Akash Badshah has scored a triple-first: Akash is the first high school student in the nearly 30-year history of the CHI conference (human factors in computing) to serve as lead author, present a paper, or win a “Best of CHI” award.
Akash presented his paper on a self-powered haptic feedback device to a huge crowd at CHI 2011 in Vancouver BC last week. The session was standing-room-only, and the organizers even had to set up an overflow room and pipe video to it. The talk was fantastic. Akash, a high school junior from Bellevue, worked with CSE professor Shwetak Patel last summer as a part of Shwetak’s summer high school research program, where high school students carry out intense 10-week long research projects. Akash is now completing his senior year at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Learn more about Akash’s research here. Learn more about research in the UW CSE UbiComp lab here. A related article from the Exonian (Philips Exeter Academy’s newspaper) here.