Information School Professors Anind K. Dey, Batya Friedman and Jacob O. Wobbrock have been named as ACM Fellows by the Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. Its Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. ACM Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee.
“Computing professionals have brought about leapfrog advances in how we live, work, and play,” ACM President Gabriele Kotsis said in a press release. “The ACM Fellows program honors the creativity and hard work of ACM members whose specific accomplishments make broader advances possible. In announcing a new class of Fellows each year, we celebrate the impact ACM Fellows make, as well as the many technical areas of computing in which they work.”
The three new ACM Fellows from the iSchool all work in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and have all previously been inducted into the CHI Academy, an honor conferred to ACM members working on the leading edge of HCI.
Dey is renowned for his work in context-aware computing, where computational processes are aware of the context in which they operate and can adapt appropriately to that context. Much of his current research leverages data about how people interact with their phones and the objects around them, producing detection and classification models related to individual well-being. He has received a 20-year and a 10-year impact award from the Ubicomp conference series to recognize his contributions to ubiquitous computing. Professor Dey is Dean of the Information School.
Friedman is the 2012 recipient of the ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award and pioneer of value sensitive design, an approach to account for human values in the design of technical systems that has been used in fields as varied as architecture, computational linguistics, computer security and transportation. Professor Friedman is a founding co-director of the Value Sensitive Design Lab and the interdisciplinary Tech Policy Lab. Her current work continues to expand the computing and information fields to prioritize human values; to engage underrepresented voices; to take a longer-term, multi-lifespan perspective; and to design for and with non-human stakeholders – dimensions critical for the well-being of human societies and the planet.
Wobbrock’s research seeks to understand and improve people’s interactions with computers and information, especially for people with disabilities. He is the primary creator of ability-based design, which scrutinizes the ability assumptions embedded in technologies in an effort to create systems better matched to what people can do. For this and his other contributions to accessible computing, he received the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award and the 2019 SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award. Professor Wobbrock directs the ACE Lab, is founding co-director of the CREATE Research Center, and is a founding member of UW’s cross-campus DUB Group.
The 71 ACM Fellows named in 2021 will be formally recognized at the ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco in June.