Forlizzi, Ogan and Ahuja Receive 2024 SIGCHI Awards
News
Three members of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) have received 2024 SIGCHI Awards, including Jodi Forlizzi for Lifetime Research, Amy Ogan for Societal Impact and Karan Ahuja for Outstanding Dissertation.
Part of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) computing society, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) annually recognizes and honors professionals for their contributions to research, teaching, practice and service in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). The awardees will be formally recognized in May at the upcoming ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hawaii.
Congratulations to all ACM SIGCHI award recipients as this recognition is a great honor in the field of HCI.
Jodi Forlizzi, Lifetime Research Award
Forlizzi, the Herbert A. Simon Professor in Computer Science and HCII and associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Computer Science (SCS), received the 2024 Lifetime Research Award.
Presented to individuals for outstanding contributions to the study of human-computer interaction, the award recognizes the best, most fundamental and influential research in the field. It is awarded for a lifetime of innovation and leadership.
In addition to her roles as professor and associate dean for DEI, Forlizzi serves as a faculty lead for the Responsible AI initiative in Carnegie Mellon University's Block Center for Technology and Society. She has advocated for design research in all forms — mentoring peers, colleagues and students in its structure and execution — which has become a pivotal component of the HCI community. She also studies the ethical impacts of human interaction with AI systems in front-line service industries, including healthcare and hospitality, and develops methods and tools to ensure that product developers can mitigate ethical harms and bias during product development. Forlizzi recently testified to the U.S. Senate in an AI innovation briefing and collaborates closely with the AFL-CIO Tech Institute.
Amy Ogan, Societal Impact Award
Ogan, associate professor of learning sciences, received the 2024 Societal Impact Award, presented to mid-career or senior professionals who promote the application of HCI research to pressing social needs. Award recipients demonstrate past or current work within the HCI profession that demonstrates social benefit.
Ogan is the Thomas and Lydia Moran Professor of Learning Science in SCS with an additional appointment at Carnegie Mellon University Africa. She focuses on ways to make learning experiences more effective and engaging, with a commitment to designing culturally responsive technology solutions that are appropriate for the infrastructure and context of the learners and addressing the root causes of inequality in educational opportunity. Over the past decade, she has conducted field research on deploying educational technology across four continents — involving tens of thousands of individuals and families — and has collaborated with dozens of educational technology companies developing local solutions. Ogan has been named a Rising Star in EECS by MIT and a World Economic Forum Young Scientist. She received the McCandless Chair at CMU and has been awarded the Jacobs Early Career Fellowship to study the use of educational technologies in emerging economies. She was the founding co-chair of the Learning, Education and Families subcommittee at ACM CHI and was previously a visiting researcher at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Karan Ahuja, Outstanding Dissertation Award
HCII alumnus Karan Ahuja (SCS 2023) received an Outstanding Dissertation Award for his thesis, "Practical and Rich User Digitization." (pdf)
The Outstanding Dissertation Award recognizes excellent dissertation research by recent Ph.D. recipients in HCI based on the work's technical depth, significance of the research contribution, potential impact on the HCI field and quality of presentation.
Ahuja is an incoming Wissner Slivka Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Northwestern University. He completed his Ph.D. in human-computer interaction at CMU in 2023, specializing in novel sensing, interaction and user digitization techniques. Many of his research projects have been open-sourced, deployed in the wild, licensed and shipped as product features. To date, Ahuja has published more than 30 papers in top computer science outlets. He is also a Siebel fellow, former editor-in-chief of ACM XRDS, and is a visiting faculty researcher at Google.
For more information on the ACM SIGCHI awards, read the official announcement on the organization's blog.
Related People
Jodi Forlizzi, Amy Ogan, Karan Ahuja