IC Award Roundup: Regents’ Professor to be Recognized for Lasting Impact at CSCW
The ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) will award Regents’ Professor Amy Bruckman and three former Georgia Tech graduate students with its 2025 Lasting Impact Award.
The award is given to a paper published at least 10 years ago that has impacted the CSCW research field.
Bruckman and her co-authors — Jill Dimond (PhD HCC 2012), Michaelanne Dye (Ph.D. HCC 2019), and Daphne LaRose (MS CS, 2011) — authored the paper Hollaback!: The Role of Collective Storytelling Online in a Social Movement Organization in 2013.
“This paper was chosen because as an early paper that centered feminist HCI and action research, it has had a strong impact in the field,” said Jessica Vitak, one of the general chairs of the 2025 CSCW conference. “It is an early example of academic attention to “publics” or interest groups and how they are increasingly networked.
“This paper offers the CSCW community an opportunity to reexamine the role that CSCW can play. The broader impact of this line of research is evident in the numerous sessions in 2025 that focus on community-engaged research, activism, and advocacy.”
In 2013, Hollaback! was a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about and combating street harassment. According to the paper, street harassment refers to harassment in public spaces toward marginalized groups such as women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.
Hollaback has since renamed itself Right to Be and now exists to support victims of all forms of harassment by providing a platform to share their stories.
The authors’ purpose of the paper was to examine how sharing stories of harassment online impacted those who shared their experiences and whether those stories could influence what Hollaback! focused on in its activism.
“There are many HCI/CSCW research projects that are fantastic contributions to meeting real human needs, but don’t outlast the research project that created them,” Bruckman said.
“By partnering with a community organization that already existed, the Hollaback project was able to support something more lasting.
“Our approach also embraced humility on the part of academics. Rather than researchers swooping in and solving problems for people, we instead partner with people to help them solve their own problems.”
The 2025 CSCW conference will be held Oct. 18-22 in Bergen, Norway. A session will be held Oct. 21 to honor the authors of the paper and discuss their impact.
Former Grad Student Earns Dissertation Award
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI) announced Erik Wijmans (Ph.D., CS, 2022) as a co-recipient of the 2022 AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award.
The organizations jointly announced the winners of their annual dissertation award for 2022, 2023, and 2024, following a three-year hiatus. The winners from those years will be honored at the 2026 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, taking place from Jan. 20 to 27 in Singapore.
Distinguished Professor Irfan Essa and former associate professor Dhruv Batra advised Wijmans. His dissertation argued for the necessity of massive-scale simulation to achieve intelligent navigation behavior. He introduced a new method for scaling reinforcement learning to multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) and machines.
Wijmans was named an outstanding paper award winner at the 2023 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). His paper, Emergence of Maps in the Memories of Blind Navigation Agents, showed that blind AI agents use memory to create maps and navigate through their surrounding environment.
