Ben Z. Zhang, an assistant professor within the Department of Technology and Society at Stony Brook University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, not too long ago gained the 2026 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI).
This award acknowledges excellent analysis contributions from rising students in human-computer interplay (HCI). His dissertation is entitled, “Infrastructuring Data Value: An Ethnography of AI Production and Data Marketplaces in the Chinese Datafied State.”
Zhang, who holds a PhD in info with a graduate certificates in science and know-how research from the University of Michigan, conducts human-computer interplay and social computing analysis on the manufacturing and sociotechnical impacts of AI-enabled programs throughout crucial contexts reminiscent of work, well being and sustainability. Drawing on coaching in HCI, science and know-how research and information science, Zhang takes a life-cycle-centered method to look at the guarantees, inequalities and often-invisible labor embedded in AI infrastructures from improvement and deployment to governance. His work contributed to principle and informs extra equitable, human-centered design and coverage interventions.
He earned a Master of Science in utilized information science from Syracuse University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Indianapolis. His analysis has been supported by awards and fellowships from the International Institute, the Rackham Graduate School on the University of Michigan and the Weizenbaum Institute in Germany.
The award choice, administered by the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee, relies upon a rigorous course of starting with nominations submitted primarily by SIGCHI members. This 12 months, the committee acquired 107 nominations within the classes of Lifetime Research, Lifetime Service, Academy, Societal Impact, Outstanding Dissertation and Special Recognition. Of these, 29 nominees had been chosen for recognition. The distinctions spotlight exceptional achievements in scholarship, service, mentorship and impression.
“I’m deeply honored and feel fortunate to be a part of the vibrant global HCI community. This recognition affirms the value of a growing body of research that examines promise, harm and precarity in AI development, while also attending to the professional, labor, institutional and economic dimensions that make AI and data infrastructures possible and consequential,” mentioned Zhang, who can also be grateful for his PhD advisors, committee members, collaborators, interlocutors, and family and friends.
Zhang’s dissertation presents an interdisciplinary, human-centered evaluation of values-in-the-making inside international AI infrastructures and affords an ethnographic account of how information’s worth is enacted. It investigates how state-directed efforts to raise information as a strategic nationwide useful resource are translated into on a regular basis practices of AI manufacturing and the development of rising information marketplaces. By tracing valuation throughout actors, websites, and governance regimes, his dissertation affords students, technologists and policymakers an analytical lens to look at how rising infrastructures form not solely what counts as beneficial, but additionally who will get to take part in worth creation – and at what value.
“We are incredibly proud of Ben,” mentioned Klaus Mueller, interim chair within the Department of Technology and Society and professor within the Department of Computer Science. “His work highlights the social and technical dimensions of AI systems – from the data infrastructures that support them to the human labor and governance behind them. Being named one of only a few recipients of the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award is a tremendous honor and reflects both the originality of his research and its importance for the future of responsible AI,” Mueller mentioned.
About the ACM SIGCHI
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is the main worldwide neighborhood of scholars and professionals eager about analysis, training, and sensible functions of human-computer interplay (HCI). They are an interdisciplinary group of laptop scientists, software program engineers, psychologists, interplay designers, graphic designers, sociologists, multi-media designers, info scientists, and anthropologists, to call among the domains whose particular experience come to bear on this space. What brings them collectively is a shared understanding that designing helpful and usable know-how is an interdisciplinary course of, and when executed correctly it has the facility to remodel lives.
— Debra Scala Giokas