Yixin Zou wins 2024 ACM SIGCHI Award

With this award, ACM SIGCHI honors researchers who make outstanding contributions in the field of human-computer interaction. 

Yixin Zou wins the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) award under the “Outstanding Dissertation” category.  The results of her study on online privacy-protective behaviors impacted the rule-making process of the California Consumer Privacy Act.

During her PhD at the University of Michigan, she investigated online privacy-protective behaviors and uncovered the challenges consumers face when using online services. She developed interventions which encourage people to adopt protective behaviors when being online. All her work was summarized in a dissertation titled “Understanding and Improving Consumers’ Adoption of Online Privacy-Protective Behaviors” for which she has now received the 2024 ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award.

“This award is only possible with the generous support from my PhD advisor and dissertation committee, my collaborators, my study participants, the wonderful community at the University of Michigan School of Information, and my family and friends. I hope that I can continue to conduct high-quality and impactful research that matches this achievement during my journey at MPI-SP", Zou says. As a group leader at MPI-SP, she continues her work on human-centered privacy and security, with a more recent focus on supporting underserved populations and conducting cross-cultural comparisons.