shares of the ACs and SCs in the years for which our committee lists record countries for nearly all members.
ACs and SCs are affiliated with institutions in 42 countries, one fewer than last year. The USA, Germany, and Canada contribute the most members, see Figure 3. The USA alone accounts for 38.2% of the committee (41.9% in 2026).
Figure 3: Countries of the 2027 ACs and SCs; a member with several affiliations is split equally across their countries.
The committee is also more geographically diverse than last year. The chance that two randomly chosen members come from different countries rose from 79.9% in 2026 to 82.5% in 2027, and the chance for continents rose from 62.4% to 66.7%. The share of members affiliated outside the USA grew from 58.1% to 61.8%, and the three largest countries together account for 54.2% of the committee, down from 59.1%.
Institutions
The committee comprises 399 institutions, of which 237 are represented by a single member. The ten institutions with the most members together account for 20.7% of the committee; the three largest, Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan, have 18 members each. In 2026, the eleven institutions with the most members (two shared tenth place) accounted for 17.1% of the committee.
| Institution | ACs and SCs | % of 2027 | % of 2026 |
| Carnegie Mellon University | 18 | 2.6 | 2.1 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 18 | 2.6 | 0.8 |
| University of Michigan | 18 | 2.6 | 2.3 |
| University of Toronto | 17 | 2.4 | 1.9 |
| University of Washington | 17 | 2.4 | 2.0 |
| Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology | 16 | 2.3 | 0.4 |
| University of Waterloo | 14 | 2.0 | 1.0 |
| 13 | 1.9 | 1.7 | |
| National University of Singapore | 13 | 1.9 | 0.8 |
| University of Melbourne | 13 | 1.9 | 0.6 |
Table 1: The ten institutions with the most 2027 ACs and SCs, with their share of the 2027 and 2026 committees; members count once per listed institution.
Institutions with the most 2027 ACs and SCs; a member counts once for each of their affiliations. The last two columns show the institution’s members’ share of all ACs and SCs for CHI 2027 and CHI 2026. As the committee is 42% smaller, the institutions with traditionally more representation have less representation on it this year.
Relative to its size, the committee draws on more institutions than in earlier years: 57.1 institutions per 100 members in 2027, compared to 40.7 in 2026 and between 40.7 and 54.2 since 2019. The share of members who are the only ones from their institution rose from 23.8% in 2026 to 30.2%. Part of this rise follows from the smaller committee: with fewer members, fewer institutions have several of them.
Figure 4: Institutions per 100 ACs and SCs, and the share of ACs and SCs who are the only members from their institution, per CHI year from 2005 to 2027.
Returning and New Members
CHI has the goal to balance between growth and stability to ensure healthy inclusion of new members while supporting knowledge transfer. This is evident in the number of new ACs as well as returning ACs in the CHI 2027 program committee. 147 ACs (22.9%) joined a CHI program committee for the first time, while 66.5% of ACs also served on the CHI 2026 committee. An additional 10.6% returned after taking at least one year of break. AC has served on two earlier CHI program committees on average.
Figure 5: Number of earlier CHI committees (2005 to 2026) on which 2027 ACs and SCs served as AC or SC.
Next, we examine how the new Minimum Qualifications for Peer Review Roles affected the selection. Compared with the last ten years, more of this year’s ACs have served before: 77.1% of the 2027 ACs served on at least one earlier CHI committee (since 2005) as AC or SC. Between 2017 and 2026, the presence varies between 52.9% to 71.6% (Figure 6). SCs play a critical role in ensuring the rigor and quality of submissions and reviews; therefore, they are all selected from experienced members of the community who are well familiar with the depth and breadth of CHI submissions. For 2027 and moving forward, the new rules ensure SCs have served at least three times as AC or SC for previous CHI conferences. In 2027, all 57 SCs have that experience (See Figure 5).
Figure 6: Share of ACs who served on at least one, and of SCs who served on at least three, earlier CHI committees (since 2005) as AC or SC, per CHI year from 2017 to 2027; people are linked across years by ORCID where known and by name otherwise.
Career Stage
While CHI welcomes young researchers, the Minimum Qualifications for Peer Reviews is designed to ensure all ACs are advanced enough in their careers to make decisions about the quality of the papers. We have information about 414 ACs on when they attained their PhD degree. Half of these 414 ACs obtained their PhD six or fewer years ago, and 49.1% in 2021 or later; 6.1% obtained it before 2006, see Figure 7.
CHI also welcomes experienced researchers from industry who might not have a PhD but have years of experience in the field in industry context. For this purpose, the Minimum Qualifications for Peer Review Roles lists years since the undergraduate degree as a minimum requirement. However, this information is not available in our database. To estimate, we assume a minimum of 3 years for a PhD and 1 year for a Master’s. Our committee members have an estimated mean of 11.2 years after undergrad (min = 4, max = 41). By this estimation, only three members would not have been past the 5 years of undergraduate studies whose qualifications were manually verified.
Figure 7: Year of PhD of 414 ACs; orange bars are expected PhD years.
Thank You
A program committee of this size runs on volunteer time. We thank all ACs, SCs, and Paper Chairs of CHI 2027 for the work ahead.