Prof. Blase Ur receives ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award
Prof. Blase Ur, who joined the University of Chicago Computer Science Department as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in 2017, was named a winner of the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award. This award is given annually by the Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction and recognizes excellent thesis research by recent Ph.D. recipients in Human-Computer Interaction. Up to three such awards are given in a year, and this year they gave only two.
Blase’s work was recognized for its “thorough, aware, detailed, nuanced, and coherent examination of passwords and their problems”. The SIGCHI announcement states: “Ur’s thesis is an excellent use of multiple perspectives – understanding how users respond to interfaces (password meters), identifying problems with how password-guessing attacks are modeled, and unpacking people’s beliefs about what makes passwords secure.”
The Award comes with an honorarium and an invitation to give a featured talk on the dissertation at the CHI conference – the premier conference for HCI research.
The full announcement of the award can be read here.
