School of IC Reels in Best Papers, Industry Awards, and Foley Scholar Awards

November was a banner month for the School of Interactive Computing as faculty and students earned numerous industry, conference, and Georgia Tech accolades and awards.

The honors included best paper and impact awards from the Association of Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). IC faculty earned industry recognition from Google and Sony, and the Institute of People and Technology (IPaT) announced its winners of the 2024 Foley Scholarships.

A paper led by Beatriz Palacios Abad was one of the five best papers at CSCW, which took place Nov. 9-13 in Costa Rica. The paper, Mending the Fabric: The Contentious, Collaborative Work of Repairing Broadband Maps, also received the conference’s Impact Recognition award.

The paper discusses the challenges of repairing broadband maps, which often inaccurately depict marginalized communities, including tribal and rural residents. Repairing these maps involves managing complex and competitive relationships between government entities, internet service providers, on-the-ground workers, and other stakeholders.

Professors Carl DiSalvo and Betsy DiSalvo and their students Annabel Rothschild and Lara Schenck received DEI recognition from CSCW for their paper, When Workers Want to Say No: A View into Critical Consciousness and Workplace Democracy in Data Work. The paper details a case study of data workers with minority backgrounds who have been provided autonomy and can reject projects that could harm their communities.

Ph.D. students Jasmine Foriest (lead author), Shravika Mittal, Kirsten Bray, and Anh-Ton Tran earned DEI recognition for their paper, A Cross Community Comparison of Muting in Conversations of Gendered Violence on Reddit, Assistant Professor Munmun De Choudhury advises the group whose paper shows how survivors of gender-based violence face many of the same disclosure barriers online as they do offline.

Ph.D. student Amy Chen was the lead author for the paper "We’re Not in That Circle of Misinformation”: Understanding Community-Based Trusted Messengers Through Cultural Code-Switching, also received DEI recognition. The paper, advisted by Professor Michael Best, explores how community-based trusted managers can be supported in marginalized communities where distrust in health authorities is rooted in historical inequities.

Associate Professors Wei Xu and Alan Ritter received a Faculty Innovation Award from the Sony Research Award Program. 

According to the award’s website, the award provides up to $100,000 to fund cutting-edge research in Sony’s general areas of interest. The award will help fund Xu’s and Ritter’s latest project: Adapting LLM-based Multimodal Dialog Across Languages and Cultures. The project will adapt large multimodal models to generate culturally nuanced responses that cater to non-Western cultures.

Xu and Betsy DiSalvo earned Google Academic Research Awards for their work on society-centered artificial intelligence (AI). Together with Charlotte Alexander, a professor of law and ethics at the Scheller College of Business, they are using AI to increase the accessibility of legal documents and support civil rights litigation.

Associate Professor Josiah Hester is a recipient of Google’s academic research award for his work with Kumu Connect. Kumu Connect is a suite of AI tools that empower Hawaiian computer science educators.

Vanessa Oguamanam, Charles Ramey, Jiawei Zhou, and Momin Siddiqui were recognized as this year’s winners of the Foley Scholar Awards during an awards dinner on Nov. 12. 

Qguamanam, Ramey, and Zhou were named winners of the three Ph.D. categories, while Siddiqui was named the master’s category winner. All winners are School of IC students.

IPaT administers the Foley Scholars Awards. For more information about the Foley Scholar winners and finalists, please see the story on IPaT’s website.