Professor Wendy Ju Honored With Prestigious Association for Computing Machinery Award

By Grace Stanley

Wendy Ju, associate professor at Cornell Tech, the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, has been awarded a place in the Class of 2025 of the prestigious ACM SIGCHI Academy. The award honors her leadership and innovations in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

ACM SIGCHI — the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction — is one of the world’s largest associations of professionals who contribute towards the research and practice of HCI.

The highly competitive SIGCHI awards uplift those who have changed the field of HCI with their exceptional achievements. Ju has been awarded a place in the CHI Academy, an honorary group of leaders who have shaped the field.

“SIGCHI is my home academic community, a group of other researchers and practitioners who tackle the opportunities and challenges of human-computer interaction together. I was drawn to SIGCHI early in my research career because it was a community that shared my interests in design, interactive technologies, and people,” Ju said.

The SIGCHI award will provide Ju with travel support to attend the 2025 CHI conference in Yokohama, Japan. CHI is widely considered to be one of the highest-ranking conferences in HCI and computer science at large. Awardees like Ju will be recognized at the conference, and they will also receive passes to attend the annual SIGCHI awards banquet.

“I found SIGCHI to be full of inspirational, warm, and nurturing collaborators and mentors. At this point, I have been part of SIGCHI for over 25 years — my entire career — so it is exciting to be recognized by the community for my contributions,” Ju said.

Ju’s research focuses on designing interaction with automation. She studies the effects of context, culture, and norms on interaction, how interactions evolve over time, and how to leverage embedded computing to conduct interaction research at scale. In addition to her role at Cornell Tech, Ju is also an inaugural faculty member of Cornell’s campus-wide multidisciplinary Design Tech department.

Ju is the innovator behind numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems. Her research methods for studying interactions with automated vehicles have been replicated by institutions like the University of California San Diego, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, the Eindhoven University of Technology, and the University of Sussex, to name a few. Her methods have also been adopted by companies like Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Renault, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

Grace Stanley is a staff writer/editor for Cornell Tech.