The SIGCHI Executive Committee is delighted to announce the SIGCHI Awards for 2022. Our fantastic list of awardees for this year includes the following:
- Lifetime Research Award: Yvonne Rogers
- Lifetime Practice Award: Steven Pemberton
- Lifetime Service Award: Geraldine Fitzpatrick
- Social Impact Award: Liz Gerber, Jennifer Mankoff, and Aaditeshwar Seth
- SIGCHI Academy: Mark Billinghurst, Tanzeem Choudhury, Aniket Kittur, Amy J. Ko, Norbert A. Streitz, Jaime Teevan, Marilyn Tremaine, and Roel Vertegaal
- Outstanding Dissertation Award: Aakash Gautam, Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken, and Fred Hohman
You can learn more about their contributions and accomplishments below. Do note the incredibly rich, diverse perspectives they contribute from many corners of the world, different scholarly backgrounds, crossing boundaries in research and practice.
We are deeply grateful to all nominators for putting their time and effort into nominating so many highly accomplished members of our community. We also thank these members of our Awards Committee who painstakingly reviewed all nominations:
- Patrick Baudisch, chair of the Research Award Subcommittee, and members Elisabeth André, Steve Benford, Clarisse de Souza, Anind Dey, Jodi Forlizzi, Chris Schmandt, Fernanda Viegas, and Jacob Wobbrock
- Sunny Consolvo, chair of the Practice Award Subcommittee, and members Zhengjie Liu and Jean Scholtz
- Leysia Palen, chair of the Social Impact Award Subcommittee, and members Shikoh Gitau, Indrani Medhi-Thies, and Jacki O’Neill
- Philippe Palanque, chair of the Service Award Subcommittee, and members Maria Francesca Costabile and Anirudha Joshi
- Niklas Elmqvist, chair of the Outstanding Dissertation Award Subcommittee, and members Jeffrey Bigham, Ann Blandford, Mary Gray, Hideki Koike, Ian Oakley, and Carla Dal Sasso Freitas
SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
Yvonne Rogers
Yvonne Rogers is a pioneer of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and one of the leaders who created the field of Ubiquitous Computing in the early 2000s. She is recognised for foundational research that investigates, invents, and designs technologies that extend and augment what humans can do. Her standing in the field is evidenced most recently by being awarded the Royal Society Milner Medal for Computer Science (2022) and a MRC Science and Suffragette Award in Mathematics and Computing (2020). She has led the creation of an interdisciplinary community; elaborated theoretical foundations; developed the seminal education text in her area and delivered impactful demonstrators across a broad set of domains.
Her research is in the areas of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing and interaction design; she designs interactive technologies that enhance life through augmenting and extending learning, every day and work activities. This involves informing, building and evaluating novel user experiences through creating and assembling a diversity of pervasive technologies. Central to her work is a critical stance towards how visions, theories and frameworks shape the fields of HCI, cognitive science and ubiquitous computing. She has been instrumental in promulgating new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in the wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., “Being Human” manifesto) and has pioneered an approach to innovation and ubiquitous learning.
Yvonne is the director of the Interaction Centre at UCL (UCLIC), deputy head of department for Computer Science and a professor of Interaction Design. She has held professorial positions at the Open University, Sussex University and Indiana University. She has spent sabbaticals at Stanford, Apple, Queensland University, University of Cape Town, University of Melbourne, QUT, UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz. She was awarded a chair of excellence from University of Bremen (2020-2024). She collaborates a lot with industrial partners and has been awarded a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award (2016). She was also elected as a Fellow of the ACM (2018); a Fellow of the British Computer Society (2012) and a Fellow of the ACM’s SIGCHI Academy (2012). She was awarded a prestigious UK EPSRC dream fellowship rethinking the relationship between ageing, computing and creativity. She is a co-author of the number one textbook (soon to be in its 6th edition) on “Interaction Design: Beyond HCI” used throughout the world for 20 years.
SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award
Steven Pemberton
Steven Pemberton is a researcher affiliated with the CWI, the Dutch national research centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His research is in a broad sense about the changes that need to be made to system architecture to make the resulting system more human-oriented. For example, he co-designed the programming language ABC, which was designed using HCI principles including user-centred design, user-testing, and iterative design. It became the basis for Python. He was the first user of the open internet in Europe, and went on to organise workshops at the first Web conference, and co-designed CSS, and lead and co-designed HTML, XHTML, and RDFa. His current work includes leading an international group designing a declarative programming language, and research into how to make data representation-neutral. He has recently initiated a conference series on declarative techniques, and is now starting a foundation to support the further development of declarative approaches.
Steven was editor-in-chief of the SIGCHI Bulletin and then ACM interactions for a decade. He co-chaired the CHI conference in 1997, and co-founded the CHI Nederland local SIGCHI group. Fuller details at www.cwi.nl/~steven.
SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Geraldine Fitzpatrick is Professor of Technology Design and Assessment and leads the Human Computer Interaction Group in the Informatics Faculty at TU Wien in Austria. She is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, an IFIP Fellow, and an IFIP TC-13 Pioneer Award recipient. She has a diverse background, with a PhD in CS&EE (Uni of Queensland), an MSc in Applied Positive/Coaching Psychology (UEL), international experience in academia and industry in Austria, England and Australia, and a prior career as a nurse/midwife. Her research draws across her diverse background to contribute socio-technical and human-centred perspectives on topics including collaboration, healthcare, aging, well-being, and sustainability.
She has been active in the ACM SIGCHI community since the 1990s, serving in many chair roles at diverse ACM conferences including CHI, CSCW, GROUP, Participatory Design, Ubicomp, and Communities and Technologies, also for conferences such as ECSCW, Pervasive Health, INTERACT, and OzCHI. Most recently she was CHI2019 General co-chair and CSCW2018 Papers co-chair. She is a member of the CHI steering committee, and previously of the CSCW steering committee. At ACM level, she is a co-editor of the CACM column ‘Computing Enabled me to…’, sits on the Distinguished Members selection committee, and was an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She has also been involved in various regional ACM and SIGCHI-affiliated activities, e.g., SIGCHI Chapters, SIGCHI Education, ACM-Europe, and Greek-ACM-W. In addition, she is the Austrian representative on the IFIP Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (TC-13), was a long-standing Associate Editor for JCSCW, and is on the selection panel for EUSSET Lifetime Achievement Award.
She is particularly passionate about how we can craft better academic cultures and peer communities. Towards this, she hosts the Changing Academic Life podcast series, and facilitates many colloquia and workshops relevant to PhD students, early career development, academic leadership development, diversity, and mentoring. She also mentors many women and young (and not so young) researchers internationally.
SIGCHI Social Impact Award
Liz Gerber
In the face of increasingly complex challenges like healthcare access and environmental collapse, we need dramatic and sustained innovation. Liz Gerber designs socio-technical systems to broaden participation in the discovery and building of solutions to expand the breadth of challenges addressed and increase the speed of discovery and quality of the solutions.
As a first-year faculty, she and her students started Design for America (DFA) to broadening participation through capacity building. Since 2009, DFA has tackled over 1200 social impact projects. Liz and her team received Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Award for Institutional Excellence in 2018. In 2020, DFA partnered with IBM and the World Design Organization to lead the COVID 19 Challenge to empower people in 33 countries across 17 time zones to address immediate needs of minimizing virus transmission and long-term need of helping communities rebuild after the pandemic.
The DFA model Liz created has spread to China, Taiwan, and Pakistan and inspired new initiatives such as Project Invent which empowers “high school students to invent technologies that solve real-world problems,” Brave Behind Bars which helps incarcerated women “develop skills in digital literacy to help address some of society’s most pressing issues,” and Girl Possible! which “empowers girls to become the change-makers of tomorrow.”
Liz co-created the Delta Lab, the first design research lab at Northwestern’s Design Institute to develop theory and collaborative technology to discover opportunities and build better solutions – especially with underserved populations. Liz further pursued her vision by co-founding the Center for Human Computer Interaction + Design to study, design, and develop interactions to increase community engagement and provide for broad advancement of societal values.
Liz shares her research and social impact practice through her active participation with the ACM SIGCHI community. Liz has co-organized 12 ACM SIGCHI workshops and panels to discuss diversity, access, and inclusion in our digital society. She co-organized the first ever CHI4Good Day of Service in San Jose (2016) and Denver (2017) providing 80+ non-profits with 2800+ volunteer hours of research and coding. She is a founding associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Social Computing where she advocates for societal impact.
When asked what technology she created that she is most proud of, Liz answers “her kids”. She lives by the moto: Love, Learn, and Lead.
Jennifer Mankoff
Jennifer Mankoff is the Richard E. Ladner Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research is focused on accessibility, giving people the voice, tools and agency to advocate for themselves. She strives to make change at both structural and individual levels. For example, her recent work on fabrication of accessible technologies considers not only innovative tools that can enable individual makers, but also the larger clinical and sociological challenges to disseminating and sharing designs. Similarly, her work at the intersection of mental health and discrimination uses sensed data and self-reports to explore how external risks and pressures interact with people’s responses to challenging moments such as discrimination experiences, or classroom access. Dr. Mankoff encourages an understanding of structural factors field wide: her 2010 paper advocating for the integration of disability studies into accessibility research, was recognized with an ASSETS Paper Impact award (for papers 10 years or older). She also co-founded and is the inaugural co-director of the Center for Research and Education in Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE). In addition, she has conducted leading work supporting environmental sustainability and topics relevant to gender and race.
In addition to her research, for her entire career, Dr. Mankoff has worked tirelessly to improve inclusion through a combination of advocacy, activism, direct action, and education. From the student group she founded during graduate school, to help students with repetitive strain injuries access needed technology, to her role as inaugural associate director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Allen School, she has consistently identified and worked to improve barriers to access throughout her career. Within SIGCHI, Jen has spent many years working with, and at times leading, AccessSIGCHI, an independent organization that advocates for improved inclusion of people with disabilities within the SIGCHI community. This work has directly impacted the inclusiveness of numerous SIGCHI conferences and led to the creation of an Adjunct Chair for Accessibility on the SIGCHI Executive Committee, institutionalizing accessibility as an important facet of SIGCHI activities.
Aaditeshwar Seth
Aaditeshwar Seth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the School of Information Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is also co-founder of the social technology enterprise Gram Vaani which operates community media platforms for low-income and rural populations. He is passionate about building appropriate technologies and participatory tools that can empower marginalized and oppressed communities to collectivize and voice themselves. Several million people, and over 150 development organizations worldwide, have touched these technologies and drawn upon the work done by Aaditeshwar’s team at Gram Vaani and his students from the ACT4D (Appropriate Computing Technologies for Development) research group at IIT Delhi. Many elements of their work have also been adopted by government departments and have influenced the use of technologies for development in the social sector. They have won several awards, including the Knight News Challenge for innovative approaches to journalism, the mBillionth award for improving inclusion in access to digital technologies, the Nasscom Social Innovation award for building a scalable and sustainable model for local media, and the World Bank’s Mission Billion award for reducing exclusions in digital ID systems.
Aaditeshwar’s research and teaching is driven by three firm convictions: that technology can definitively lead to social good if it is designed and managed responsibly; that a technological community exclusively committed towards social good is the need of the hour; and that dividing lines between technologists, governments, and corporates on the one hand and ordinary people on the other hand can be bridged to build a more equal world. His upcoming book, Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to Technologists, argues that the primary goal of technology is to bring equality and overturn hegemonic unjust social and economic structures. Building upon the foundations of Marxist humanism, Habermas’ theories of the public sphere and deliberative democracy, and Foucault’s analysis of power, he argues that technologists must learn to navigate the political economy of technology, build an ethos of responsibility in their work, and reshape the internal governance of their workplaces to uphold the same values. He has extensively applied these principles to build tools for community-based development through voice-based participatory media platforms. He is now working on equipping communities to build climate resilience through better natural resource management, and ensure equality through fairer allocation of social welfare for disadvantaged groups.
SIGCHI Academy
Mark Billinghurst
Mark Billinghurst is a Professor at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, and also at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand, directing the Empathic Computing Laboratory in both places. He is well known for his research in Augmented Reality, especially the use of AR for enhancing face to face and remote collaboration, and for AR interface design. In 2002 he graduated from the University of Washington with the first PhD on collaborative AR systems, containing innovations such as AR-based video conferencing, shared transitional AR interfaces, and formal user studies comparing AR to non-AR collaborative systems. He also pioneered AR interface techniques that have significantly influenced the field, such as the Tangible AR interaction metaphor that combines tangible user interfaces for input and AR displays for visual output. Currently he is working on Empathic Computing, which combines AR, VR and physiological sensing in systems that create shared understanding between people.
Mark has received a number of awards. In 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand for his work in AR research and commercialization. In 2012 he was awarded the IEEE ISMAR Lasting Impact Award for the most influential ISMAR paper published in the previous 10 years. In 2013 he was awarded the IEEE VR/VGTC Technical Achievement Award, and in 2019 both the IEEE ISMAR Career Impact Award, and the IEEE VR/VGTC Career Award. In 2022 he was inducted into the inaugural class of the IEEE VGTC VR Academy.
Mark also actively serves the ACM and ACM SIGCHI community. He was the Best of CHI Chair for CHI 2015, the Program Chair for the IUI 2018 conference, and has served on the CHI program committee since 2010. He has played a significant role in the regional SIGCHI conference, including as Chair for CHINZ 2013 in New Zealand, Program Chair for OZCHI 2007 and OZCHI 2016 in Australia, Short Paper Chair for OZCHI 2018, and Posters Co-Chair for OZCHI 2019. He served as an ACM Distinguished Speaker from 2018-2021, and currently serves as Chair of the Interactive and Immersive Experiences Committee for ACM SIGGRAPH.
Tanzeem Choudhury
Tanzeem Choudhury is the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair in Integrated Health and Technology at Cornell Tech, where she directs the People-Aware Computing group. She is the Senior Vice President of Digital Health at Optum Labs, and is a co-founder of HealthRhythms Inc, a company whose mission is to add the layer of behavioral health into all of healthcare. Her group’s research on novel mobile systems for behavioral sensing and health interventions has helped to shape the field of mobile health, specifically digital mental health. Bridging between computer science, health sciences, and psychology, her work is enabling richer and more continuous analysis of people and helping to transform healthcare from a reactive to a proactive and personalized system. Tanzeem received her PhD from the Media Laboratory at MIT and her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Rochester. She has been awarded the MIT Technology Review TR35 award, the NSF CAREER award, and the Ubiquitous Computing 10-year Impact Award and is a TED Fellow, a Kavli Fellow, and an ACM Fellow.
Aniket Kittur
Aniket “Niki” Kittur is a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Center for Knowledge Acceleration. His research explores combining human and machine intelligence at scale to accelerate sensemaking and innovation. His research explores breaking up thinking into components that can be externalized and augmented by other humans or machines outside an individual’s brain, kickstarting a virtuous cycle where everyone can build on others’ work instead of starting from scratch. His work has contributed to building a scientific foundation and computational tools for augmenting large scale social production systems (e.g., Wikipedia); crowdsourcing complex and creative work; accelerating scientific and technological innovation; and making sense of the web.
He is on the editorial board for the HCI Journal, on the steering committee and past general chair for ACM Collective Intelligence, co-founded the CrowdCamp workshop, and is on the advisory board for the Consortium for the Science of Socio-technical Systems. He has given invited keynotes and plenaries at UIST, HCOMP, CSCW, the National Academy of Sciences, and the NSF; he is a Kavli Fellow; and has received a CAREER award and the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence. He received a BA in Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton, and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UCLA.
Amy J. Ko
Amy J. Ko is a Professor at the University of Washington Information School and Adjunct Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. She studies programming, including who does it, how, and why. She has made foundational contributions to the causes of software defects, programming language and API learning, programming strategies, debugging tools, and the social systems and structures that shape who codes. She is also known for her writing online about academia, science, diversity, oppression, and justice and her free and open books on HCI, Software Engineering, Computing Education, and Information. She has also co-founded a Masters in HCI and Design, a Masters in Technology Innovation, a Masters in Secondary CS Teaching, as well as the venture-backed startup AnswerDash, which brought crowdsourced contextual help to market. Her research has influenced developer tools, CS curriculum, educational technologies, and state and federal U.S. education policy, impacting millions of people globally.
Amy received her PhD at the Carnegie Mellon HCI Institute and her B.S.in Computer Science and Psychology from Oregon State University. Of her more than 150 publications, 15 have received distinguished and most influential paper awards, across HCI, Software Engineering, and Computing Education research venues.
Norbert A. Streitz
Dr. rer. nat. Dr. phil. Norbert A. Streitz (Ph.D. in Physics, Ph.D. in Cognitive Science) is a Senior Scientist and Strategic Advisor. He is the scientific director of the Smart Future Initiative founded by him in 2009. Prior to this, Norbert held positions as Division Manager and Deputy Director of the Fraunhofer Institute IPSI (previously GMD-IPSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, during a period of 20 years. During this time, he was also a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Technical University Darmstadt. Before IPSI, Norbert was an Assistant Professor at the Psychology Department, Technical University Aachen (RWTH), Germany, where he founded the ACCEPT Research Group (AaChen Cognitive Ergonomics ProjecT).
At different times of his career, he was a post-doc research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, a visiting scholar at Xerox PARC (in 1990 when Mark Weiser wrote there his seminal paper ‘The Computer for the 21. Century’ and created the field of ubiquitous computing) and at the Intelligent Systems Lab of MITI, Tsukuba Science City, Japan.
Norbert contributed to a wide range of HCI issues with a strong commitment to real interdisciplinary work. His teams had backgrounds in computer science, psychology, ergonomics, engineering, design, architecture, sociology, and economics. Early work with his ACCEPT group investigated mental and conceptual models for designing user-centered systems grounded in a cognitive ergonomics approach. After moving to IPSI, he engaged in the field of hypertext/ hypermedia (many years before WWW). Starting in 1988, he and his team developed the cooperative hypermedia authoring and presentation system SEPIA (Structured Elicitation of Ideas for Authoring). In 1993, the CSCW perspective was extended by different versions of the local and distributed electronic meeting room system DOLPHIN.
Norbert is best known for the innovative and trademarked Roomware® components (interactive and connected walls, tables, chairs, lecterns) and the BEACH software realizing new interaction paradigms, altogether constituting i-LAND (interactive Landscape for Creativity and Innovation). With i-LAND, Norbert and his team created in 1998 a truly ubiquitous computing environment serving as the blueprint for future Smart and Cooperative Buildings, also winning several design prizes and research awards. As a pioneer in ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, Norbert was instrumental in defining the EU-funded proactive initiative “The Disappearing Computer” (2000 – 2004) with 17 projects, chaired the DC steering committee and managed associated projects (Ambient Agoras, Amigo, …). Since 2007, Norbert works on citizen-centered design of our future cities as Humane, Sociable, Self-aware, and Cooperative Hybrid Cities, moving beyond ‘smart-only’ cities by redefining what he calls the ‘Smart-Everything’ Paradigm. A more recent activity addresses issues of smart islands.
Norbert has published or co-edited 33 books/proceedings and authored/co-authored more than 165 papers. He serves on many program and organization committees of international conferences and editorial boards of journals, e.g., JAISE (Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments), JAIHC (Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing), MTI (Multimodal Technologies and Interaction), UAIS (Universal Access in the Information Society) and previously ACM TOCHI. Norbert is on advisory boards of research institutes, large projects, an evaluation expert for international funding organizations and consultant to international companies.
Jaime Teevan
Jaime Teevan is Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where she is responsible for driving research-backed innovation in the company’s core products. Jaime is an advocate for finding smarter ways for people to make the most of their time, and believes in the positive impact that breaks and recovery have on productivity. She leads Microsoft’s future of work initiative, which brings researchers from Microsoft, LinkedIn, and GitHub together to study how the pandemic has changed the way people work. Previously she was Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and led the Productivity team at Microsoft Research.
Jaime is active in the HCI and IR communities, serving in many roles including PC Chair for the inaugural Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval (CHIIR), and is also being inducted into the SIGIR Academy this year. She has been a member of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Human Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC) boards, and received numerous awards for her research, such as the Technology Review TR35, Borg Early Career, Karen Spärck Jones, and SIGIR Test of Time awards. She holds a Ph.D. in AI from MIT and a B.S. from Yale, and is affiliate faculty at the University of Washington.
Marilyn Tremaine
Marilyn Tremaine‘s academic career started as a lecturer and later assistant professor in the University of Michigan Business School. Then in 1988, she became associate professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto, Canada, and a part of the Dynamic Graphics Project. In 1997, she returned to the US. She joined Drexel University as Professor of Computer and Information Systems. In 2001, she joined the New Jersey Institute of Technology where she was a professor and chair of the Information Systems Department. In 2008, she was a Research Professor at Rutgers University with joint appointments in the College of Communication and Information and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is currently teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.
Tremaine is a Distinguished Alumni of the University of Toronto Knowledge Media Design Institute. Tremaine has also been vice president of product development for three software startup companies and a Senior Research Scientist at the EDS Center for Applied Research.
Tremaine co-founded ACM SIGCHI. She was the president of SIGCHI from 1999 to 2002, and served as SIGCHI’s vice-president of communications, finance, and conference planning. Tremaine served on six editorial boards for journals and received two university teaching awards.
Tremaine is known for psychology studies of early interactive user interfaces, collaborative software, and for developing a framework for cost-justifying usability engineering. Other research interests include auditory and multimodal interface design, global software development, and the development of interfaces for the blind and visually impaired, people with Aphasia, or in rehabilitation following a stroke.
Tremaine has developed educational programs in HCI and related fields, such as the Master of Business and Science on User Experience Design at Rutgers University. In addition, she helped develop SIGCHI’s Human-Computer Interaction curriculum resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Tremaine
Roel Vertegaal
Dr. Roel Vertegaal is a Dutch future interaction designer, scientist, entrepreneur and electronic musician who resides in Canada. He is Director of Human-Computer Interaction Research and Senior Principal Scientist at Huawei Consumer Business Group in Shenzhen, China, where he leads the development of new user interface technologies for a wide range of products, from smartphones to smart cars. Prior, Roel directed the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he pioneered many of today’s novel mobile interaction techniques, including Organic User Interfaces: Multi-display thin-film paper-like tablets, and flexible and foldable smartphones that led to the Huawei Mate X and P50 Pocket, Samsung Galaxy Fold and Z product lines as well as the Asus and Lenovo ThinkPad foldable laptops. His rollable tablet work for LG Display led to LG’s rollable TV. Roel is also known for his work on Attentive User Interfaces, developing the original attention-aware interactions and eye sensors featured in Apple‘s iPhone and iPad and the smart pause features in the Samsung’s Galaxy phones, along with calibration-free eye tracking technologies and attention-based advertising displays through his startup Xuuk. More recently, he developed the concept of Real Reality Interfaces: multi-shaped interactive holograms, including flexible light field phones, vision-correcting systems and live-size video conferencing pods that capture and convey humans in full 3D. Dr. Vertegaal is also known for his empirical work, conducting some of the first user studies on flexible display interactions, holographic display interactions and attentive interactions: He was the first to measure and demonstrate the effects of eye contact on turn taking in multiparty conversation, using an eye tracker. Dr. Vertegaal co-founded the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA) and the ACM CHI Conference’s alt.chi track. He graduated over 40 PhDs/MScs, and (co)authored over 150 refereed scientific articles and books with 9000 citations. An innovator in science communication, his work is featured widely in the popular press, from Scientific American to CNN.
Outstanding Dissertation Award
Aakash Gautam
Aakash Gautam‘s dissertation (Designing Socio-Technical Systems to Illuminate Possibilities for a Vulnerable Population) examined the role of design and designers in supporting vulnerable populations. Aakash collaborated with an anti-trafficking organization in Nepal and survivors of sex-trafficking supported by the organization to investigate how socio-technical systems could assist survivors in achieving what they called “dignified reintegration.”
Aakash’s dissertation details the slow, incremental steps in a long-term community-based design journey. The contribution includes: (1) a rich account of the context and how those realities of the ground influenced methods and strategies, (2) a shift away from focusing exclusively on users’ needs by emphasizing approaches that identify and build upon the community’s existing assets, (3) an operationalizable definition of assets and a framework of action that leverage’s community’s assets to realize change at an individual and institutional level, (4) a novel design of a voice-annotated web application that helped overcome barriers due to limited text and digital literacy and helped facilitate empowered technology use and adaptation, and (5) a call for greater accountability and a focus on reciprocity, mutuality, and ethical design action when working with vulnerable populations.
Aakash completed his dissertation at Virginia Tech, where he was supervised by Deborah Tatar. His dissertation was inspired and carried out in collaboration with scholars such as Steve Harrison, Marisol Wong-Villacres, and Neha Kumar. His work has been published in CHI, CSCW, and PDC conferences, and received recognition for contributing to diversity and inclusion at CSCW 2018.
Aakash is now an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at San Francisco State University, where he works with students on community-based technology design that aims to counter the Silicon Valley credo of “move fast and break things.”
Fred Hohman
Fred Hohman is a Research Scientist at Apple where he designs and develops interactive interfaces to help people confidently understand machine learning and data-driven systems. Besides building tools, he also creates data visualizations and writes interactive articles to simply communicate complex ideas.
He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech where he worked with Polo Chau and Alex Endert on enabling machine learning interpretability at scale and for everyone. His dissertation won the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award and was supported by the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. Throughout his research he has collaborated with designers, developers, artists, and scientists while working at Apple, Microsoft Research, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, and Pacific Northwest National Lab. Fred has published across top conferences in human-computer interaction and machine learning, including interactive journals like Distill, and has won awards at CHI, KDD, VIS, and SIGMOD. He received his B.S. in mathematics and physics.
Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken
Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken directs the Institute for Design Research at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland. In 2021, she received her doctoral degree from the Institute of Sports Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, while also working as a Senior Games/HCI Researcher at ZHdK. With her background in sports science and expertise in game research, she specialized in the design and evaluation of serious & applied games for health, fitness, and rehabilitation.
Taking an interdisciplinary, iterative, research-based, and user-centered design approach, her dissertation explores how different movement-based controller devices, exercise concepts, game adaptations, and player modes influence the attractiveness and effectiveness of exergames. The dissertation provides both scientific and practical contributions to the emerging field of exergaming as an easily accessible, innovative training approach, and thereby addresses one of the biggest societal challenges of the 21st century – physical inactivity.
Besides her work in academia, Anna is also founder and CEO of ZHdK-SpinOff Sphery, a fitness gaming startup that brings knowledge from the lab to the field and the market. Anna’s work has won multiple academic and industry awards and formed the basis for various interdisciplinary third-party funded projects as well as numerous follow-up studies.
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