ISS

We are pleased to host the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS) 2011, held from 13th to 16th of November 2011, in Kobe, Japan. ITS 2011 is the 6th event in a series of annual research workshops and conferences that began in 2006 in Adelaide, Australia as "Table-top", and has subsequently traveled around the world (Tabletop 2007 in Newport, RI, USA; Tabletop and Interactive Surfaces (TIS) 2008 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the ACM International Conference ITS 2009 in Banff, Canada, and the ACM International Conference ITS 2010 in Saarbrücken, Germany). ITS has also broadened in scope beyond its original focus on horizontal computer systems and it becomes a premier venue for presenting research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies. As a still young and very active community, we embrace the growth of the discipline in a wide variety of areas, including innovations in ITS hardware, software, interaction design, and studies expanding our understanding of design considerations of ITS technologies and of their applications in modern society. ITS 2011 will bring together top researchers and practitioners who are interested in both the technical and human aspects of interactive tabletop and surface technologies. As in the last year, ITS 2011 has added a separate day for a doctoral symposium and tutorials before the main conference. We also have co-located workshop Dexis 2011 on November 13th, focusing on the use of interactive surfaces for visual data exploration.

We received 96 full paper and note submissions (56 papers and 40 notes) this year. After a thorough review process, the program committee accepted 32 submissions (acceptance rate of 33.3% in total), which include 19 papers (33.9%) and 13 notes (32.5%). Each anonymous submission was assigned primary and secondary program committee members. The primary committee member assigned at least two external reviewers for each submission, and the secondary at least one. After receiving the reviews, both program committee members wrote a meta-review for every submission. The program committee then met in Redmond, WA, USA on August 25 and 26, 2011, to examine each submission and select the top papers. At that moment all acceptances were conditional and they were finally accepted only after the authors provided a final revision addressing the committee's comments.