Announcing the 2025 ACM SIGCHI Awards!

Celebrating human-computer interaction research, practice, and impact.

The 2025 SIGCHI Awardees (Image composition: Neha Kumar; credit to individual photographers)

We are delighted to announce this year’s recipients of the ACM SIGCHI Awards! These prestigious awards, administered by the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC), recognize exceptional achievements across multiple categories including research excellence, practical impact, and contributions to society. The awards also celebrate outstanding doctoral work and welcome new members to the SIGCHI Academy. Finally, this year introduces our inaugural SIGCHI Special Recognitions program — a pathway to discover and establish future permanent awards through community engagement.

Selection for these awards is highly competitive, drawing from our community of over 5,000 SIGCHI members. Each awardee has demonstrated remarkable contributions to our field. We look forward to celebrating their achievements at the ACM CHI 2025 conference in Yokohama, Japan this spring, where awardees will share their insights through talks and panel discussions.

Below are this year’s awardees by category and in alphabetical order.

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award

• Paul Dourish — University of California, Irvine, USA
• Pattie Maes — Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award

• Kia Höök — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Yoshifumi Kitamura — Tohoku University, Japan
• Aaron Quigley — CSIRO Data61, Australia

ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award

• Tiago Guerreiro — University of Lisbon, Portugal
• Alexis Hiniker — University of Washington, USA
• Kentaro Toyama — University of Michigan, USA

ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award

• Leona Holloway — Monash University, Australia
• Katerina Stepanova — Simon Frasier University, Canada (now: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
• Anupriya Tuli — IIIT Delhi, India (now: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
• Zijie Jay Wang — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA(now: OpenAI, USA)
• Nur Yildirim — Carnegie Mellon University, USA(now: University of Virginia, USA)

ACM SIGCHI Academy Class of 2025

• Carl DiSalvo — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• James Fogarty — University of Washington, USA
• Elizabeth Gerber — Northwestern University, USA
• Wendy Ju — Cornell Tech, USA
• Pattie Maes — Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Joanna McGrenere — University of British Columbia, Canada
• Antti Oulasvirta — Aalto University, Finland
• Kate Starbird — University of Washington, USA
• Wolfgang Stuerzlinger — Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Kentaro Toyama — University of Michigan, USA
• Martin Wattenberg — Harvard University/Google, USA

ACM SIGCHI Special Recognition

Because of their exploratory nature, each special recognition is given with a citation.

• Gregory Abowd — Northeastern University, USA — For his extraordinary ability to inspire and mentor individuals from diverse backgrounds and his commitment to fostering collaboration, creativity, and impact.
• Cecilia Aragon — University of Washington, USA — For establishing human-centered data science as a new field bridging HCI and data science, demonstrating its impact through applications from astrophysics to energy systems.
• Nadia Campo Woytuk — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden — For early-career research in intimate body-sensing technologies, developing open-source methods for studying intimate care, and creating inclusive maker spaces that support feminist HCI.
• Mark Colley — University College London, UK — For early-career contributions to inclusive HCI research, extensive community building, and championing open science in automotive user interfaces.
• Gustavo Lopez — University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica — For advancing HCI research and education in Latin America through community leadership, helping to establish regional SIGCHI chapters, and fostering collaboration in HCI.
• Jasmine Lu — University of Chicago, USA — For pioneering research in ecological HCI through novel hardware interfaces and fostering communities around sustainable computing.
• Jooyoung Park — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden — For early-career contributions to feminist HCI and haptic technology design, advancing methodologies for embodied care technologies, and fostering inclusive research.
• Nadya Peek — University of Washington, USA — For democratizing automation through open-source hardware, building global maker communities, and bridging academic research with grassroots fabrication practices.
• Anicia Peters — National Commission of Research, Science and Technology, Namibia — For pioneering the development of HCI in Africa, transforming HCI education in Namibia, and applying human-centered approaches to critical societal challenges.
• Christian Sturm — Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Germany — For sustained contributions to global HCI education, building student communities across Latin America and Africa, and championing inclusive approaches to design competitions.
• The Google/academia Android XR interaction team — For pioneering the interaction framework of Android XR through exemplary industry-academia collaboration, establishing foundational input methods and interaction guidelines for XR operating systems: Karan Ahuja (Northwestern University); Andrea Colaco (Google); Massimiliano Di Luca (University of Birmingham); Hans Gellersen (Lancaster University); Mar Gonzalez-Franco (Google); Eric J. Gonzalez (Google); Ken Pfeuffer (Aarhus University); Hasti Seifi (Arizona State University)

Closing Remarks

On behalf of the SIGCHI Executive Committee, I extend my heartfelt congratulations to all awardees. Their accomplishments will be celebrated at CHI 2025 in Japan. Special thanks go to our award subcommittee members and chairs for their dedication in reviewing nominations and selecting this year’s recipients.

I encourage you, SIGCHI community members, to continue nominating outstanding individuals in our field. Please also consider volunteering for our award subcommittees in future cycles.

Niklas Elmqvist
ACM SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for Awards

Awardee Biographies

Gregory D. Abowd — Northeastern University, USA

Gregory D. Abowd is the Dean of the College of Engineering at Northeastern University, where he is also a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with affiliate appointments in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Prior to joining Northeastern in March 2021, Dr. Abowd was faculty in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology for over 26 years. His research falls largely in the area of Human-Computer Interaction with an emphasis on applications and technology development for mobile and ubiquitous computing in everyday settings. His research has introduced innovations in the classroom, the home, for stakeholders connected with autism and other chronic health conditions, and sustainable forms of computing in everyday life. He has graduated 39 Ph.D. students, the majority of whom went on to their own successful academic careers. He is an ACM Fellow, a member of the CHI Academy, and was awarded the 2023 CHI Lifetime Research Award (2023). In 2008, he founded the Atlanta Autism Consortium, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing engagement across stakeholder communities. For his work in autism as both a researcher and community organizer, he received the ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award (2008), the ACM Eugene Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics (2009), and the State of Georgia Outstanding Achievement Award for Autism (2017).

Karan Ahuja — Northwestern University, USA

Karan Ahuja is the Lisa Wissner-Slivka & Benjamin Slivka Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University where he directs the Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing & Experiences (SPICE) Lab and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine. As a pioneer in AI and Sensing, he is a recipient of the Forbes 30 under 30, MIT 35 innovators under 35 Asia Pacific, and ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award. His research develops novel, practical and deployable Machine Learning and Sensing systems that aim to overcome challenges in high-impact application areas of health sensing, extended reality (XR), natural user interfaces, and physical computing. To date, Karan has published over 35 papers, with 8 winning awards, at top computer science venues. He received his Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University in 2023 and B.Tech. in Computer Science in 2017. His innovative work has transformed into widely-adopted technologies, with many projects being open-sourced, deployed in the wild, licensed, and shipped as product features — including features used by over 100 million users — influencing flagship products at leading companies like Google and Apple.

Cecilia Aragon — University of Washington, USA

Cecilia Aragon is Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and Director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004, and her B.S. in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on human-centered data science, an emerging field at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and data science. Her work has been recognized with over US$28M in grants from federal agencies, private foundations, and industry.

Aragon has authored or co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles, 3 books, 4 patents, and over 140 other publications in the areas of data science, HCI, machine learning, and astrophysics. In 2016, she became the first Latina to be named to the rank of Full Professor in the College of Engineering at UW in its hundred-year history. Aragon is a Distinguished Member of the ACM, Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at UW, and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the US government on outstanding scientists in the early stages of their careers. Her latest book, Human-Centered Data Science: An Introduction, was released by MIT Press in March 2022.

Nadia Campo Woytuk — Royal Institute of Technology KTH, Sweden

Nadia Campo Woytuk (she/they) is a Ph.D. student within the Interaction Design (IxD) team at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, exploring critical feminist design of technologies for the intimate body and the social and environmental ecologies it entangles. Her Ph.D. work draws from feminist posthumanities to explore how to design for experiences of menstruation, fertility, sexual and reproductive health in ways that uplift embodied, sensory and material knowledge. Nadia works with textile and biomaterial fabrication and brings together participatory and speculative approaches in her research.

Andrea Colaco — Google, USA

Andrea is a Software Engineering Manager at Google introducing novel applied machine learning techniques for context-based human input and intent understanding into new product categories like AR/VR and connected home devices. With a background in computational techniques and computer vision, she studies how these tools bring real-time systems to the next level. She completed her Ph.D. at MIT and her BSc at the Birla Institute of Technology.

Mark Colley — University College London, United Kingdom

Mark is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor at the University College London Interaction Centre. He received his Ph.D. from Ulm University, Germany. Before engaging in academia, he spent some years in industry.

Mark is an editorial board member of IMWUT, Behaviour & Information Technology, and IJHCS and serves frequently as an organizer for various conferences. His co-founded startup Zefwih has won several prizes and support from the German government. He has obtained numerous awards and fellowships including a research fellowship by Canon as well as the DAAD.

Mark’s multidisciplinary research in HCI, Accessibility, and Computational Modeling and Simulation is dedicated to tackling complex challenges and seizing opportunities within advanced mobility technologies. It involves designing, implementing, and testing novel simulators to study present and futuristic mobility scenarios. A core motivation for Mark is to make mobility more accessible.

His work addresses issues such as undertrust in automated vehicles and enhances accessibility in urban (air) mobility, thereby supporting societal and industrial growth. A significant portion of his research focuses on evaluating innovative interaction paradigms between automated vehicles and vulnerable road users, utilizing empirical evidence alongside simulation-based approaches to analyze their broad-scale impacts.

Massimiliano (Max) Di Luca — University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Dr. Max Di Luca is Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham (UK). He received the Ph.D. Degree in Cognitive Science from Brown University (USA). He was a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen (Germany), visiting scientist at Oculus (USA), and research scientist at Facebook Reality Labs (USA). He has collaborated with industry leaders such as Facebook, Google, and Procter & Gamble, applying academic research to real-world problems. He has received research funding from the European Commission, the Royal Society, BBSRC and EPSRC. He has published 70 scientific articles, has presented his work in more than 100 conferences, and is an author of 4 patents in psychophysics, immersive technologies, haptics, and computational modeling. He has been nominated Turing fellow and fellow of the InterContinental Academia.

Carl DiSalvo — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Carl DiSalvo is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He serves on the steering committee for the AIAI Network, a multi-institution endeavor investigating how the humanities might help us enlist AI ethically, equitably, and in the service of justice, funded by the Mellon Foundation. He is also the 2024–2025 James Wei Visiting Professor at Princeton University.

Carl’s research explores how design fosters and thwarts democratic participation, and how communities use and resist data while working toward social change. Throughout his work, he draws together concepts and practices from art and design, and the humanities and social sciences to interpret and make socio-technical systems. He is committed to engaged scholarship, and pursues research, teaching, and service as means to support social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Carl DiSalvo regularly publishes in design, science and technology studies, and human-computer interaction journals and conference proceedings. He has published two books with MIT Press, Adversarial Design (2012) and Design as Democratic Inquiry (2022). He’s also a co-editor of the journal Design Issues. His experimental art and design work have been exhibited and supported by the ZKM (Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe), Grey Area Foundation for the Arts (San Francisco), Times Square Arts Alliance, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis). He earned a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University with joint appointments in the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Center for the Arts in Society.

Paul Dourish — University of California, Irvine, USA

Paul Dourish is Chancellor’s Professor and the Steckler Endowed Chair in Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he directs the Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical, and Accessible Technology. He holds appointments in Informatics and Anthropology, and is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses primarily on understanding information technology as a site of social and cultural production, combining human-computer interaction, social informatics, and science and technology studies. He is the author of several books, most recently “The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information” (MIT Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the British Computer Society (BCS), and a member of the SIGCHI Academy.

He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College, London, and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh. Before coming to UCI, he was a Senior Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox PARC; he has also held research positions at Apple and at Rank Xerox EuroPARC. He has held visiting positions at Stanford, MIT, the IT University of Copenhagen, Intel, and Microsoft Research.

James Fogarty — University of Washington, USA

James Fogarty is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research has included substantial contributions to Human-Computer Interaction & Design across context-aware and ubiquitous computing, interactive machine learning, interface toolkits, accessibility, and personal health informatics. In collaboration with students and colleagues, James’s research has highlighted opportunities for machine learning in everyday interaction, has advanced accessibility through both innovation and policy, and has defined new approaches to supporting people in leveraging personal data toward health goals. His reflections on code and contribution have also influenced research across interactive systems.

James co-founded and directs DUB (i.e., Design Use Build, an alliance of faculty, students, researchers, and industry partners around Human Computer Interaction & Design at the University of Washington), co-founded MHCI+D (i.e., the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design), and co-founded CREATE (i.e., the Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences). These initiatives have fostered a thriving collaborative ecosystem of Human-Computer Interaction & Design in the Seattle community, advancing multidisciplinary research and impact while training leading scholars and innovators.

James was introduced to Human-Computer Interaction and to research by Mary Beth Rosson and John M. Carroll while pursuing his BS in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, was advised by Scott Hudson as part of the first cohort of Ph.D. students in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and was introduced to teaching through working with Randy Pausch. Throughout his career, James has been committed to mentoring others along a path to their own interests and impact across Human-Computer Interaction & Design.

Hans Gellersen — Lancaster University, United Kingdom and Aarhus University, Denmark

Hans Gellersen is a Professor of Interactive Systems at Lancaster University in the UK, and at Aarhus University in Denmark. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1996 from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. Hans started his career in ubiquitous computing, with early work on computing in everyday objects, systems that blend physical and digital interaction, and techniques that facilitate cross-device interaction. His recent research interests include eye-tracking, gaze for interaction, and multimodal interaction techniques that leverage eye movement in concert with other modalities. Hans was a founder of the Ubicomp conference series in 1999, serves on the Editorial Board of ACM TOCHI and is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy. He has received Best Paper awards including from the ACM CHI and UIST conferences and the TOCHI journal. In 2021, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for his work on gaze and eye movement in interaction and in 2022 he received a Humboldt Prize by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation in recognition of his lifetime’s research achievements.

Elizabeth Gerber — Northwestern University, USA

Liz helps organizations design and implement new technologies to effectively collaborate. She is particularly interested in how emerging technologies enable new ways to share and create new information with diverse stakeholders to solve complex problems; how the new sources of information

change how people work and how the shifts in the way people work changes the role of the organization. Her work cuts across management, computer science, and design, and is generously supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, and industry. Her research is informed by her formal training in design, innovation, and management science at Dartmouth College and Stanford University where she helped develop the Business and Design Initiative at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Her work has been featured in outlets including NPR, ABC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Forbes, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, and Wired.

Liz is a Professor at Northwestern U, Founding co-Director of the Center for Human Computer Interaction + Design, and Founder of Design for America, an award winning network preparing the next generation of community focused innovators, Founding Associate Editor of Transactions in Social Computing, and Producer of the Technical Difficulties Podcast, a podcast centering female leaders in technology. She’s received numerous awards for her scholarship and teaching including the ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award, Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Excellence Award, Beckman Trust Award, the IEEE’s Teaching Excellence Award, and Northwestern’s Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence.

Eric J. Gonzalez — Google, USA

Eric J. Gonzalez is a Research Scientist at Google in the Blended Interaction Research & Devices (BIRD) Lab, where he works on advancing human-computer interaction for spatial computing and extended reality (XR). His research is broadly focused on novel input & interaction techniques and real-time AI-mediated experiences, and has led to over 25 publications. Previously, Eric received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2022 and B.S. from the University of Florida in 2016, with research internships completed at Microsoft Research and Meta Reality Labs. His work has been recognized with multiple best paper and honorable mention awards at top-tier HCI venues, including CHI and UIST.

Mar Gonzalez-Franco — Google, USA

Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco is a Computer Scientist and Neuroscientist. She is a Research Scientist at Google where she leads the Blended Interactions and Devices Research lab working on a new generation of immersive technologies and generative AI experiences. Her team has envisioned Android XR multimodal and multidevice interactions to the OS and unified input vocabularies. Before working at Google, she was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where she built new features for products such as Xbox, Hololens, Soundscape, and Teams. Her main tech transfer at Microsoft, was Avatars on MS Teams that is available on daily basis to over 260 million users, and won Times Invention of the year 2022. Before getting into industry research she completed her Masters, Ph.D. and Postdoc at University of Barcelona, Tsinghua, MIT and UCL. Her technical work has produced over 100 papers and 40 patents (some pending), and +10 open-source projects including some of the most used avatar libraries (Microsoft Rocketbox, UCF-Google VALID), and Immersive AI pipelines and datasets (XR-Objects, Diffseg, PARSE-Ego4D). She was awarded the IEEE VGTC VR New researcher award in 2022, and the NAE early-career engineer.

Tiago Guerreiro — Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

Tiago Guerreiro is an Associate Professor at Universidade de Lisboa and a researcher at LASIGE. He is an HCI researcher focusing on designing, developing, and evaluating interactive technologies in areas of high social impact. Tiago’s research follows a participatory paradigm, characterized by long-term engagements with communities, co-creation, and longitudinal deployments of prototypes. He has devoted 20 years to the design of technologies with and for people with disabilities. Lately, he has been working with children with visual impairments and their educators, with people with chronic diseases and their carers, and with older adults and their values. He published 120+ peer-reviewed papers, and received awards at CHI, ASSETS, SOUPS, ISS, HRI, among others. He is an Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (with Stephanie Ludi), was ASSETS 2020 General Chair and 2024 Program Co-Chair (with Robin Brewer), SIGACCESS Awards Chair, CHI’s Accessibility & Ageing 2019 Subcommittee Chair (with Anne Marie Piper) and TheWebConf’s User Experience and Accessibility 2021 Track Chair (with Simon Harper), among many other service roles. He was an invited expert supporting the EC in implementing the Web Accessibility Directive. He was a founder and president (2019–25) of his institution’s Ethics Review Board. He is a Vice-Director at LASIGE (350+ members) and leads the Tech&People group (https://techandpeople.github.io).

Alexis Hiniker — University of Washington, USA

Alexis Hiniker is an Associate Professor of HCI at the University of Washington Information School. She studies the ways in which consumer-facing technologies pressure young people into giving up their attention, money, and data, and she builds and evaluates systems to demonstrate how technology can, instead, help young people thrive. The prevalence of manipulative designs in popular products might suggest that the best way to protect children is to limit their use of technology, but Alexis’ work is built on the claim that young people have a right to safe, developmentally supportive online spaces designed to respect users’ autonomy and well-being.

Alexis holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Harvard, a master’s degree in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington. She has published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers, which have been featured in mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and more. Her research has been cited in multiple U.S. state and federal congressional sessions, and the class she teaches on ethical design has been featured on NPR and in TechCrunch. She has provided subject-matter expertise on manipulative designs to the White House, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the European Commission. She is a Jacobs Foundation Early Career Fellow, a Google Research Scholar, and a senior advisor to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Her incredibly talented and inspiring Ph.D. students make all her work possible.

Leona Holloway — Monash University, Australia

Leona is a Research Fellow with the Inclusive Technologies team in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. Drawing on her background as a braille and tactile graphics transcriber, Leona’s work focuses on the use of new (and old) technologies for access to graphics by people who are blind or have low vision. Her Ph.D. research into 3D printing for accessibility was conducted in close collaboration with partner organisations to support the successful implementation of 3D printing for accessibility throughout Australia and New Zealand, resulting in world-first research-based guidelines on the topic and an ongoing community of practice.

Leona is the Chair of the Australia and New Zealand Accessible Graphics Group (ANZAGG) and has served on the executives of the International Council on English Braille and the Australian Braille Authority, writing practitioner guidelines, promoting accessibility awareness and fostering community partnerships. Leona highly values her connections with the print accessibility sector and uses collaborative research methodologies to ensure that her work is driven by community needs and has real-world impact. Leona also serves as the Community Impact pillar lead for the Monash Assistive Technology & Society (MATS) Centre.

Kristina “Kia” Höök — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Kristina “Kia” Höök is a Professor in Interaction Design in the Interaction Design team (IxD) at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and also works part-time at RISE. She is known for her work on social navigation, seamfulness, mobile services, affective interaction and designing for bodily engagement in interaction through soma design. She has obtained numerous national and international grants, awards, and fellowships including the Cor Baayen Fellowship by ERCIM, the INGVAR award, she is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and elected ACM SIGCHI Academy.

In the years 2018–2024 she served as the editor in chief of ACM TOCHI. In that period the number of submissions went from 250 to more than 550 articles per year. Meanwhile, the impact factor increased from 1.7 to 4.8 in 2023, and the Scopus 4-year impact factor increased from 4.4 to 7.5.

She served as an adjunct member to the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee 1999 to 2001, and was elected to the ACM SIGCHI EC 2013 to 2016. She served as Technical Program chair for the ACM CHI-conference in 2012. She was the chair of the first SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award subcommittee from 2017 to 2020, shaping its rules and criteria. Finally, she was a distinguished speaker for ACM from 2014 to 2020, sharing her ideas about human-computer interaction to a wider computer science audience. She has given keynotes at conferences such as IndiaHCI, CHItaly, Brazilian HCI-conference, CHIRA, MOCO, ENAC, BioSTEC, CHIRA, WomENcourage, ECCE, ETIS, HttF, and TEI.

Höök is a horseback rider, mother, grandmother, and feminist.

Wendy Ju — Cornell Tech, USA

Wendy is an Associate Professor in Information Science at Cornell Tech. She is also an inaugural faculty member of Cornell’s new campus-wide multidisciplinary Design Tech department, and an Associate Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, and has a secondary affiliation in the faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at Technion-Israel. Her research focuses on designing interaction with automation, to understand the effects of context, culture and norms on interaction, to expand our capability to account for how interactions evolve over time, and leverage embedded computing to expand our ability to do interaction research at scale. Wendy has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.

Prof. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built; her research methods for studying pedestrian-AV interaction and in-vehicle interaction have been replicated by UC San Diego, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, TU Eindhoven, TU Twente, RISE Viktoria, University of Sussex and QUT, and adopted by Ford, Toyota Research Institute, Nissan, Renault, VW and Volvo. She has served on the steering committees for TEI, HRI, DIS and AutoUI, and is currently, since 2023, Steering Committee Co-Chair for DIS. She is also on the advisory board of the Open Source Hardware Association.

Yoshifumi Kitamura — Tohoku University, Japan

Yoshifumi Kitamura has been a professor at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University since 2010, and director of the Interdisciplinary ICT Research Center for Cyber and Real Spaces since 2023. His research interests include interactive content design, telecommunication with nonverbal information, human-computer interaction, 3D user interfaces, virtual reality, and related fields. Prior to joining Tohoku University, he was an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering and the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University. While working at ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories, he focused on advanced user interfaces in virtual environments. His first formal appointment was at Information Systems Research Center Canon Inc. where he was involved in research on artificial intelligence, image processing, computer vision, and 3D data processing. He received his formal education from Osaka University, B.Sc. (1985); M.Sc. (1987); and Ph.D. (1996). He serves in positions such as Japan Liaison for IFIP TC-13 (Human-Computer Interaction) (2012-), Japan Liaison and Chair of ACM SIGCHI Asian Development Committee (2015–2021), Chair of Japan ACM SIGCHI Chapter (2016–2021), Steering Committee Chair of ACM VRST, SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 Conference Chair, ACM CHI 2021 General Chair, and so on. He has received awards such as the Lifetime Community Contribution Award from the Japan ACM SIGCHI Chapter and was inducted into the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy. He is also a Fellow of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) and the Virtual Reality Society of Japan (VRSJ).

Gustavo Lopez — University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica

Dr. Gustavo Lopez is a Professor and researcher at University of Costa Rica. His areas of interest include Usability, User Experience, and Accessibility, Human-Centered Design, Software Process Improvement, and Agile Practices Implementation. He has participated in and led over 10 academic research projects. He has published more than 100 research articles, including book chapters, conference papers, and journal articles. He currently serves as chair of the SIGCHI Latam committee and he is the director of the graduate program in Computer Science at University of Costa Rica.

Jasmine Lu — University of Chicago, USA

Jasmine Lu is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Through her work, she explores how we might build the future of interactive technologies to be more sustainable and center ecological thinking. Her research focuses on the issue of electronic waste, exploring new strategies to mitigate it or better recycle it. This includes building interactive tools to assist with electronic waste reuse (UIST’23, CHI’25), understanding existing practices in reuse (TOCHI’24), and designing interactions around caring for our devices (UIST’22).

Jasmine’s work has been supported by a University of Chicago Climate and Energy Institute Ph.D. Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Her work has also been awarded as a Fast Company Design Awards Experimental Category Finalist and an ACM UIST Honorable Mention Award. Jasmine’s work has been covered by The New Scientist, Forbes, Gizmodo, UChicago News, Nerdist, Communications of the ACM, and other news outlets. Outside of her research, she has also served as a member of the ACM SIGCHI Sustainability Committee and as a feature editor for ACM XRDS magazine.

Pattie Maes — Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Pattie Maes is a professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab where does research at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. For over three decades, Maes has challenged and reimagined how technology can empower human capabilities. She pioneered the concepts of Collaborative Filtering and Software Agents in the 90s and remains focused on how software systems and novel devices might augment people and assist them with issues such as information processing, decision making, memory, learning, and wellbeing. Maes is the recipient of several awards: Netguru selected her for “Hidden Heroes: the people who shaped technology (2022), Time Magazine has included several of her designs in its annual list of inventions of the year; The American Association for Artificial Intelligence gave her the “classic paper 2012” prize, awarded to the most influential AI paper of the year, Fast Company named her one of 50 most influential designers (2011); Newsweek picked her as one of the “100 Americans to watch for” (2000); TIME Digital selected her as a member of the “Cyber Elite,” the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world; the World Economic Forum honored her with the title “Global Leader for Tomorrow”; Ars Electronica awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2000 she was recognized with the “Lifetime Achievement Award” by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council. She also received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and Open Universiteit, Netherlands, and has given several TED talks.

Joanna McGrenere — University of British Columbia, Canada

Joanna McGrenere is a Co-Head and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (Canada) and recently completed a five-year Inria & Université of Paris Saclay International Research Chair (France). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2002.

Her research specializes in Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on designing personalized user interfaces, developing interactive systems for diverse user populations, including older adults and people with impairments, and supporting learning in feature-rich interfaces and beyond. Joanna’s research has strong ties to industry — her collaborations and funding include Microsoft, Microsoft Research, Slack, Autodesk, Samsung, Mozilla, Meta, Google, and IBM.

Joanna has a sustained record of service leadership beginning as the Student Fellows Co-Chair for ACM’s first Universal Usability conference, followed by numerous roles at CHI, UIST, ASSETS, TOCHI, and TACCESS. She was Paper Co-Chair for CHI 2015 and ASSETS 2018 and the CHI 2020 Technical Program Co-Chair, and she serves on the CHI Working Group on Peer Review. Her many accolades include a Killam Research Prize, membership in The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in Canada’s Royal Society, a Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring, and she was the first recipient of the Computing Research Association Women (CRA-W) Anita Borg Early Career Scholar Award. Joanna’s impact is amplified by the success of her 51 graduate students; notably, 6 of her graduate students and 3 postdocs are now tenure-track professors.

Antti Oulasvirta — Aalto University, Finland

Antti Oulasvirta leads the Computational Behavior Lab Aalto University and the Interactive AI research program at Finnish Center for AI. Prior to joining Aalto, he was a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction at Saarland university. He received his doctorate in Cognitive Science from the University of Helsinki in 2006, after which he was a Fulbright Scholar at the School of Information in University of California-Berkeley in 2007–2008 and a Senior Researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT in 2008–2011. He was awarded the ERC Starting Grant (2015–2020) for research on computational design of user interfaces and the ERC Advanced Grant (2024–2029) for studying computational models of human behavior. Dr. Oulasvirta serves as an associate editor for ACM TOCHI and has previously served International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, as well as served as a column editor for IEEE Computer. His work has been awarded the Best Paper Award and Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI fifteen times between 2008 and 2024. He has held keynote talks at NordiCHI’14, CoDIT’14, EICS’16, IHCI’17, ICWE’19, Chinese CHI’19, and IS-EUD’23. He is a Fellow of ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). In 2019, he was invited to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. He was a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow in 2011 and in 2022.

Jooyoung Park — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Joo Young (Jooyoung) Park is a Ph.D. student within the Interaction Design (IxD) team at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Jooyoung’s research lies in the intersection of HCI, design, and feminist crip technoscience, exploring novel intimate care technologies. She uses critical feminist theories and design methods to understand the relationship between technology and the body, and create more embodied, non-pathologizing, and long-term modes of menstrual care. Her current project explores on-body touch and haptic technology in the context of menstrual pain. Using Research through Design, she investigates the agency and materiality of technology-facilitated touch for bodies in pain/discomfort, and its implications on personal and sociopolitical levels.

Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Jooyoung holds a double-degree B.A. in Information Science & Culture Studies (ISC) and German Language Education from Seoul National University and a M.Sc. in Design for Interaction from TU Delft.

Nadya Peek — University of Washington, USA

Nadya Peek develops unconventional digital fabrication tools, small scale automation, networked controls, and advanced manufacturing systems. Spanning electronics, firmware, software, and mechanics, her research focuses on harnessing the precision of machines for the creativity of individuals. Nadya directs the Machine Agency at the University of Washington where she is an associate professor in Human-Centered Design and Engineering. Machines and systems Nadya has built have been shared widely, including at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the World Economic Forum, TED, and many Maker Faires and outreach events. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and her teaching has been recognized with the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Innovation with Technology. She received the MIT Technology Review’s 35 under 35 award in 2020. Nadya is an active member of the global fab lab community, making digital fabrication more accessible with better CAD/CAM tools and developing open source hardware machines and control systems. She is on the board of the Open Source Hardware Association, the editor in chief of the Journal of Open Hardware, half of the design studio James and the Giant Peek, plays drum machines and synths in the band Construction, and got her Ph.D. at MIT in the Center for Bits and Atoms.

Anicia Peters — National Commission on Research, Science and Technology, Namibia

Anicia Peters (Ph.D.) is the CEO of the National Commission of Research, Science and Technology (NCRST), Co-Chair of the 4IR Working Group of the Africa Union’s Africa Scientific, Research and Innovation Council (AU-ASRIC) and adjunct Research Professor. She chaired the Namibia Presidential Task Force on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2021–2022) and served on Namibia’s inaugural green hydrogen technical committee. She co-established the Namibia Green Hydrogen Research Institute hosted at the University of Namibia and also the Namibia-India Center of Excellence in Information Technology at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, Currently she is establishing the Namibia Responsible AI Institute.

In 2013, she founded the Africa Human Computer Interaction (AfriCHI) conference series and works across Africa and internationally to incorporate HCI and human-centered AI into different spheres. She established three ACM chapters including an ACM SIGCHI chapter in Namibia. Since 2010, Anicia served in various CHI volunteer roles such as student volunteer, reviewer, organizing committee roles and subcommittees, speaker and the Technical Programme Co-Chair for CHI2023. She also served in the CHI Steering Committee.

Anicia was the Pro-Vice Chancellor: Research, Innovation & Development at University of Namibia until 2023 and previously served as a Faculty Dean for Computing at the Namibia University of Science and Technology. Her Ph.D. and MSc in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) were completed at Iowa State University and undergraduate degrees at Namibia University of Science and Technology. She also completed a Post-Doc at Oregon State University and has over 30 years of international experience in academia and industry.

Ken Pfeuffer — Aarhus University, Denmark

Ken Pfeuffer is Associate Professor at Aarhus University (Denmark) in the Department of Computer Science specializing in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), with a focus on virtual and augmented reality as well as eye-tracking technologies. His research explores new ways of interacting with digital information, particularly in the context of 3D and multimodal user interfaces. He completed his Ph.D. at Lancaster University and a postdoctoral position at Bundeswehr University (Germany), with research internships at Microsoft and Google. His work has received honorable mention awards at conferences such as UIST, SUI, and CHI, recognizing its contribution to the field. His research pioneered interaction techniques like “Gaze + Pinch” similar to those now emerging as the primary interaction paradigm in AR products by companies like Meta, Apple, and Google.

Aaron Quigley — Data61/UNSW, Australia

Aaron Quigley is the Science Director and Deputy Director of CSIRO’s Data61 and an Adjunct Professor in UNSW. He was previously head of school for the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia and until June 2020, he was the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, director of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), board member for ScotlandIS and the DataLab.

Aaron’s research interests include discreet computing, global HCI, pervasive and ubiquitous computing and information visualisation on which he has delivered over 50 invited talks most recently as an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Aaron has published over 200 internationally peer-reviewed publications including edited volumes, journal papers, book chapters, conference and workshop papers.

Aaron is an ACM Distinguished Member and an IEEE Senior Member. Aaron was the technical program Chair for the ACM EICS 2022 conference and general co-chair for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 2021. He serves as chair of ACM CHI Steering committee and on the Yirigaa Advisory Board. Aaron has had chairing roles in thirty international conferences and has served on over ninety conference and workshop program committees.

His research and development has been supported by the EPSRC, AHRC, JISC, SFC, NDRC, EU FP7/FP6, SFI, Smart Internet CRC, NICTA, Wacom, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and MERL and has held 7 patents. Aaron has held academic and industry appointments in Singapore, Australia, Japan, USA, Germany, Ireland and the UK.

Hasti Seifi — Arizona State University, USA

Hasti Seifi is an assistant professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, where she leads the Touch Experience and Accessibility Lab. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. She received her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Her research focuses on developing novel interactions for haptics, social robotics, and accessibility. She has published over 40 papers at top-tier venues and received funding from various agencies such as National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Google, and Villum Foundation. Her work was recognized by an NSF CAREER award (2024), an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship (2018), the EuroHaptics best Ph.D. thesis award (2017), and a Maria Klawe award for her outreach activities in computer science (2017). Hasti serves the HCI community in various roles, such as a subcommittee chair for ACM CHI 2025, program chair for EuroHaptics 2022, and associate chairs for ACM CHI and ACM UIST (2020–2024).

Kate Starbird — University of Washington, USA

Kate Starbird is a Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Kate’s research sits within the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). Extending from early work in crisis informatics, her research program has followed the phenomenon of online rumoring down the rabbit hole and into some of the toxic online spaces that are increasingly (re)shaping discourse, values, and politics around the world. In particular, Kate’s team has developed and deployed methods for conducting rapid research to help resolve rumors as they unfold. Another major contribution of her work has been to demonstrate that online disinformation — i.e. the intentional manipulation of discourse for political gain — is inherently participatory, taking shape through collaborations between witting agents and unwitting (though willing) crowds. Most recently, her research has converged on a conceptualization of right-wing media as effectively leveraging partisan, participatory dynamics through improvisational performances.

Dr. Starbird received her BS in Computer Science from Stanford (1997) and her Ph.D. in Technology, Media and Society from the University of Colorado (2012). She has received several awards for her research, including the ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award and a Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award. She is a co-founder and formerly served as director of the UW Center for an Informed Public, which works through research, education, and policy recommendations to strengthen democratic discourse by building resilience to online misinformation and manipulation.

Katerina Stepanova — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Supported by the prestigious Banting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Katerina is working in the Interaction Design team (IxD) at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. She has completed her Ph.D. working with virtual reality at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, where she received numerous grants and awards, including SSHRC, DAAD, and CCA.

With a background in cognitive science, psychology and theatre she strives to explore how interactive technologies could offer positive experiences with a transformative potential. Particularly, she considers the fundamental role our bodies play in our cognition and how our bodies can be mediated with technology. She is fascinated by the human mind enacted through our embodied experiences and how technologies can help us uncover its processes. This in turn, can guide future innovation in design for more caring and fulfilling lives. In her work, Katerina employed theories of embodied cognition, phenomenology, somaesthetics and feminist theories to create and study how interactive art installations and virtual reality can help foster the feeling of connection to oneself, others and the world. Working with interdisciplinary teams, she combines methodologies from design, humanities and cognitive science to unpack how media artefacts affect our human experience, society, and culture.

Wolfgang Stuerzlinger — Simon Fraser University, Canada

Wolfgang’s research focuses on 3D User Interfaces, Extended Reality, Human-Computer Interaction, and Visual/Immersive Analytics. In the early 2000s, he worked on the High-Dynamic Range display technology now in most TVs. Wolfgang defined a methodology to characterize 3D selection performance in 2009, influencing VR interaction technique and input device design. Recently, he identified the vergence-accommodation conflict as a limitation for 3D interaction performance in current head-mounted displays. The Apple Vision Pro also uses Wolfgang’s combination of gaze & pinch with a comfortable arm position. He co-authored the Immersive Analytics book in 2018. Companies have also adopted his work on better user interfaces for occasionally failing technologies like autocorrect and speech recognition.

Wolfgang has published more than 200 fully reviewed scientific publications. He received his doctorate from the Vienna University of Technology in 1993, was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Prof. F. Brooks Jr, worked at York University in Toronto, and is now a Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He founded the ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction and was deeply involved in the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces. He has served on over 100 program committees, has been program chair for ten scientific events, and was a board member for the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence. Wolfgang has supervised more than 55 graduate students with research theses to completion. Eleven graduates are presently working as faculty members.

Christian Sturm — Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Germany

Dr. Christian Sturm serves as a Professor of Human Factors and Usability Engineering at the Technical University of Ingolstadt, Germany. He earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science in Media from Furtwangen University and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, Cultural Anthropology, and Telematics from the University of Freiburg. Dr. Sturm’s professional journey encompasses roles in academia and industry across Germany, Mexico, Spain, and Egypt. His research interests lie at the intersection of user experience, cross-cultural studies, and entrepreneurial thinking. Beyond his teaching and research activities, Dr. Sturm is dedicated to mentoring students for design competitions worldwide and provides consultancy for international and interdisciplinary projects. In addition, he has been co-organizing the CHI workshop “HCI Across Borders” since 2017.

Kentaro Toyama — University of Michigan, USA

Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. His research explores how digital technology can and cannot contribute to community development and social change. In 2005, Kentaro co-founded Microsoft Research India, and served as the lab’s assistant managing director until 2009. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducted pioneering research in Information & Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD). Prior to his time in India, Kentaro did research in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Ghana. His work has been featured in the New York Times, BBC, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Kentaro is the author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, which won an Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in 2016.

Anupriya Tuli — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Anupriya is a Digital Futures Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Interaction Design team (IxD) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Focusing on health equity, she works at the intersection of HCI, global health, and taboo. She engages with feminist perspectives to understand and craft sociotechnical experiences toward building just and equitable futures for all.

Anupriya earned her Ph.D. in Human-Centered Design from IIIT-Delhi, India, where she delved into the design of digital menstrual technologies seeking to understand how technology design can effectively address cultural taboos and systemic barriers to nurture positive menstrual experiences. Her commitment to bringing research beyond academia led her to train as a menstrual health educator, engage in policy discussions, and collaborate with practitioners and NGOs working on menstrual health and wellbeing in India. Her contributions have been recognized through fellowships from the Government of India and Google India. In 2023, she was invited as a Young Researcher to the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, a prestigious gathering of global experts in computing and mathematics.

As an interaction designer, Anupriya is passionate about nurturing safe spaces and developing approaches that serve as catalysts for designing sociotechnical experiences centered on care, equity, and wellbeing.

Zijie Jay Wang — OpenAI, USA

Jay Wang is a safety researcher at OpenAI. He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, where he worked with Professor Polo Chau. Jay’s research focuses on making AI more accessible, interpretable, and accountable, by designing and developing novel interactive interfaces for people to easily and enjoyably interact with machine learning systems at scale. Jay’s hybrid expertise in human-computer interaction and machine learning enables him to harness AI’s potential to benefit everyone.

Jay pioneers easy-to-access interactive visualizations that help novices and experts understand AI models (e.g., WizMap used at Apple, Google, and OpenAI, and CNN Explainer used by 360,000+ novices worldwide). He presents first-of-its-kind resources (e.g., 6.5TB DiffusionDB with 14 million prompt-image pairs) to help AI developers and policymakers assess the impacts of generative AI. To guide AI with human values, Jay’s work helps AI developers vet and fix problematic model behaviors (e.g., GAM Changer deployed at Microsoft and NYU Langone Health) and those impacted by AI to receive customizable suggestions to alter unfavorable AI decisions (e.g., GAM Coach). To democratize human-centered AI practices, Jay introduces in situ tools (e.g., Farsight) to foster responsible AI awareness among AI practitioners in their current workflows. Jay’s work is making significant impacts on academia, industry, and society. CNN Explainer has been integrated into top university courses on deep learning, receiving over 8,300 stars on GitHub.

Martin Wattenberg — Harvard University/Google, USA

Martin Wattenberg is a professor at Harvard University, where he co-leads the Insight + Interaction Lab with long-time collaborator Fernanda Viégas. He’s also a part-time member, and co-founder, of Google DeepMind’s PAIR (People + AI Research) research initiative. Throughout his career, Wattenberg has found ways to make complex systems transparent. He’s known for creating new visualization techniques, and promoting the power of social visualization. At Dow Jones/SmartMoney.com, he helped create some of the earliest pieces of interactive web journalism, and at IBM Research, his lab built the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many Eyes. Later, at Google Research, he and Viégas led a team working on end-user visualizations for products such as Search, YouTube, and Google Translate. Today, Wattenberg focuses on finding ways to help people use AI, by making the inner workings of machine learning systems transparent, and by designing AI systems to center the people using them. He is also known for visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art. Wattenberg has a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley, focusing on dynamical systems.

Nur Yildirim — University of Virginia, USA

Nur Yildirim is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) designer and an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science. Her research focuses on bringing design thinking and participatory approaches to AI innovation to make AI technologies useful in real-world contexts. Nur received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute and spent time at Google Research and Microsoft Research working on human-centered AI innovation. She was named a Rising Star by Michigan AI Lab and MIT EECS. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and Accenture have supported her work. Before academia, Nur worked as a design practitioner in the industry, shipping award-winning products ranging from medical to consumer electronics to assistive robots to toys.