Joseph Konstan Earns ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) Professor Joseph Konstan has earned the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Lifetime Research Award. Konstan, who is also the Associate Dean for Research in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering, was recently honored at the CHI 2026 Conference in Barcelona, Spain, the premier international conference in the field of human-computer interaction.
The SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award is presented to individuals for outstanding contributions to the study of human-computer interaction. This award recognizes the very best, most fundamental, and influential research contributions. It is awarded for a lifetime of innovation and leadership. The award includes an honorarium of $5,000, the opportunity to give a talk at CHI, and lifetime invitation to the annual SIGCHI awards banquet.
“To me, the biggest honor is recognition from my peers,” Konstan said. “It is a magnificent thing when the people that you admire, and the people that have shaped the fields that you care about say, ‘Hey, you've done good work and it matters.’ It's also a really nice opportunity to take some of the work that is in a corner of the field and give it the spotlight.”
Konstan's work lies broadly in the field of human-computer interaction. Most of his work relates to recommender systems - personalization software - and how personalization algorithms can be improved to provide better user experience. He also works more broadly on social computing - challenges in how technology supports (or fails to support) collaboration and on health applications of technology, particularly web and mobile behavioral interventions for health improvement. His work is among the most recognized in the field, with 16 of his papers receiving more than 1,000 citations.
“This recommender systems community is not at the center of computer-human interaction broadly,” Konstan said. “The majority of people who will go to a recommender systems conference have no other connection with the human-computer interaction side of things. They think about recommender systems as a business problem or an AI problem, but they're not thinking about the human side. This award helps recognize the contributions made by bringing the human side of things into this application area.”
Konstan’s service started in 1994 within ACM SIGCHI’s conferences, eventually becoming SIGCHI’s President (2003-2006) and Chair of the SIG Governing Board (2006-2008), and serving as a member of ACM’s Executive Committee. He is the co-founder of ACM RECSYS, the premiere recommender systems conference, and will co-chair the 20th RecSys conference this fall in Minneapolis. Konstan earned the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2013 and the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award in 2023.
Currently, Konstan is leading a $2 million project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) which aims to enable researchers nationwide to carry out live one-time and longitudinal experiences on users of AI systems that personalize the news-reading experience. This project grows out of Konstan’s 28-year history of running MovieLens, an experimental news recommender system that has had hundreds of thousands of users and has been used for over a hundred experiments.
“This project’s fundamental purpose is to enable human-centered experimentation and evaluation of recommender system innovations. After it was established that these recommender systems can work, we started asking how they should work. This is where the field really split. One method is to look at user data to determine their interests and recommend similar products. The human-centered approach says that is not very useful. We are working to figure out what happens if I want you to see things that are better than what customers would have found on their own. And to do that, we need different ways of measuring the user experience, which is harder to do.”
Konstan’s Lifetime Research Award is one of the many highlights of CS&E’s involvement with this year’s CHI Conference. The department accounts for 13 accepted papers (one of which earned Best Paper Honorable Mention), three poster presentations, and hosted two workshops in Barcelona. In all, CS&E has 24 researchers represented at CHI26.
“This award is a real credit to the group we have built here at the University of Minnesota,” Konstan said. “The GroupLens system was one of the original automated recommender systems that the late John Riedl and Paul Resnick first built in the early 1990s. We have been building up the GroupLens group in social computing here in computer science for a long time and it really puts us on the map.
“As the Department of Computer Science & Engineering continues to grow, we are working closer with other folks that are in other parts of human-centered computing, like the folks in visualization, graphics, and natural language processing,” Konstan added. “That larger focus has really made Minnesota stand out.”
Learn more about Konstan’s work on the GroupLens website.