October 7, 2022
Shiri Azenkot, associate professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion, has received the 10-year Impact Award from the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (MobileHCI).
Azenkot and co-author Shumin Zhai, a principal scientist at Google, received the award for their 2012 paper, “Touch behavior with different postures on soft smartphone keyboards,” which offered findings to improve the usability and accuracy of touch sensing on smartphones’ “soft,” onscreen keyboards. Azenkot completed the award-winning research while interning at Google as a Ph.D. student.
Since its publication, the visionary research has been cited in nearly 150 research papers and has been downloaded 2,000 times, according to the ACM digital library.
Azenkot accepted the award virtually and gave a talk with Zhai at the MobileHCI conference, held Sept. 28 through Oct. 1 in Vancouver.
Director of the Enhancing Ability Lab at Cornell Tech, Azenkot is broadly interested in human -computer interaction and accessibility. She focuses on intelligent interactive systems that enhance the perception and ability of people with disabilities, in particular people with visual impairments. Her research is frequently published at top HCI and accessibility conferences, and her honors include CAREER and CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) awards from the National Science Foundation as well as multiple best-paper awards and nominations.
Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.