News

Mitchell Gordon '16 wins CRA Outstanding Undergrad Researcher Award

December 16, 2015

The Computing Research Association announced that Mitchell Gordon '16 is the 2016 winner of the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award for PhD granting institutions.  Mitchell has an impressive body of research, having worked with Jeff Bigham both at UR and CMU, Walter Lasecki (PhD '15, now faculty at U. Michigan) and most recently with Prof. Philip Guo.  Gordon's work has been in Human Computer Interaction.  His first-authored paper “WatchWriter: Tap and Gesture Typing on a Smartwatch with Miniature Qwerty and Beyond” (Mitchell Gordon, Tom Ouyang, Shumin Zhai) was accepted this week for the Proceedings of the International ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016). One might say this was a good week for Mitchell!

Though we've had many students named as finalists and honorable mention over the years, we have had only one other winner of this highly competitive award.  David Eisenstat won the 2006 Outstanding Undergraduate Award for his work in Computer Theory.  Eisenstat completed his PhD in computer science at Brown.  Mitchell is currently applying to graduate schools to continue his study in Human Computer Interaction.

As the winner of this award, CRA will reimburse his expenses (up to $1500) to attend a suitable research conference related to his interests. He will also receive formal recognition  to commemorate this achievement.


URCS student, Joyce Zhu '17, was also recognized with honorable mention for her work with Philip Guo as well. Joyce's first author paper, "Toward a Domain-Specific Visual Discussion Forum for Learning Computer Programming: An Empirical Study of a Popular MOOC Forum" ( Joyce Zhu, Jeremy Warner, Mitchell Gordon, Jeffery White, Renan Zanelatto, Philip J. Guo) was pubished in the proceedings for IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) Oct. 2015.