2021 SIGCHI AWARDS
SIGCHI LIFETIME RESEARCH AWARD
SCOTT HUDSON
Scott Hudson is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Although his work covers a wide range of HCI topics, a key theme in his research has been the creation of tools and enabling technologies for the construction of interactive systems. Much of his early work concentrated on software tools for implementation of graphical user interfaces, and made influential contributions to areas such as toolkits for user interfaces, and interaction techniques. Later, his research also included substantial work on the use of sensors in interactive devices, including early work on the use of machine learning techniques in HCI. His most recent work has considered computational fabrication techniques such as 3D printing, and was some of the first in this emerging area applied to HCI. Scott has always been known for his inventiveness, creating for example, a pixelated display implemented with air bubbles in water, and a 3D printer which prints in needle felted yarn.
Scott received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1986, and has previously held faculty positions at the University of Arizona and the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Carnegie Mellon, he founded the HCI Institute Ph.D. program, and served as its director for many years. He has regularly served on program committees for the CHI, UIST and other conferences, served as the papers co-chair for CHI, and was one of the principal designers of the current review system. He has served as general and papers chair for UIST, and currently serves as the chair of the UIST steering committee. He received the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2017. Elected to the CHI Academy in 2006, he has published extensively on technology-oriented HCI topics. He has received best paper awards at the CHI, UIST, and Ubicomp conferences, as well as the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence at CMU.
SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award
JOHN T. RICHARDS
John T. Richards received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Oregon in 1978. He joined the IBM Research Division in that same year as part of the team creating the world’s first voice mail system. Incorporating one of the earliest instances of a user interface management system, this work was recognized by the Human Factors Society Alexander C. Williams Jr. Award for “outstanding human factors contributions to the design of a major operational system”. Following this he helped form and subsequently led IBM’s User Interface Institute, a group noted for research in both usability engineering and object-oriented programming. Returning to the user-centered design and development of novel applications after several years, John and his team created: NetVista, a bespoke suite of fully autonomic servers and multi-platform clients enabling K-12 schools to easily and safely access the Internet; SmartPad, IBM’s first mobile e-business application pioneering the concept of retail shopping via a mobile device; and accessibilityWorks, a multi award winning browser extension allowing people with visual, motor, and cognitive disabilities to access the World Wide Web.
John is currently an IBM Distinguished Research Staff Member and has served for several years as an Honorary Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Recent scientific contributions include the development of an empirical and behavioral-modeling approach to quantifying human productivity in parallel and scientific computing (funded by DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems initiative). Recent design and development contributions include the creation of Web experiences illustrating the use of Fairness and Explainability toolkits in furtherance of Trustworthy AI. John is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a recipient of ACM SIGPLAN’s Distinguished Service Award, a member of IBM’s Academy of Technology, and a recipient of nine Outstanding Level awards from IBM.
SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award
WENDY KELLOGG
Wendy A. Kellogg founded and managed the Social Computing Group at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center from 1998-2013. The team produced pioneering work in the design and study of computer-mediated communication (CMC). She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Oregon. Wendy is an ACM Fellow (2002), a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy (2008), and was a member of the IBM Academy of Technology until her retirement in 2014.
Wendy has served in numerous leadership positions in the CHI and CSCW communities. She has chaired CHI (1994), CSCW (2000), served as Papers Chair for DIS (2000), CHI (2005), and CSCW (2017), and as Technical Program Chair for CHI (2011). She has created new venues or been the inaugural chair for CHI events including the Interactive Experience, SIGCHI Best of CHI Awards, and the Interaction Beyond the Individual sub-committee. She has been Workshops Chair (CHI 2004), and Doctoral Consortium Chair (CHI 2010). She has served on SIGCHI’s Conference Management Committee, Publications Strategy Task Force, Publications Board, and Papers Support Committee. She has served as an Associate Editor of ACM’s ToCHI, and on the editorial boards for ACM Queue, and ACM interactions. In addition, Wendy has served many times as an Associate Chair for CHI, Communities & Technologies, CSCW, DIS, ECSCW, and GROUP. She was faculty for CSST (2009), the ACM SIGCHI Writing Workshop for CSCW in Beijing, China (2010), the Doctoral Colloquium (CSCW 2008), and the Doctoral Consortium for NSF Social Computational Systems (2011). She was honored to bring an HCI perspective to the National Academies of Science Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (2002-2005), and the Scientific Advisory Committee for MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media & Learning Hub (2010-2012).
PHILIPPE PALANQUE
Philippe Palanque is Professor of Computer Science at Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier (France) and is head of the ICS (Interactive Critical Systems) research group at IRIT Lab. He graduated with a PhD in formal methods for interactive systems 30 years ago and was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017. Since the early 90’s his research focusses on interactive systems engineering proposing notations, methods and tools to integrate multiple properties such as usability, dependability, resilience and more recently user experience. These contributions have been developed together with industrial partners from various application domains such as civil aviation (Airbus), air traffic management (Eurocontrol) or satellite ground segments (CNES and ESA).
Philippe has a long lasting activity in organizing events which started with the Eurographics workshop on Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems near Toulouse in 1995 which became the SIGCHI EICS conference series in 2009. He is Technical Program co-Chair of the EICS 2021 edition, co-chaired CHI 2014 (with the one-of-a-kind wonderful team) and is a member of their steering committees. He is also involved in IFIP Technical Committee 13 (on HCI) since 1999 (as representative from France) and is currently chairing it (2017-2023).
Beyond attending and organizing events, Philippe involvement with SIGCHI committees started in 2006 with the invitation from Julie Jacko and Mary Czerwinski (SIGCHI president and vice-president) to take the role of adjunct chair for SIGCHI Specialized Conferences. This invitation was renewed by the following presidents (Gerrit van der Veer and Elisabeth Churchill) and during 9 years in total he was supporting SIGCHI conference leaders in running successful events. All of this was only possible thanks to the unerring support from Ashley Cozzi at ACM. In 2016, under the lead of Loren Terveen (SIGCHI president) he was tasked to setup the CHI conference steering committee and define processes (with diagrams) to organize its functioning. He is extremely thankful to Aaron Quigley and Regan Mandryk who agreed to take over these responsibilities and go beyond in providing better support to SIGCHI community.
SIGCHI SOCIAL IMPACT AWARD
MARIA CECÍLIA CALANI BARANAUSKAS
Cecilia Baranauskas is Full Professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in Brazil, currently affiliated as Collaborator in the Institute of Computing, where she developed her academic career, and at the Computer Science Graduate Program of the Federal University of Paraná (PPGInf UFPR). Co-founder and former Director of the Nucleus of Informatics Applied to Education (NIED), at UNICAMP, she is an honorary member of the Brazilian Academy of Educational Technology (abte.org.br) and Member of the Governing Board of UNESCO Institute for Information Technology in Education (IITE).
Senior Lecturer of The Brazilian Computing Society (SBC), appointed by the SBC Special Committee in Human-Computer Interaction, she is one of the authors of the very first HCI book written in Brazilian Portuguese. She has also served the Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (TC13) Board of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) as the Brazilian Representative (2002 – 2007). Her research interests have focused on proposing a socially aware computing perspective for the analysis, design and evaluation of technology-based environments, leading several research projects in the theme. She was also one of the proponents and promoter of one of the Grand Challenges in Computer Science Research in Brazil (2006-2016) – The Participative and Universal Access to Knowledge for the Brazilian Citizen, which had a remarkable impact in the academic communities of Computers in Education and Human- Computer Interaction, among other areas.
As a result of her contributions throughout her career, Cecilia has received different national and international awards, such as the Diploma of Educational Merit “Prof. Darcy Ribeiro” in 2006, the ACM SIGDOC Rigo Award in 2010, the 1st HCI Outstanding Career Award in 2015, and the Academic Recognition “Zeferino Vaz” in 2016. She holds a Research Productivity Scholarship from The Nacional Council for Research (CNPq).
ANDY DEARDEN
Andy Dearden is Emeritus Professor of Interactive Systems Design at Sheffield Hallam University. His research examines our role as interaction designers, and how we can contribute to creating better futures for our shared human society and for our planet. He has worked with private sector businesses, voluntary and community organisations, local government bodies, health services and marginal communities in the global South. His research combines: practical investigations doing design, organising projects and building software using different participatory methods; with reflective questions about the roles, the relationships, the values and the ethics that we adopt as technologists, designers and researchers in thepractice of designing.
He has led multiple initiatives opening up the field of interaction design to new challenges, by building bridges between researchers, designers and people who are affected by what we do. He has led groups in researching: “Designing for Civil Society”, “Technology and Social Action”, “User Centred Design and International Development”, “User Centred Healthcare Design”, “Ethics, Roles and Relationships in Interaction Design with Developing Regions”, and “Researching for Change in a Globalising Asymmetric World”. The Kheti project which he led in partnership with farmers in Sironj, Madhya Pradesh, India, received a 2009 Manthan Award for e-Enterprise and Livelihood. He recently facilitated the development of “Minimum Ethical Standards in ICTD/ICT4D Research” that are being widely adopted in the field. He has published over 100 papers in leading journals and conferences.
JUAN GILBERT
Dr. Juan E. Gilbert is the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and Chair of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida where he leads the Human Experience Research Lab. Dr. Gilbert’s research involves the creation and evaluation of innovative solutions to real world problems. He integrates a wide variety of people, technology, policy, and cultural lenses to address serious societal issues. His research also examines both HCI and AI through his examinations of Bias in AI, Advanced Learning Technologies, Culturally Aware Computing, and attention to people with a wide variety of disabilities and formative experiences. He is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. In 2012, he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring from President Barack Obama. He also received the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2014 Mentor Award. In 2018, he received the Computer Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award. He was also named a 2015-2106 AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador, Speech Technology Luminary by Speech Technology Magazine and a national role model by Minority Access Inc. He is also a National Associate of the National Research Council of the National Academies. Dr. Gilbert was named a Master of Innovation by Black Enterprise Magazine, a Modern-Day Technology Leader by the Black Engineer of the Year Award Conference, the Pioneer of the Year by the National Society of Black Engineers and he received the Black Data Processing Association (BDPA) Epsilon Award for Outstanding Technical Contribution. In 2002, Dr. Gilbert was named one of the nation’s top African-American Scholars by Diverse Issues in Higher Education. In 2013, the Black Graduate and Professional Student Association at Auburn University named their Distinguished Lecture Series in honor of Dr. Gilbert. He has testified before the Congress on the Bipartisan Electronic Voting Reform Act of 2008 and the U.S. House Committee on Administration for the “2020 Election Security – Perspectives from Voting System Vendors and Experts”. In 2006, Dr. Gilbert was honored with a mural painting in New York City by City Year New York, a non-profit organization that unites a diverse group of 17 to 24 year-old young people for a year of full-time, rigorous community service, leadership development, and civic engagement.
Dr. Gilbert’s work in Advanced Learning Technologies increases access to technology for those with limited educational opportunities, particularly by providing personalized instruction for those in under-resourced schools that might not otherwise be able to afford this type of engagement. Additionally, in these environments, his work addresses the use of computer and telecommunication technology by diverse populations. Specifically, this research engages culturally relevant learning environments to support education. This ethnocomputing approach improves access to and engagement with education for a wide variety of populations, particularly traditionally underrepresented groups. Likewise, it is well known in higher education research that holistic admissions increases educational opportunities at all levels, but particularly at the undergraduate and graduate school levels. Dr. Gilbert is using his research in AI to understand how clustering algorithms might better process admissions applications in ways that actually serve to increase holistic diversity rather than select for majority dominant groups as traditional algorithmic approaches have done. In pilot studies with several universities, Dr. Gilbert’s patented AI algorithm for admissions called Applications Quest has resulted in greater diversity in a fraction of the time it takes the admissions committee while yielding the same academic achievement levels as the committee. In short, Dr. Gilbert’s research has made substantial impact in areas of educational technology and learning support not only in terms of basic HCI and AI research but also in applying this work for great impact to address the systemic barriers to high quality education.
SIGCHI Academy
MANEESH AGRAWALA
Maneesh Agrawala is the Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science and Director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University. His work spans human-computer interaction, computer graphics and visualization with a focus on investigating how cognitive design principles can be used to improve the effectiveness of audio-visual media for conveying ideas, information and stories. The goals of this work are to discover the design principles and then instantiate them in both interactive and automated content creation tools. Maneesh has also spent time working closely with journalists to identify the issues that arise in gathering, analyzing and synthesizing information into featured stories. He regularly teaches classes on computational journalism and visualization.
In the SIGCHI community, Maneesh has served as co-program chair for UIST 2011, member of the UIST 2012 doctoral symposium committee, and will be co-general chair for UIST 2022. He has also served as co-chair of the Computation + Journalism symposium 2016 and as an associate editor for IEEE TVCG (2011-2014).
Maneesh has received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
ANN BLANDFORD
Ann Blandford is Professor of Human–Computer Interaction at University College London and formerly Director of UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC) and of the UCL Institute of Digital Health. She has led many research projects on the design of safety-critical systems and information systems and has pioneered new approaches to studying and designing complex interactive systems, with a particular focus on health and wellbeing technologies. Much of her research has been empirically driven, with a strong focus on the situated use of technologies “in the wild”. Her early work cumulated in a suite of analytic methods for reasoning about complex systems, including DiCoT (Distributed Cognition for Teamwork) and CASSM (Conceptual Analysis for Surface and Structural Misfits). She is the lead author on two Synthesis lectures: on Interacting with Information and on Qualitative Methods in HCI. She now works closely with healthcare engineers, clinicians and patients, exploring new approaches to applying HCI theory and methods to practical health technology projects. She has published widely on the design and use of interactive health technologies, and on how technology can be designed to better support people’s needs and values, recognising that people are living complex lives and often managing complex health conditions.
She has an interdisciplinary background, with a first degree in mathematics and several years working in Engineering, followed by a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. She moved into HCI when she joined the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge to work on the AMODEUS project (1991-95). She has served as technical programme chair for various international conferences including IHM-HCI 2001, DSV-IS 2006, NordiCHI 2010 and ICHI 2016. She has chaired national research committees including SSAISB (1997-1999) and the UK Computing Research Committee (2016-18).
JEFF HEER
Jeffrey Heer is a professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Interactive Data Lab. His research contributions include new tools, techniques, and empirical studies in the areas of data visualization, data wrangling, text analysis, language translation, and interactive machine learning. In particular, the visualization tools developed by Jeff and his collaborators – Vega(-Lite), D3.js, Protovis, Prefuse – are used by researchers, companies, and data enthusiasts around the world. Jeff is also a co-founder of Trifacta, a provider of interactive tools for scalable data transformation. Jeff holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, whom he then “betrayed” to join the Stanford CS faculty (2009–2013). Honors include MIT Technology Review’s TR35 (2009), a Sloan Fellowship (2012), the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (2016), the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award (2017), and induction into the inaugural class of the IEEE Visualization Academy (2019).
JONATHAN LAZAR
Jonathan Lazar, PhD, LLM is a professor in the College of Information Studies (the iSchool) at the University of Maryland, where he is the incoming director of the Trace Research and Development Center, one of the oldest centers on technology and disability in the world, and he is also a faculty member in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). His research on interface accessibility for users with disabilities has provided an empirically based understanding of how people with disabilities interact with technologies, influencing researchers and developers, changing interface guidelines, and setting new standards for research methods involving people with disabilities. For instance, his research has provided a foundation for understanding how Blind users interact with menu structures, security features, and frustrating situations, among others. Jonathan Lazar also performed the first HCI research focusing on users with Down syndrome. A hallmark of his research has been his ongoing partnership with disability advocacy groups, including the National Federation of the Blind, the National Down Syndrome Congress, and the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs (G3ICT) at the United Nations.
Jonathan Lazar is widely published, with 56 journal articles, and 102 refereed articles in conference proceedings, edited books, and magazines. Jonathan has authored, co-authored, or co-edited 13 books, including two seminal textbooks: Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction (2010, 2nd edition published in 2017, co-authored with Jinjuan Heidi Feng and Harry Hochheiser), and Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy (2015, co-authored with Dan Goldstein and Anne Taylor). His newest book, Accessible Technology and the Developing World, co-edited with Michael Stein, will be published by Oxford University Press in mid-2021. Jonathan Lazar frequently collaborates with those outside of HCI—including lawyers, librarians, physicians, and speech pathologists. His cross-disciplinary work includes being selected as the Shutzer Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2012-2013, and earning a law degree (LLM) from the University of Pennsylvania focused on disability rights law in 2017-2018. He has advised many U.S. Federal and State agencies and committees about HCI-related issues, and his work has influenced law and policy, including a 2018 Maryland state law on procurement of accessible technology, and the 2013 U.S. Federal regulation issued by the Department of Transportation, Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability in Air Travel: Accessibility of Web Sites and Automated Kiosks at U.S. Airports.
Jonathan Lazar has also been active in the SIGCHI and SIGACCESS communities, serving in many roles, including SIGCHI adjunct chair of public policy from 2010-2015, Digital Accessibility Chair for CHI 2014, co-teaching the “Introduction to HCI” course (with Simone Barbosa) at CHI from 2014-2019, and serving as general chair for the 2021 ACM ASSETS Conference on Accessible Computing. He received the 2016 SIGCHI Social Impact Award, and the 2020 SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility.
FABIO PATERNÒ
Fabio Paternò is Research Director at CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy, where he founded the Laboratory on Human Interfaces in Information Systems. He received Laurea Degree from University of Pisa, and a PhD from University of York.
Fabio is a computer scientist who has dedicated his professional life to the design of methods and tools that can improve the interaction between people and digital technologies in terms of usability, accessibility, and user experience, with attention to both theoretical and application aspects, and possible social implications. His work has been influential in several HCI subcommunities: in the engineering interactive systems area his work on task models, model-based design of interactive applications (he also wrote a book on this topic) and cross-device user interfaces has been widely appreciated, in the accessibility and aging area has provided contributions in terms of guidelines for vision-impaired users, tools for accessibility validation, and ambient-assisted living support, he is considered one of the most influential researchers in the field of end-user development, in which he has worked to the design of solutions for various types of technologies (Web, mobile devices, internet of thing settings, humanoid robots), he was a pioneer in the area of automatic support for usability evaluation, with then a focus on solutions for remote evaluation, and one of the first HCI researchers working on applications and techniques for mobile devices, when such devices started to be available.
He has been the scientific coordinator or one of the principal investigators in several international projects in the HCI area. In such projects he has coordinated multi-disciplinary teams from academy, industry, and end user organizations, considering a variety of applications domains ranging from safety-critical systems to ambient-assisted living, and including ERP applications, museums, …. During such research activities Fabio has contributed to the development of HCI-related academic sub-communities and conferences (he has been paper co-chair at CHI and INTERACT, general co-chair at Mobile HCI, EICS, IUI, IS-EUD, MUM, …). He is currently also in the editorial board of seven international journals in the area of HCI or related fields. His work has produced an extensive list of publications with several of them widely cited (co-author of more than 300 publications with an h-index of 52 according to Google Scholar).
ROSALIND PICARD
Rosalind W. Picard is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, co-founder of Affectiva, delivering technology to help measure and communicate emotion, and co-founder and Chief Scientist of Empatica, providing medical wearables and analytics to improve lives.
Picard has introduced objective tools and techniques to advance the measurement, understanding, and communication of human affective and physiological data for HCI. Her work has focused on integrating signal processing and machine learning together with findings from psychology, neuroscience and neurology, to design interactions that improve human experience. Picard is known internationally for her book, Affective Computing, which helped launch the field by that name. She was a founding member of the original IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems, helping launch the field of wearable computing. Picard is author or co-author today of over three hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles.
Picard is a graduate with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds an SM and ScD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the AAAC, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, recognized for contributions to affective and wearable computing. Her research group’s inventions have been twice named to “top ten” lists, including the New York Times Magazine’s Best Ideas of 2006 for their Social Cue Reader, used in autism, and 2011’s Popular Science Top Ten Inventions for a Mirror that Monitors Vital Signs. Her work with Empatica won a Red Dot Design Award for the Embrace smartwatch for seizure monitoring and alerts. She is a spokesperson for human-centered innovation and for creating technology to serve those who are not flourishing or at risk of not flourishing; she regularly speaks to the public and has given TEDx talks garnering over a million views.
FERNANDA VIÉGAS
Fernanda Viégas is a Principal Scientist at Google, where she co-leads the PAIR (People+AI Research) initiative. She is also an incoming Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she will be affiliated with Harvard Business School and expand her collaborations in machine learning and data visualization across a variety of disciplines. Her recent work in machine learning, with long-time colleague Martin Wattenberg, focuses on improving human-AI interaction with a broader agenda of democratizing AI technology. She is interested in weaving societal expectations and values into the design and evaluation of AI systems.
Fernanda and Martin pioneered the design of collaborative visualization environments on the Web and created a number of data visualization techniques that have become leading tools in data science. The systems their teams have created are used daily by millions of people. Fernanda’s passion for making complex data understandable to lay viewers has led her to visualize wind currents, study collaboration patterns in Wikipedia, and create dynamic maps of news around the world. Fernanda’s visualization-based artwork with Martin has been exhibited worldwide, and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab.
ALLISON WOODRUFF
Allison Woodruff is a human-computer interaction researcher who focuses on societal issues such as privacy, algorithmic fairness and understanding, reputation management, and sustainability and environmental justice. Her work with citizen scientists seeking improved air quality in a low-income community influenced government and corporate environmental agendas.
Allison is known for informing the design of ubiquitous and mobile computing by studying how varied communities and individuals shape and adapt their environments. She has conducted qualitative studies and technology interventions in a wide range of settings such as green homes, street sweeper maintenance yards, amusement parks, museums, and religious environments. Her research with the Orthodox Jewish community is known as a unique engagement with both religious and domestic sociotechnical practice.
Allison has 20+ years experience as a corporate researcher, and she has a strong record of translating her interdisciplinary research into significant product and organizational change. She has co-authored over 70 papers and articles and is a co-inventor on 30 issued patents. She has worked at Xerox PARC and Intel Research and currently works at Google. Allison’s dissertation focused on information density in database visualization, and she holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Outstanding Dissertation Award
JOSH ANDRES
Josh Andres’ dissertation (Integrated Exertion – Understanding the Design of Human–Computer Integration in an Exertion Context) helps to move human-computer “interaction” to human-computer “integration” by considering the active human body in a user-computer partnership. Josh used design research to investigate how to integrate computational machinery with the active human body to extend the user’s abilities. He exemplified this by designing three eBikes that use three different data types, motion, traffic lights, and EEG (electroencephalography) to integrate with the exerting user and make cycling safer and more engaging.
This research is timely and increasingly ethically important, as integrations between users and computers are gaining potency through technological advances that allow the user and computer to work together more tightly. His work can guide interaction designers on how to, and in an inclusive manner, amplify a person’s sensations of their abilities in an exertion context to create “superpower”, “co-operative” and “symbiotic” human-computer partnerships.
Josh undertook his PhD at the Exertion Games Lab in Melbourne, Australia, with support from Monash University, IBM Research Australia, and RMIT University, and it was co-supervised by Florian’ Floyd’ Mueller, Jürg von Känel and Jonathan Duckworth.
ARUNESH MATHUR
Arunesh Mathur’s dissertation (‘Identifying and Measuring Manipulative User Interfaces at Scale on the Web’) presents measurement methods to automatically identify manipulative user interfaces—colloquially known as “dark patterns”—at scale on the web. Using these methods, Mathur quantifies the prevalence of dark patterns in three studies and shows how dark patterns are rampant on the web, thus a pressing concern for society.
First, his research examines whether social media content creators, or ”influencers”, disclose their relationships with advertisers to their audience. Analyzing over 500K YouTube videos and 2.1M Pinterest pins, Mathur finds that only about 10% of all advertising content is disclosed to users. Second, his research examines various types of dark patterns in shopping websites. Analyzing data from 11K shopping websites, it exposes over 1,800 dark patterns on over 1,200 websites that mislead users into making more purchases or disclosing more information than they would otherwise. Third, his research examines the prevalence of dark patterns in political emails from the 2020 U.S. election cycle. Through an analysis of over 100K emails, Mathur finds that over 40% of emails from the median sender contain dark patterns that nudge recipients to open emails and make donations they might otherwise not make. Mathur’s dissertation concludes with technical and policy solutions to combat the spread of these patterns. It further outlays the conceptual foundation of dark patterns and articulates a set of normative perspectives for analyzing the effects of dark patterns.
Mathur’s dissertation contributes datasets and code from these studies on GitHub and describes the findings on public-facing websites. The constituent studies have been published at CSCW (2018, 2019) and CHI (2021). They have received the Future of Privacy Forum’s Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award and the best paper award at CSCW. Mathur has also presented this research at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and various senators’ offices in the U.S.
QIAN YANG
Qian Yang is an assistant professor at Cornell University Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. She received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University HCI Institute. Her work focuses on integrating Artificial Intelligence applications (e.g., predictive modeling, computer vision) into human-centered technology design practices. Taking a Research through Design approach, Yang investigates how to better design human-AI in- teraction by designing them: from decision support systems for life-and-death healthcare decisions to intelligent mobile services, from Natural Language Generation systems to autonomous cars. Yang’s AI system designs have won multiple awards both from academic conferences and industry.