Welcome to ACM TEI 2015, the 9th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction, hosted at Stanford University in California, USA from January 15th to January 19th, 2015!
This year's conference continues TEI's tradition of being the premiere forum for research and design on tangible and physical interaction. While we are starting to see consumer electronics for the home, wearable computers for the body, and the internet embedded into the everyday things that surround us, TEI as a community is still digging deeper, planting the seeds for the technologies, methods, and interactions to come. We are especially focused on design as a theme this year, as the conference reception is jointly hosted by Stanford's d.school, Center for Design Research, and Design Program.
The conference starts out with Studios and Workshops that embody the cornerstones of TEI---community building through hands-on making and thoughtful reflection. The main program starts off with the renowned author Dr. Frank R. Wilson's opening keynote, which contemplates our high hopes for the prosthetic technologies we are creating, questioning the "perverse idea that our biology is our undoing, and that only technology can save us." The Demos and Posters provide an interactive venue for attendees to engage with and try out novel designs, interaction technologies, and material experiences. The Art Exhibition explores sensory connections among people and the world around them through interactive artworks. We end with Wendy Mackay's "whirlwind tour" of tangible computing with interactive paper-a view of where we've come from as a community, and a look out towards where we are headed next.
And then there are of course also Papers. In the practice-oriented style of TEI, they are presented as either Talks or Demos or both. Authors could choose their own contribution-matching-paper length ratio, with all submissions subsequently equally subjected to a blind peer review process of at least 3 reviewers. Accepted papers are published in the ACM Digital Library. In total, we received a staggering 222 submissions to the papers category. We accepted 63 papers, making for an acceptance rate of 28%. And finally, in the Work-in-Progress category, we had 72 submissions and accepted 40, making for an acceptance rate of 55%.