School of Computer Science Professor Scott Hudson and a team of former and current students have earned the school's 2015 Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence.

The award recognizes an outstanding body of work that epitomizes Newell's research style as expressed in his words: "Good science responds to real phenomena or real problems. Good science is in the details. Good science makes a difference."

In this case, that work is the "innovative and practical physical interaction techniques" that Hudson, a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, developed with former Ph.D. students James Fogarty, Daniel Avrahami, Johnny Lee and Chris Harrison, and current Ph.D. student Robert Xiao.

"The Newell Award committee was impressed with the highly innovative and deep contributions to user interface design made by this team over a decade-long period. Their work spans the full spectrum of work in this space, with a high degree of originality in every aspect," said Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science and chair of the awards committee. "It includes devices, interaction techniques, statistical models, algorithms, applications and toolkits. Their work has had substantial impact on academic research as well as industry practice."

Read more about their work here.