Chapters Corner: From Interest to Contribution: Building an HCI Community Pipeline in Bangladesh through the SIGCHI Dhaka Chapter & HCCS Research Group

There is a particular kind of question students ask when they are on the edge of becoming researchers. Not the clean, well-formed question they write in a proposal, but the raw one that comes out sideways after a supervision session or in a corridor. As someone who has supervised thesis work for more than four years at BRAC University, I have heard that question many times. They were curious about why systems fail people. They wanted to design for communities they actually knew. They had the instinct, but not the structure to hold it. What they did not yet have was a community. No pipeline, no regular gathering, no place where the next question could be asked alongside people who shared it and could push it further. The work we did in early 2026, launching the Human-Centered Computing and Society (HCCS) research group at BRAC University and reactivating the ACM SIGCHI Dhaka Chapter in close succession, was, at its core, an attempt to build that path.