UIST Workflow

A UIST year is engineered backwards from two fixed points: the paper deadline in late March and the conference in the fall. Between them sits a pipeline with almost no slack for hardware failures, video production, or study scheduling. This skill turns the cycle into a managed project. All dates below are the verified 2026 numbers (checked 2026-07-08); reopen uist.acm.org/<year>/cfp/ before committing a calendar.

The 2026 reference calendar

As of 2026-07-08 the live obligations are the camera-ready chain for accepted papers and the adjunct tracks (Demos, Posters — deadlines 待核实, read the CFP) for everyone else; new submissions target the 2027 cycle.

Backwards plan for a systems paper

Work in reverse from the paper deadline; the ordering below is where UIST projects actually fail, not a generic writing schedule:

1. T minus 0-1 weeks — submission mechanics. PCS uploads, anonymity sweeps, abstract-field consistency (see uist-submission).
2. T minus 1-3 weeks — video figure production. Scripting, capture, edit, captions, anonymization. The video cannot be shot until the system is stable, and it competes with the writing for the same people (see uist-supplementary).
3. T minus 3-6 weeks — evaluation. Technical benchmarks and any user study; IRB approval must predate this window, so file it in the fall.
4. T minus 6-10 weeks — feature freeze. Everything demonstrated in the paper must exist by here. Features added after freeze belong to the next paper.
5. T minus 10+ weeks — build. Include one full hardware re-spin or one major refactor in the estimate, because there will be one.

Owners and risk register

Assign names, not roles, and write the mitigation before the risk fires:

RISK                              OWNER      MITIGATION
Hardware breaks in video week     <name>     Build two units; film B-roll early
Study participants no-show        <name>     Over-recruit 30%; pilot in freeze week
Video render/caption pipeline     <name>     Dry-run export at T-3w with dummy edit
Page-limit overflow (10pp body)   <name>     Appendix plan agreed at T-4w
Rebuttal week hits a holiday      <name>     Pre-draft objection playbook (uist-author-response)
Camera-ready owner on vacation    <name>     TAPS + alt-text buddy named at notification

The two parallel lanes

UIST is one conference with two archival containers, and a healthy group uses both:

• Papers lane (main proceedings): the full pipeline above.
• Adjunct lane (Demos, Posters — separate chairs, separate deadlines, adjunct proceedings): a rejected paper's system can still appear at the conference as a demo; early-stage work can test community reaction as a poster; the same work must not be submitted to both Demos and Posters (the 2026 rule converts it to a demo and drops the poster). Decide the fallback lane on notification day, not after the adjunct deadlines pass.

Planning UIST 2027 from a mid-2026 vantage

For teams reading this in the live window (post-notification 2026), the next Papers deadline is roughly nine months out and the calendar is not yet published (待核实 — watch the 2027 site from its first announcement). Provisional planning rules that survive cycle drift:

• Assume the abstract/paper pair lands in late March ± a few weeks and the conference in the fall; anchor the feature-freeze ten weeks before the assumed deadline and adjust when the real dates post.
• Anything involving human subjects needs ethics approval filed by roughly December; anything involving custom hardware needs its final revision ordered by January (fab and shipping queues do not respect AoE).
• Book video-production capacity — the person, the rig, the edit suite — for the two pre-deadline weeks now; it is the least substitutable resource in the pipeline.
• Draft the contribution list before the spring: if you cannot write three capability claims in January, the project is a 2028 paper wearing a 2027 badge.

The month-by-month cadence (generic UIST year)

Between cycles

• File a post-mortem within two weeks of notification while reviews are fresh: which review criticism was predictable at freeze time?
• Convert the submission's infrastructure — build scripts, benchmark harnesses, capture rigs — into reusable lab property; UIST groups compound or burn out on exactly this.
• Watch the next edition's site from its first announcement: dates shift by weeks between editions and the length rules have changed across recent cycles.

Output format

[Cycle target] UIST <year> papers / demos / posters / DS
[Today's phase] build / freeze / evaluation / video / submission / review / rebuttal / camera-ready / conference prep
[Critical path] <the single task that moves the finish date>
[Risk register] top three, each with named owner
[Next fixed date] <date + obligation>