After nearly two years of preparation, we are thrilled to welcome you to CHI 2012 in Austin, Texas. Austin is justifiably proud of being the Live Music Capital of the World (R), and it is home to a world-class university, innovative technology and design firms, superb restaurants, exciting culture and nightlife, and genuinely friendly people--what a perfect fit for our CHI conference. We encourage you to get out and explore the city.

But we also are working hard to lure you back indoors with a phenomenal technical program. At the core of the program are over a hundred technical sessions with research papers and notes, case studies, and other exciting presentations that bring you the best new work on human-computer interaction.

We give thanks to our hundreds of review committee members and our more than one thousand reviewers--they invested thousands of hours to help make sure that we've picked the best content. All of the technical content can be found in the ACM Digital Library.

At the same time, we hope to lure you into our useful courses, engaging panels, and thoughtful invited talks. We're very excited to have Margaret Gould Stewart and Hugh Herr as our keynote speakers. In spanning from Margaret's talk on connecting the world through video to Hugh's talk on designing intelligent orthotics and prosthetics we span the scope of this conference--from social interaction with each other through computing to the very personal and intimate interaction of a human with computerized limbs or other assistive devices. We're also excited to have two special invited talks: Stu Card, SIGCHI's 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award winner, will talk about what interaction science means in today's environment; and Richard Shusterman will bridge HCI and the humanities as he introduces us to Somaesthetics and how it can improve our understanding and experience. We are also honored to have Dan Olsen, Joy Mountford, and Batya Friedman--SIGCHI's Lifetime Research, Lifetime Practice, and Social Impact awardees--each giving talks at CHI 2012. Each of the three of them has made an indelible impact on our field.

The theme of this year's CHI conference is "It's the Experience!" and from the beginning it has been our goal to ensure that CHI 2012 attendees don't only hear about HCI, but experience it with all of their senses. We are therefore delighted to have more than 60 interactivity demonstrations and installations--opportunities for you to see, feel, hear, and interact with exciting new technologies and also to reflect on technologies of the past, thanks to Roger Ibars' HWD collection--a hands-on installation of historic hard-wired input devices. We'll be featuring the full set of interactivity on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday lunchtime; selected installations will be available at other times--check the Interactivity tab for more details. Our video program will provide another way to experience innovative forms of HCI.

CHI 2012 has new depth in Computer Games (including a new student games competition), digital arts, and the humanities. We have an unusually rich collection of Digital Arts installations--we invite you to take some time to interact with the artists and learn about how art--like science, engineering, and design--has its own ways of posing and exploring challenging questions.

And there's so much more. We will also have over 250 posters representing exciting works-in-progress and much more. Student venues at CHI 2012 include our doctoral consortium--an intimate opportunity for extensive mentoring and peer support; student research and design competitions, and the games competition. Come see the competition finalists! And let's not forget CHI Madness--a frenetic but highly efficient whirlwind tour through each days technical papers.

Even before we "formally" open the conference Monday morning, we will have had an intensive weekend of workshops where CHI attendees gather to address emerging fields, tackle challenging questions, and simply support each other in areas of common interest. The mutual support continues both in formal SIG gatherings and in informal gatherings in the convention center halls and at tables in our exhibit hall. We particularly invite you to gather together in affinity groups built around our nine communities--these communities not only shape our program, they also can help enrich your experience as an attendee.