2024 Skip Ellis and Anita Borg Early Career Award Winners Announced!

Since 2019, CRA-WP has recognized an outstanding computer science researcher in honor of Clarence “Skip” Ellis, by awarding them with the CRA-WP Skip Ellis Early Career Award (SEECA).

CRA-WP is pleased to announce Martez Mott (Microsoft Research) as the recipient of the 2024 Skip Ellis Early Career Award for his research and service to the computer science community.

Mott is a Senior Researcher in the Ability group and Human Centered AI Experiences team at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He conducts research in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), accessibility, mixed reality, and human-centered AI. His research focuses on designing, building, and evaluating novel intelligent interactive technologies that are guided by scientific understandings of people’s experiences with computers and information. A core tenet of this work is the consultation and inclusion of potential users and beneficiaries of technologies in all aspects of the research process. He is best known for his research on improving accessibility for people with limited mobility by identifying and removing accessibility barriers found in a range of computing technologies, including touch screens, gaze-based text entry, and virtual reality hardware.Mott received his PhD and MS in Information Science from the Information School at the University of Washington (UW), where his dissertation was supported by a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant and a UW Graduate Opportunity Minority Achievement Program Fellowship. Before attending UW, Martez received his BS and MS in Computer Science from Bowling Green State University and was awarded the Outstanding Computer Science Graduate Student Award.

Mott is passionate about improving diversity in Computer and Information Science. He was an inaugural teaching fellow and served as a research advisor at the iSchool Inclusion Institute. He co-chaired the 2020 and 2021 CHI Mentoring Workshops at the ACM CHI conference, the premier international conference for HCI research. He also cofounded and co-leads the Black Researchers @ Microsoft Research employee resource group.

 

Since 2004, CRA-WP has recognized an outstanding computer science researcher in honor of Anita Borg, by awarding them with the CRA-WP Anita Borg Early Career Award (BECA).

CRA-WP is pleased to announce Yakun Sophia Shao (University of California, Berkeley) as the recipient of the 2024 Anita Borg Early Career Award for her research, mentorship, and service to the computer science community.

Shao is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she was a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA and received her Ph.D. in 2016 from Harvard University. Her research focuses on computer architecture, specifically domain-specific architecture, deep-learning accelerators, and high-productivity hardware design methodology. Shao’s work has been awarded a Distinguished Artifact Award at ISCA’2023, the Best Paper Award at DAC’2021, the Best Paper Award at JSSC’2020, a Best Paper Award at MICRO’2019, a Research Highlight of Communications of ACM (2021), Top Picks in Computer Architecture (2023, 2014), and Honorable Mentions (2019*2). She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, the 2022 IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, an Intel Rising Star Faculty Award, a Google Research Scholar Award, and the inaugural Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award. You can visit Professor Shao’s personal webpage at: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ysshao/.

 

Read more about the CRA-WP Early Career Awards.

 

Check out our interviews with both participants in the CRA Bulletin: Sophia Shao & Martez Mott