Last week, Daniel Herron was awarded a 2018 UTS HDR Directors Commendation. The Faculty’s Higher Degree Research director decided to award the Commendation to Daniel for his work on how to deal with broken relationships and their digital remains. With this award, Daniel wins an official certificate recognising the achievement and a modest cash prize.

The faculty uses the award to recognise work that illustrates the breadth and depth of its doctoral candidates, and it hopes to encourage candidates to look at how their work makes a contribution to their field and society. Daniel made various efforts to promote and communicate his work in the media, including radio interviews and an article in The Conversation. He also undertook a collaboration with the Museum of Broken Relationships to stage an exhibition at the CHI 2018 conference earlier this year. After that, he went on to Facebook for an internship that lasted several months.

We’re very proud of Daniel being rewarded for his research achievements! Daniel himself says that ‘as a Joint-PhD student, it means a lot that FEIT are as excited about my research as I am! Thank you to FEIT and UTS for supporting my work and recognising my contribution with this award.’

Yesterday, UTS Integrated Product Design student Keisha Jayaratne took second place in the CHI 2016 conference’s Student Research Competition. After being shortlisted based her Extended Abstract paper and poster at the conference, she presented her work on Memory Tree, a design that supports reminiscing using sound recordings. It was developed, prototyped, and tested with participants last semester as part of Keisha’s Honours programme, during which she was supervised by Elise van den Hoven. At CHI, she took second place among the undergraduate research submissions.

We’re happy to see Keisha’s work on supporting remembering was well received and allowed her to present in front of quite a crowd at CHI. For those of you not at CHI, her paper is already available for download from the ACM Library.

Credit for the photo up top goes to Berry Eggen, who was in the audience. The other image was a slide by Keisha and grabbed from the CHI session webcast.