Brown CS Alum Joseph J. Laviola Jr. Will Be Inducted Into The ACM SICGHI Academy
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on March 2, 2026
Less than a year after a receiving one of the highest honors in the field of virtual reality, Brown CS alum and former adjunct research faculty member and visiting scholar Joseph J. Laviola Jr. (now Charles N. Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida) has been recognized again.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest and oldest educational and scientific computing society, and every year its Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) admits roughly ten new members to the ACM SIGCHI Academy to honor them as the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped human-computer interaction and been at the forefront of the discipline. Joseph will be inducted at this year’s ACM CHI 2026 conference, which will be held in April in Barcelona, Spain.
Joseph directs the Interactive Computing Experiences Research Cluster, which develops innovative techniques, tools, and applications that improve the overall experience between humans and machines. He’s the former director of the Modeling and Simulation graduate program at the University of Central Florida. His primary research interests include pen- and touch-based interactive computing, virtual and augmented reality, 3D spatial interfaces, human-robot interaction, multimodal interaction, and user interface evaluation. He has published over 200 refereed journal and conference papers, 8 book chapters, and has 5 patents. His work has appeared in journals such as ACM TIIS, ACM TOCHI, IEEE PAMI, Presence, and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, and he has presented research at conferences including ACM CHI, ACM IUI, IEEE Virtual Reality, and ACM SIGGRAPH. He is also the lead author on the second edition of 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice, the first comprehensive book on 3D user interfaces. In 2009, he won an NSF Career Award to conduct research on mathematical sketching.
“I am honored,” Joseph tells us, “to be selected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy this year and to be a part of a group of VR researchers, developers, and practitioners that I looked up to and followed as a graduate student at Brown and as a professor at the University of Central Florida.”
The full list of inductees is available here.
Last year, Joseph was honored by induction into the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
