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Assistant Professor Nur Yildirim Receives SIGCHI Dissertation Award
Assistant Professor of Data Science Nur Yildirim received the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award for her Ph.D. research in the field of human-computer interaction. She is among five researchers awarded internationally.
The Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, or SIGCHI, is one of the Association of Computer Machinery's special interest groups and is focused on human-computer interactions. The awards are administered by ACM SIGCHI's Executive Committee to "recognize exceptional achievements across multiple categories including research excellence, practical impact, and contributions to society."
SIGCHI stipulates that each awardee has demonstrated remarkable contributions to their field. Yildirim was the recipient of the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award for her research on human-AI interaction to make AI useful in real-world contexts.
Yildirim's dissertation, "Discovering the Right Things to Design with Artificial Intelligence," explores how a vast majority of AI initiatives often fail due to ineffective ideation, leading teams to pursue suboptimal innovations. The research addresses this by developing new processes, a taxonomy of AI capabilities, and a hybrid ideation method to help teams identify valuable, feasible AI opportunities and mitigate risks.
Before teaching at the School of Data Science, Yildirim received her Ph.D. from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She also worked as a research intern at industry research labs such as Google Deepmind and Microsoft Research, in addition to work as an industrial designer.
