The SIGCHI Executive Committee is delighted to announce the SIGCHI Awards for 2023. Our fantastic list of awardees for this year includes the following:
- Lifetime Research Award: Gregory Abowd
- Lifetime Practice Award: Deborah J. Mayhew
- Lifetime Service Award: Elizabeth Churchill and Loren Terveen
- Societal Impact Award: Shaowen Bardzell, Munmun De Choudhury, and Nicola Dell
- Outstanding Dissertation Award: Megan Hofmann, Dhruv “DJ” Jain, and Kai Lukoff
- SIGCHI Academy: Hrvoje Benko, Marc Hassenzahl, Steve Hodges, Cliff Lampe, Uichin Lee, Regan Mandryk, Florian “Floyd” Mueller, and Phoebe Sengers.
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 our nominators for putting their time and effort into nominating so many highly accomplished members of our community, and offering text for the introductions below. We also thank these members of our Awards Committee who painstakingly reviewed all nominations:
- Yvonne Rogers, chair of the Research Award Subcommittee, and members Steve Benford, Steven Drucker, Bonnie Nardi, Chris Schmandt, Fernanda Viegas, and Jacob Wobbrock
- Sunny Consolvo, chair of the Practice Award Subcommittee, and members Zhengjie Liu, Steven Pemberton, and Jean Scholtz
- Leysia Palen, chair of the Social Impact Award Subcommittee, and members Elizabeth Gerber, Shikoh Gitau, Jacki O’Neill, and Aaditeshwar Seth
- Philippe Palanque, chair of the Service Award Subcommittee, and members Duncan Brumby, Anirudha Joshi, and Regan Mandryk
- Niklas Elmqvist, chair of the Outstanding Dissertation Award Subcommittee, and members Ann Blandford, Danyel Fisher, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Mary Gray, Raquel Oliveira Prates, and Carla Dal Sasso Freitas
And last but certainly not least, we are extremely thankful to SIGCHI Executive Vice-President Andrew Kun, for coordinating across all the above stakeholders with great care.
SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
Gregory Abowd
Gregory Abowd is a world leader in the invention and application of ubiquitous computing technologies. His work has defined the field over the past three decades, and his intellectual contributions have shaped two major themes in ubiquitous computing: context-aware computing and automated capture and access of live experiences. He has shown how a variety of application areas—the classroom, the home, autism, and health care—benefit from innovations in mobile and ubiquitous technologies. Two particularly trailblazing projects, Classroom 2000 and the Aware Home, demonstrated “living laboratories” to advance technological advancements as well as understanding the impact when those technologies are woven into everyday life. His research has resulted in public-domain software toolkits and commercial solutions in the home and health sectors. As the parent of two sons on the autism spectrum, Gregory initiated a research program in technologies to support this neurodiverse population, resulting in several commercial products. In the process, he started a non-profit, the Atlanta Autism Consortium, that connects stakeholder communities across research, clinical practice, education, and families, and he was recognized by the State of Georgia for his efforts in establishing that organization.
Gregory’s leadership to the research community cemented ubiquitous computing as a core topic in HCI research. He hosted UbiComp 2001 in Atlanta, rebranding and establishing it as the premier forum in the area. He served on the founding editorial board for IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine and was the co-founding Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in HCI. In the mid 2010’s created the Proceedings of the ACM in Interaction, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), serving as the Founding Editor-in-Chief.
Gregory has been recognized by ACM as a Fellow, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, recipient of the SIGCHI Social Impact Award, and the ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Award. After 26 years at Georgia Tech, Gregory recently became Dean of Engineering at Northeastern University.
SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award
Deborah J. Mayhew
Dr. Deborah J. Mayhew was among the first independent consultants in the newly emerging field of software usability, establishing her practice in 1986. She was also among the earliest book authors in this field, first publishing in 1992. Her consulting practice spanned 30 years, starting out during the emergence of personal computers and lasting well into the age of websites and cell phones. In her 30-year practice, Dr. Mayhew provided test data and design advice impacting internal corporate software applications and public websites in many diverse industries and government agencies. A big part of her practice involved teaching in-house courses on usability to corporate software and web development professionals, as well as mentoring other usability practitioners in corporate IT departments.
Dr. Mayhew participated in the founding of SIGCHI, serving as a volunteer organizer in the first CHI conference in 1983, and again in 1986. She offered several courses at CHI for many years. She served as SIGCHI’s Liaison to the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and as a frequent reviewer of conference papers and journal articles.
Dr. Mayhew’s significant impact on the field of HCI included convincing leaders in the software industry that usability engineering was important. It was not only SIGCHI’s conferences and tutorials that paved the way for our field to be accepted, but the first consultants who convinced management that their skills were essential. Dr. Mayhew is foremost among them. She did this by making teaching a significant part of her consulting practice. Her short (30 minute) free course entitled “Introduction to Web and eCommerce User eXperience Design” has had a global enrollment of 42,753 attendees. She has also written four books on how to carry out Usability Engineering, the most famous one being “Cost Justifying Usability.”
SIGCHI Lifetime Service Awards
Elizabeth Churchill
Elizabeth Churchill is a Director of User Experience at Google, past Executive Vice President of the ACM, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Distinguished Speaker.
With a background in psychology (neuro, experimental, cognitive and social), Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, for the past 20 years she has drawn on social, computer, engineering and data sciences to create innovative end-user applications and services as an applied social scientist, interactive technology designer, and social communications researcher. She has built research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC, and FujiXerox. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and honorary Doctor of Sciences (DSc.) from the University of Sussex and the University of Stockholm. In 2016 she received a Citris-Banatao Institute Award Athena Award for Women in Technology for her Executive Leadership.
Elizabeth has contributed extensively to the SIGCHI leadership throughout her career. Between 2008 and 2012, she published more than 20 columns in Interactions magazine, and recently took on the role as co-editor of Interactions magazine, demonstrating continued involvement in this role. She served extensively on the SIGCHI leadership, being elected as Executive Vice-President of SIGCHI for two consecutive periods (2009–2012 and 2012-2015). In her role, she developed external relations between SIGCHI and the community of Usability Professionals; she built, and shared, a SIGCHI education committee that managed to input a strong view on Interactive Systems Design and on Experience Design in the ACM-IEEE curriculum guidelines, and she stimulated input of SIGCHI in the ACM Public Policy Vision development. She further served as SIGCHI VP for Chapters in this period. She has been active within conference organization, serving in myriad organizational roles, including co-chairing: panels, keynotes, papers, posters, student design competitions, workshops, demos, and conferences themselves.
Loren Terveen
Loren Terveen has served the SIGCHI community for over 25 years. Beginning as a reviewer and then Program Committee member for SIGCHI conferences, he later served in major conference and society leadership roles, helping to innovate community processes and expand community focus. Notable in his conference service roles were General Co-Chair of three conferences: IUI 1998, CHI 2002, and CSCW 2023; Program Co-Chair for CSCW 2004 and CSCW 2013; and the first elected Chair of the CSCW Steering Committee. Loren has also had a long history of serving the SIGCHI Executive Committee. He was first Vice President for Membership and Communication (2009—2012), and then served as Adjunct Chair for Awards (2012—2015). In these roles, Loren focused on improving SIGCHI’s internal awards process, establishing subcommittees for various awards, and increasing transparency. Loren was elected President of SIGCHI in 2015 and during his term focused on supporting and expanding worldwide participation in SIGCHI, reorganizing the SIGCHI Executive Committee roles to be more sustainable, establishing a steering committee for the CHI conference to disentangle the management of our flagship conference from the EC, and establishing the SIGCHI Research Ethics committee, which has since taken on an important role in offering guidance on issues such as how to handle ethical issues in paper reviewing. This is certainly not the end of his service to SIGCHI as he is currently General Co-Chair of CSCW 2023 where he is innovating on the future of hybrid conferences and will continue to be a supportive leader in the greater HCI community for years to come.
SIGCHI Societal Impact Award
Shaowen Bardzell
After spending twelve years at the Department of Informatics at Indiana University, Shaowen Bardzell is currently the Professor-in-Charge of the HCI faculty group in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. She will be joining Georgia Tech as the Chair of the School of Interactive Computing this July.
In the past twelve years, Shaowen has changed the field of HCI by launching a major new research area of Feminist HCI; she has engaged with marginalized community groups in the American Midwest and in Asia in pursuit of democracy and participation; and she has promoted care towards vulnerable, marginalized, and/or minoritized members of the ACM community. Shaowen’s research and community engagement address several social impact and advocacy themes, including Feminist HCI, Emancipatory Politics, and Participation; Women’s Health and the Body; Multispecies Co-Survival and Environmental Justice; and Bottom-up Innovation and Decentering the West in Design. Her CHI 2010 paper informed and inspired a transformative research literature in HCI and beyond, comprising hundreds of papers in the Digital Library and Google Scholar, and the cover story for the ACM interactions magazine.
Shaowen has organized venues for others to present their own Feminist and social justice research. She has generously created spaces for others’ work, including workshops and panels on feminism, social justice, and intersectionality (CHI 2013, 2014, 2016; CSCW 2017); special thematic issues of TOCHI, Interactions, Design Issues, Interacting with Computers, Journal of CSCW, Journal of Peer Production; and numerous leadership roles in SIGCHI conferences. She proposed and co-chaired the subcommittee on Critical and Sustainable Computing and Social Justice.
Shaowen’s service to SIGCHI is extensive. In addition to serving in many SIGCHI conference chairing roles, she was Vice-President at Large (2019-2021) on the SIGCHI Executive Committee, focusing on equity and inclusion. In this role, she was also the co-founder and inaugural chair of SIGCHI CARES, which supports members of the SIGCHI community who have been targets of harassment or discrimination. In 2021-2022, Shaowen served as the elected Executive Vice-President of SIGCHI.
Munmun De Choudhury
Munmun De Choudhury is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She has devoted her career toward developing new methods and technologies to help those who suffer from mental health issues, especially those who might be socially or economically vulnerable, underserved, or marginalized. She is best known for laying the foundation of a new line of research that utilizes human-centered computational techniques to more deeply understand and improve mental health outcomes, based in ethical analyses of social media data. In the long tradition of HCI, Munmun is truly an interdisciplinary researcher, combining methods from social computing, machine learning, and natural language analysis with theories from the social and behavioral sciences, medicine, and public health.
Munmun’s work has been recognized within the SIGCHI community and beyond, such as with the 2022 Web Science Trust Test-of-Time Award, the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award, the 2019 Complex Systems Society–Junior Scientific Award, numerous best paper and honorable mention awards from the ACM and AAAI, and features and coverage in popular press such as The New York Times, NPR, and the BBC. She serves on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Social Science. She is also an appointed member of a committee by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that examines current research on social media and young people, and makes conclusions about the impact of social media on their mental and physical wellbeing. Earlier, Munmun was a faculty associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and a postdoc at Microsoft Research. She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Arizona State University.
Nicola Dell
As an HCI and ICTD researcher, Nicki Dell studies, builds, and deploys sociotechnical systems that positively impact the lives of underserved communities around the world, in fields ranging from public and community health to privacy and security. Nowhere has her impact been greater, however, than in her ground-breaking work to improve the digital safety and security for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). The Clinic to End Tech Abuse, which Nicki co-founded in 2018, has quickly emerged as the leading research and clinical effort to combat tech-related IPV abuse, providing direct clinical support to more than 500 individuals and training and guidance to more than 25 support and social service organizations. In addition, CETA has provided freely available tools, trainings, and resources that are widely used by survivors and advocates around the world, and have informed the practice of frontline service workers and support professionals in a growing range of jurisdictions.
Nicki’s work has also inspired consequential changes in law and policy, rewriting the rules by which public law and major online platforms operate. This includes her work to introduce the bipartisan “Safe Connections Act,” signed into law in December 2022, that gives abuse survivors the right to get out of phone plans shared with abusers. Her work on abuser surveillance and monitoring has also led Google to restrict ad serving and Google Play store searches on abuse-related terms, the banning of certain kinds of apps, and the removal of abuse-related videos from YouTube; new training programs for customer support agents at Norton Lifelock; and ongoing advising with the Coalition Against Stalkerware.
In sum, Nicki’s work is exemplary in many regards, representing an unusually ‘full stack’ model of intervention and social impact. She has been the driving force in putting tech-related IPV abuses on the radar of companies, government, and HCI as a field; has offered direct and meaningful support to survivors; and has produced real-world changes that have begun to combat this pervasive and insidious problem.
Outstanding Dissertation Award
Megan Hofmann
Megan Hofmann’s dissertation on “Optimizing Medical Making’’ has taken a strong interdisciplinary approach, both with improved understanding of an important domain, and substantive technical contributions, using methodologies ranging from systems and programming language contributions, to ethnographic methods. This has allowed the work to make contributions in multiple areas such as accessibility, software tools, and digital fabrication. The work introduces and explores a new research topic: Medical Making. This area has had a substantial real-world impact and is poised to grow in the coming years. For example, recommendations made in her work have influenced the clinical review processes of the NIH 3D print exchange and were used by global communities of makers to produce personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the scholarly merit of this work has been recognized with three best paper awards and two honorable mentions. Complimentary to work on Medical Making, this thesis also covers cutting-edge work in the growing space of Automatic Machine Knitting.
Dhruv “DJ” Jain
Dhruv “DJ” Jain is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, also affiliated with the School of Information and Department of Family Medicine. His research focuses on accessibility, and investigates the full cycle of identifying user needs, developing novel assistive technology systems, and studying these systems in the field. He got his Ph.D. from University of Washington and Masters from the MIT Media Lab.
DJ’s dissertation advances the design and evaluation of interactive systems to improve sound awareness for people who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). This research, drawing on his own experience as a person who is hard of hearing, has two goals: first, to better understand how DHH people feel about technology-mediated sound awareness and how these feelings manifest across contexts; and second, to design, build, and study new technical solutions for sound using iterative, human-centered design.
DJ’s dissertation makes contributions across the human-centered design pipeline, including new research methods for disability and technology design, advancing understanding of preferences for sound classification and real-time captioning, designing and implementing new interactive sound awareness systems on IoT devices, smartwatches, and augmented reality glasses, and evaluating these systems in lab studies and field deployments.
The work was honored with an ACM ASSETS Best Artifact award, selected for a CACM Research Highlights article, covered by popular press venues including CNN, New Scientist, and Forbes, directly impacted real-time captioning work at Google, and yielded a released app called SoundWatch in the Google Play store that is being used by DHH people across the world for real-time sound recognition.
DJ’s dissertation exemplifies the use of end-to-end human-centered research to define and advance methods and tools for real-time sound recognition, fundamentally advancing our understanding of DHH people’s needs around sound recognition and providing technical solutions to support those needs.
Kai Lukoff
Kai Lukoff’s dissertation research responds to the problem that mobile devices are omnipresent in many people’s lives, and yet many people are dissatisfied with how much and when they use them. They adopt various devices and apps for their promise to connect with others, to accomplish tasks, and to be entertained, but may then find that their use–or others’ use–of those very same apps and devices gets in the way of connection, productivity, and meaningful entertainment.
Many products exist to help people manage and reduce their ”screen time.” Kai’s work proposed that screen time is a coarse measure facilitated by what can be tracked, rather than by what people actually want to do. As a consequence, many popular digital wellbeing tools are not well-aligned with the full range of people’s goals. Kai offers an alternative approach: user agency. His dissertation describes design patterns that capture people’s attention and undermine their agency, as well as patterns that can increase user agency. It also cautions that people may not always want to increase their user agency, such as when they want to sit back and be Entertained.
To test these design patterns, Kai built an application, SwitchTube, that implements three different interfaces for a video player app: one with design patterns that capture attention, one with design patterns that maximize user agency, and one that allows users to switch between the two previous interfaces. The design that supported switching between interfaces provided users with a greater sense of agency, satisfaction, and goal alignment.
Kai’s research is a ground-breaking and vital contribution to the SIGCHI community of researchers and practitioners who work hard so that the applications, services, and devices they create benefit individuals and society, while reducing harms that may occur through uses that do not benefit them. Kai’s dissertation has provoked, and will continue to provoke, conversations that have helped the HCI, social computing, and ubicomp fields gain a better understanding of what, exactly, we mean by digital wellbeing and how to achieve it.
SIGCHI Academy
Hrvoje Benko
Hrvoje Benko is a Director of Research Science at Meta Reality Labs Research, where he leads research on novel interaction techniques, devices, and interfaces for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). He is responsible for setting the vision and research direction of the HCI research organization at Meta Reality Labs Research as well as driving the research and development on novel wristband input and output solutions for AR and VR experiences. Prior to joining Meta, he was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he conducted highly influential research on topics ranging from multi-touch interaction and room-scale virtual environments to haptic devices and perceptual illusions. Benko received a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University.
Benko and his colleagues won the UIST 2022 Lasting Impact Award for OmniTouch, the first wearable projector+depth-camera system that enabled touch interaction everywhere, and developed the open-source RoomAlive Toolkit, which enables the creation of room-sized dynamic projection-mapping experiences that don’t require headsets or glasses. His team’s work on a research prototype multi-touch mouse was reported on in a paper that received the UIST 2009 best paper award and was later commercialized as the Microsoft Touch Mouse. His team’s novel approach to visualizing contact points on a multi-touch display to allow users to better understand their interactions was incorporated in the Windows OS. Benko has received many best paper awards and honorable mentions at CHI, UIST, ISS, and CSCW, has co-authored more than 100 scientific articles, and is a co-inventor on more than 75 issued patents.
Benko has been an active participant in the SIGCHI community, serving UIST as General Chair (2014), Program Co-Chair (2012), and member of the steering committee; CHI as Associate Chair for many years; and TOCHI as Associate Editor since 2016 and Information Director (2016–2018).
Marc Hassenzahl
Marc Hassenzahl is a professor for “Ubiquitous Design” in the Department of Business Computing at the University of Siegen, Germany. In 2006, he received his doctorate in Psychology with distinction from the Technical University of Darmstadt. After two years as a junior professor for Economic Psychology at the University of Koblenz-Landau, he became professor for Experience and Interaction Design at Folkwang University of the Arts’ faculty of design.
For more than 20 years, Marc has been exploring the theory and practice of designing enjoyable, meaningful, and transforming interactive experiences. His work is transdisciplinary and operates at the intersection of psychology, design research and interaction/industrial design. In 2000, he published his first paper on “hedonic quality” in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the CHI conference in Den Haag, and even then called for a science of joy and beauty in HCI. Since then, Marc has been influential in shaping the field of User Experience, Experience Design, Design for Wellbeing, and Design for Transformation. His unique combination of sound psychological theory, workable methods, and design work has certainly been key to make the experiential perspective on technology a concern of mainstream HCI.
Marc is the broadly cited author of “Experience Design. Technology for all the right reasons” and 216 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. His Attrakdiff questionnaire became the first widely used questionnaire to measure “hedonics”. As early as 2009, he linked user experience to broader concerns for wellbeing. He made influential contributions to the design of technology-mediated relatedness (closeness) and behavior change for health and sustainability. In 2016, he was awarded Design and Emotion Societies’ “Slow Glow Award” for his general contribution to Experience Design. He is member of the editorial boards of Interacting with Computers, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, and ACM Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI).
Steve Hodges
Steve Hodges is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. He is an IEEE Fellow, with over 125 patents, author of over 130 papers, including 85+ at top-tier venues, 5 10-year lasting impact awards (3 ACM Ubicomp, ACM UIST, and IEEE ISMAR) and 11 best paper/honorable mention awards. Not only is Steve accomplished academically (with his many papers at UIST and Ubicomp), he has also made significant community-building contributions, including his groundbreaking work on SenseCam, the BBC micro:bit, and Kinect, through which he has impacted millions of people. He is the rare researcher and technical leader whose significant contributions have spanned research, product and entrepreneurship. He has had true and meaningful real-world impact.
Steve has served on the Program Committee for ACM Ubicomp a number of times and for CHI, organized CHI workshops, gave a Visions talk at UIST, and brought the SenseCam symposium to ACM SIGCHI. He has been publishing at SIGCHI venues for nearly 30 years, with his first CHI paper (a note) published in 1994. He was an Associate Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Pervasive for 10 years, and is on the advisory board for Imperial College’s School of Design Engineering and Lancaster’s School of Computing and Communications.
Clifford Lampe
Cliff Lampe is a leader in the CHI community both through his research and his exemplary service and leadership.
Cliff’s research, much of it published in SIGCHI conferences, is foundational in social computing. His work is at the intersection of technical features and social interactions in large-scale online platforms. His early work was with pioneering online social platforms like Slashdot, Everything2, and Wikipedia. He co-authored a landmark CHI 2007 paper with Nicole Ellison “A Familiar Face(book): Profile Elements as Signals in an Online Social Network,” which uses data and theory from the social sciences to give “designers insight into the importance of the profile and how it works to encourage connections and articulated relationships between users.” We consider this almost obvious now—a hallmark of important scholarship. His ongoing mixed-methods work has shaped how both scholars and corporations understand online social interactions.
Cliff is also an extraordinarily active volunteer in the SIGCHI community. He recently served as the General Chair for CHI 2022. He has been Technical Program Chair at CHI twice, and has served as the Vice-President of Publications for SIGCHI. He was elected to the role of Executive Vice-President of SIGCHI. He served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the ACM in Human-Computer Interaction, and is a Distinguished Member of the ACM. He is also currently serving as the Chair of the CHI Steering Committee. His dedication and thoughtfulness in these roles are unmatched. He doesn’t just fill roles–he re-envisions what is possible. It’s hard to even think about SIGCHI without thinking about Cliff Lampe, and he richly deserves his induction into the SIGCHI Academy.
Uichin Lee
Uichin Lee is a professor and Director of the Interactive Computing Lab at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology).
His research in the area of positive computing has had real-world societal impact. He is truly an interdisciplinary HCI researcher, making significant contributions in both system design and in understanding human behavior. His work on digital wellbeing has counteracted problematic usage behaviors, his novel computing systems have improved self-regulation of smartphone use, and he has designed and implemented successful digital health interventions for promoting physical and mental wellbeing. Thousands of people use his positive computing apps every day. He has co-authored more than 160 peer-reviewed articles and been granted 25 patents, including 6 U.S. patents. His system Lock n’ LoL (Lock Your Smartphone and Laugh Out Loud), which won a CHI Best Paper award, is an example of his innovative research designed to mitigate social exclusion. Another system, Let’s FOCUS, deployed and evaluated in a longitudinal study with hundreds of students, has served as an important foundation for designing technical interventions in learning contexts. He has also been a pioneer in designing Just-in-Time interventions for health and well-being.
His leadership is noteworthy not only in research but also in service. Uichin was one of a group of international experts who drafted The Riyadh Declaration on Digital Health, a call to action for globally disseminating state-of-the art evidence-based practices and data for countries to use in combating pandemics and for developing more effective health systems. Uichin has been instrumental in establishing and furthering HCI in Korea, raising its presence in the country through setting up the SIGCHI Korea chapter, chairing it since 2018 and he has also chaired the Korea HCI conference. In 2021, he served as the Program Chair for the SIGCHI Ubicomp conference and has been an editor at PACM HCI (CSCW) and PACM IMWUT (Ubicomp).
Regan Mandryk
Regan Mandryk is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Digital Gaming Technologies and Experiences and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. Her objective is to design, develop, and evaluate novel technologies that improve the social, cognitive, and emotional wellbeing of people. Having researched games since her first publications in the early 2000s, she has been at the forefront of legitimizing games research in HCI, with more than 200 top-tier publications, including 25 best paper awards and nominations. Together with her trainees, she has made foundational and significant contributions in modeling the emotional experience and personality of players, harnessing game motivation, facilitating social connection through play, combating toxicity within multiplayer games, and harnessing games for the assessment and treatment of mental health. Her many trainees have gone on to faculty positions at universities within Canada and in Europe, and to industrial research positions at companies like Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Meta.
Regan led Games research in the Canadian GRAND Network, led the first ever Canadian graduate training program on games user research (SWaGUR.ca), and established the gaming research community within SIGCHI. She co-founded CHI PLAY in 2014: she was Papers Chair in 2014, 2015, 2023, and 2024, the Technical Program Chair in 2016 and Co-Chair of the inaugural Games and Play subcommittee for CHI in 2016, which was also the first virtual program committee at CHI. She chaired CHI in 2018 and chaired the CHI Steering Committee from 2019 to 2022. She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2014, received the University of Saskatchewan New Researcher Award in 2015, the Canadian Association for Computer Science’s Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science Researcher Prize in 2016, and the prestigious E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship from NSERC in 2018.
Florian “Floyd” Mueller
Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is a Professor of Future Interfaces at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia where he directs the award-winning Exertion Games Lab. Previously, he was at RMIT, Stanford, University of Melbourne, Microsoft Research, MIT Media Lab, Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Labs, Xerox Parc, and the industrial research organization CSIRO. Floyd’s games were played by over 20,000 players across 3 continents and were featured on the BBC, ABC, Discovery Science Channel and Wired magazine.
His contributions have been widely recognized, for example, he is an inaugural honouree of the Australian Design Centre’s Design Honours. His work has been shortlisted for the European Innovation Games Award (next to Nintendo’s WiiFit), has received a Nokia Mindtrek Ubimedia Award, and was commissioned by Wired’s Nextfest.
He has written over 300 publications, mostly in the premier publication outlets in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) such as CHI, CHI PLAY, DIS, TEI, Ubicomp (IMWUT), UIST, as well as ToCHI, and IJHCS. He was in the Top 100 Most Productive HCI researcher list and received 9 “Best Paper Honorable Mentions Top 5%” (5x CHI, 2x DIS, 2x CHI PLAY) as well as 2 “Best Paper Top 1%” (CHI PLAY and CHI). He was selected to be Associate Editor for tier A journals such as Elsevier’s IJHCS (International Journal of Human-Computer Studies) and ACM’s IMWUT (Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies). He is co-Editor in Chief for Now Publisher’s Foundations and Trends in HCI.
Floyd co-established the first CHI Subcommittee on “Games and Play” as well as the CHI PLAY conference series. He was selected to be General co-Chair for CHI PLAY’18 and then CHI’20, becoming the first Australian-based researcher to spearhead the highest-ranked publication outlet in HCI. He is General co-Chair for CHI’24.
Phoebe Sengers
Phoebe Sengers’ research takes a critical approach to the development of technology in order to improve its overall impact on society. She considers the values and practices brought into the design of technologies, and asks whether these are good matches for the projected audience of these technologies, or whether relevant values and practices are omitted, and could be substituted. She uses design to imagine alternative possibilities for technological creations in these situations. Her contribution to this field has been to demonstrate clearly and concretely how critical insights can be made directly design-relevant, and thereby show the benefit of taking critical analysis seriously as part of the technological design process. She was one of the pioneers bringing this critical approach and ideas from design to the area of human-computer interaction, and she is widely recognized and respected for her path breaking work.
Phoebe has over the course of her career consistently introduced new directions and methods that have been influential for the field. Her work on reflective design, ambiguity in design, design probes, autobiographical design, and design around emotion are highly cited and widely used in HCI programs across the country. A paper on the three paradigms of HCI, published in an alternative CHI session, helped to open the space for a different type of HCI. In her work on sustainable HCI, Phoebe helped reorient the field away from thinking only about individual users and their consumption, to the need for engaging with larger scale contexts, including systemic and political responses.
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