acm sigchi outstanding dissertation award 🏆

I’m super happy to announce that my PhD thesis (linked at the bottom of this post!) has been awarded the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2024. I am extremely honoured and grateful to be among many fantastic awards recipients this year:

about the award

The award, granted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s Special Interest Group in Human-Computer Interaction (SIGCHI), recognises “the most outstanding research contributions from recently graduated PhD students within the HCI community, showcasing the quality and impact of HCI research.” The SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award is given annually, usually to 3 winners; this year, there were 5 incredible theses awarded this distinction. The awards are given for outstanding technical depth, significance of the research contribution, potential impact on the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and quality of presentation. In addition to the opportunity to give a talk at the premier international conference of HCI, the ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the award includes an honorarium of $1,000, a plaque and recognition, and lifetime invitation to the annual SIGCHI awards banquet.

The nomination is made by the PhD advisor (thank you, Andrew!) with the support of an expert in the field who “can provide additional insights or evidence of the dissertation’s impact.” Many thanks to the incredible recommendation from Prof. Noura Howell at Georgia Tech to support this nomination, as well as to the awards committee led by Ian Oakley and Niklas Elmqvist, SIGCHI Chair for Awards, for their consideration of my thesis.

award citation

The award citation for the thesis was very thoughtful in describing my thesis’s contributions:

Dr. Courtney Reed’s dissertation is a joy to read and fascinating to contemplate. It is a unique and interdisciplinary exploration of embodiment, sensorimotor imagery, and the mediating role of technology. It combines cognitive science, design theory, and music pedagogy with technical and artistic practices grounded in reflexive experience to contribute a nuanced, engaged, situated, and mature examination of biofeedback’s influence on bodily awareness and subjective experience in vocal practice. The committee appreciated the distinctive topic as well as the breadth of its ambitions, the sophistication of its analysis, and its captivating prose.

The voice is body and instrument. Third-person interpretation of the voice by listeners, vocal teachers, and digital agents is centred largely around audio feedback. For a vocalist, physical feedback from within the body provides an additional interaction. The vocalist’s understanding of their multi-sensory experiences is through tacit knowledge of the body. This knowledge is difficult to articulate, yet awareness and control of the body are innate. In the ever-increasing emergence of technology which quantifies or interprets physiological processes, we must remain conscious also of embodiment and human perception of these processes. Focusing on the vocalist-voice relationship, this thesis expands knowledge of human interaction and how technology influences our perception of our bodies. To unite these different perspectives in the vocal context, I draw on mixed methods from cognitive science, psychology, music information retrieval, and interactive system design. Objective methods such as vocal audio analysis provide a third-person observation. Subjective practices such as micro-phenomenology capture the experiential, first-person perspectives of the vocalists themselves. Quantitative-qualitative blend provides details not only on novel interaction, but also an understanding of how technology influences existing understanding of the body.

acm sigchi outstanding dissertation award 🏆

about the award

award citation

references

2023