Northwestern wins awards at ACM CHI 2025
The premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction in the world, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI, is taking place in Yokohama, Japan, from April 26th to May 1st. Northwestern University proudly showcases groundbreaking work, with 19 faculty members and 10 students or postdocs presenting their research. Check out the awards and presentations below.
This year's award winners
This year, Center for HCI+D students and faculty affiliates have received one Special Recognition Award, one inductee to the Academy class of 2025, and three honorable mentions.
Faculty affiliate Karan Ahuja earned a 2025 Special Recognition Award for his work with the Google Android XR team for a series of projects aimed at developing various aspects of extended-reality.
Co-director Elizabeth Gerber was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy Class of 2025 for her significant contributions to the field and her dedication to using design for social impact.
Former Design Cluster fellow and TSB PhD student, Connie Chau, and faculty affiliates Kaylee Payne Kruzan and Maia Jacobs received an honorable mention for their paper "“All Day, Every Day, Listening to Trauma”: Investigating Features of Digital Interventions for Empathy-Based Stress and Burnout” with Colleen Norton.
Jesse (Chenfeng) Gao, a TSB PhD student, received an honorable mention for their paper “Shape-Kit: A Design Toolkit for Crafting On-Body Expressive Haptics” written with Ran Zhou, Jianru Ding, Wanli Qian, Benjamin Erickson, Madeline Balaam, Daniel Leithinger, and Ken Nakagaki.
Kellogg professor Matthew Groh received an honorable mention for his paper “Deceptive Explanations by Large Language Models Lead People to Change their Beliefs About Misinformation More Often than Honest Explanations” he co-authored with Valdemar Danry, Pat Pataranutaporn, and Ziv Epstein.
HCI+D Schedule
Saturday, April 26th
*New Futures: (Re-)Designing Socio-technical Systems for News Production and Consumption
Types: Workshops
Authors: Sachita Nishal, Marianne Aubin Le Quere, Brian James McInnis, Bronwyn Jones, Kristen Vaccaro, Tanja Aitamurto, Mor Naaman, Nicholas Diakopoulos
*Multiple sessions
Monday, April 28th
AVEC: An Assessment of Visual Encoding Ability in Visualization Construction
Session: Visualization
Type: Papers
Authors: Lily W. Ge, Yuan Cui, Matthew Kay
*Demonstrating Shape-Kit: A Design Toolkit for Crafting On-Body Expressive Haptics
Session: Interactivity
Type: Interactivity
Authors: Ran Zhou, Jianru Ding, Chenfeng (Jesse) Gao, Wanli Qian, Benjamin Erickson, Madeline Balaam, Daniel Leithinger, Ken Nakagaki
*Multiple sessions will be taking place on Tuesday April 29 and Wednesday April 30th
Introducing AI Without Computers: Hands-On Literacy and Ethical Sense-Making for Young Learners
Session: Late-breaking Work: Learning and Education
Type: Late-Breaking Work
Authors: Hasti Darabipourshiraz, Maalvika Bhat, Duri Long
Jupybara: Operationalizing a Design Space for Actionable Data Analysis and Storytelling with LLMs
Session: Storytelling and Sense-Making
Type: Papers
Authors: Huichen Will Wang, Larry Birnbaum, Vidya Setlur
Multi-Prompting Scenario-based Movie Recommendation with Large Language Models: Real User Case Study
Session: Decision Making
Type: Case Studies
Authors: Ruixuan Sun, Xinyi Li, Avinash Akella, Joseph A. Konstan
SIGCHI Academy
Type: Awards
Awardees: Carl DiSalvo, James Fogarty, Elizabeth Gerber, Wendy Ju, Pattie Maes, Joanna McGrenere, Antti Oulasvirta, Kate Starbird, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, Kentaro Toyama, Martin Wattenberg
Seeing Eye to AI? Applying Deep-Feature-Based Similarity Metrics to Information Visualization
Session: Visualization
Type: Papers
Authors: Sheng Long, Angelos Chatzimparmpas, Emma Alexander, Matthew Kay, Jessica Hullman
Preliminary Feasibility of Using Crowworkers to Identify Visual Triggers for Photosensitive Epilepsy in Digital Media
Session: Late-breaking Work: User Experience and Accessibility
Type: Late-Breaking Work
Authors: Angela Davis, Connie W. Chau, Maia Jacobs
Tuesday, April 29th
Text Entry for XR Trove (TEXT): Collecting and Analyzing Techniques for Text Input in XR
Session: XR
Type: Papers
Authors: Arpit Bhatia, Moaaz Hudhud Mughrabi, Diar Abdlkarin, Massimiliano Di Luca, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Karan Ahuja, Hasti Seifi
Toward Human-Quantum Computer Interaction: interface Techniques for Usable Quantum Computing
Session: Innovations in Interaction Design
Type: Papers
Authors: Hyeok Kim, Kaitlin Smith, Mingyoung Jesscia Jeng
What Makes Visualization Complex?
Session: Late-breaking Work: Data and Visualization
Type: Late-breaking Work
Authors: Kylie R. Lin, Sean Sheng-tse Ru, David N. Rapp, Hui Guan, Cindy Xiong Bearfield
Shape-Kit: A Design Toolkit for Crafting On-Body Expressive Haptics
Awards: Honorable Mention
Session: Haptic Technology
Type: Papers
Authors: Ran Zhou, Jianru Ding, Chenfeng Gao, Wanli Qian, Benjamin Erickson, Madeline Balaam, Daniel Leithinger, Ken Nakagaki
Wednesday, April 30th
Beyond Words: An Experimental Study of Signaling in Crowdfunding
Session: Social Media, Online Community, Sensemaking
Type: Journals
Authors: Henry Kudzanai Dambanemuya, Eunseo Dana Choi, Darren Gergle, Emoke-Agnes Horvat
Characterizing Photorealism and Artifacts in Diffusion Model-Generated Images
Session: Optimizing with/for AI
Type: Papers
Authors: Negar Kamali, Karyn Nakamura, Aakriti Kuar, Angelos Chatzimparmpas, Jessica Hullman, Matthew Groh
“My doctor didn’t give me half of the privilege”: Incorporating Black Patients' Lived Experience in Virtual Patients for Racial Bias Mitigation Training
Session: Diversity and Inclusiveness
Type: Papers
Authors: Mohan Zalake, Eric S Swirksy, Blessings Chisunkha, Monique Jindal
Type: Late-Breaking Work
Authors: Qiyao Peng, Yingdan Lu, Yilang Peng, Sijia Qian, Xinyi Liu, Cuihua Shen
Deceptive Explanations by Large Language Models Lead People to Change their Beliefs About Misinformation More Often than Honest Explanations
Awards: Honorable Mention
Session: Shaping Diverse Cognitive Process
Type: Papers
Authors: Valdemar Danry, Pat Pataranutaporn, Matthew Groh, Ziv Epstein
Empowering Social Service with AI: Insights from a Participatory Design Study with Practitioners
Session: Late-breaking Work: Human-AI Collaboration
Type: Late-Breaking Work
Authors: Yugin Tan, Kai Xin Soh, Renwen Zhang, Jungup Lee, Han meng, Biswadeep Sen, Yi-Chieh Lee
Multiple sessions
Everyday Uncertainty: How Blind People Use Gen AI Tools for Information Access
Session: Assistive Technologies
Type: Papers
Authors: Xinru Tang, Ali Abdolrahmani, Darren Gergle, Anne Marie Piper
ExploreSelf: Fostering User-driven Exploration and Reflection on Personal Challenges with Adaptive Guidance by Large Language Models
Session: Digital Health and Well-being
Type: Papers
Authors: Inhwa Song, SoHyun Park, Sachin R Pendse, Jessica Lee Schleider, Munmun De Choudhury, Young-Ho Kim
Human Subjects Research in Age of Generative AI: Opportunities and Challenges of Applying LLM-Simulated Data to HCI Studies
Session: Human Subjects Research in Age of Generative AI
Type: Panels
Authors: Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Michael S. Bernstein, S. Shyam Sundar, Renwen Zhang, Manoel Horta, Yingdan Lu, Serina Chang, Tongshuang Wu, Aimei Yang, Dmitri Williams, Joon Sung Park, Katherine Ognyanova, Ziang Xiao, Aaron Shaw, David A. Shamma
“All Day, Every Day, Listening to Trauma”: Investigating Features of Digital Interventions for Empathy-Based Stress and Burnout
Awards: Honorable Mention
Session: Emotion and Behavior Change
Type: Papers
Authors: Connie W. Chau, Colleen Norton, Kaylee Payne Kruzan, Maia Jacobs
More Forecasts, More (Decision) Problems: How Uncertainty Representations for Multiple Forecasts Impact Decision Making
Session: Decision Making and Analysis
Type: Papers
Authors: Abhraneel Sarma, Maryam Hedayati, Matthew Kay
Multimodal AI for Sensing and Interaction
Type: Courses
Authors: Paul Pu Liang, Karan Ahuja, Yiyue Luo
Two sessions
Online-EYE: Multimodal Implicit Eye Tracking Calibration for XR
Session: Immersive Touch and Gesture Interaction
Types: Papers
Authors: Baosheng James HOU, Lucy Abramyan, Prasanthi Gurumurthy, Haley Adams, Ivana Tosic Rodgers, Eric J Gonzalez, Khushman Patel, Andrea Colaco, Ken Pfueffer, Hans Gellersen, Karan Ahuja, Mar Gonzalez-Franco
Prompting Generative AI with Interaction-Augmented Instructions
Session: Late-breaking Work: Human-AI Collaboration
Type: Late-Breaking Work
Authors: Leixian Shen, Haotian Li, Yifang Wang, Xing Xie, Huamin Qu
Multiple sessions
Underspecified Human Decision Experiments Considered Harmful
Session: Decision Making and Analysis
Type: Papers
Authors: Jessica Hullman, Alex Kale, Jason Hartline
Understanding Journalistic Practices Surrounding AI: towards the Design of Support Resources for Journalists to Foster Public AI Literacy
Session: Late-breaking Work: AI Ethics and Trusts
Type: Late-Breaking Work
Authors: Charlotte Li, Duri Long
Multiple sessions
What’s In Your Kit? Mental Health Technology Kits for Depression Self-Management
Session: Mental and Emotional Wellbeing
Type: Papers
Authors: Eleanor R. Burgess, Sean A. Munson, David C. Mohr, Madhu Reddy