Honors for Meagan Loerakker
Meagan Loerakker was recognised as a runner-up for the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at the Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.
Picture: José Miguel Mateos Ramos
We’re delighted to announce that Meagan Loerakker was recognised as a runner-up for the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at the Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing!
Named in honour of the late computer scientist Gaetano Borriello, the award recognizes PhD students who have made exceptional contributions to academia and society, demonstrating excellence and breadth in the field of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing. Being considered for this distinction places Meagan among the top students in ubiquitous computing worldwide for 2025—a remarkable career milestone and a well-deserved recognition of her outstanding work.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) — formed from the merger of the renowned Pervasive and UbiComp conferences and colocated with the ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC) since 2013 — brings together leading research in ubiquitous and wearable computing.
About Meagan
Meagan Loerakker is a PhD student in the Research Unit Human-Computer Interaction, headed by Paweł W. Woźniak, at TU Wien Informatics. Her research explores the design of feedback in sports technologies that foster bodily awareness and promote wellbeing. She studies how individuals interpret and derive meaning from different types of data visualisations, taking into account personal goals, shifting motivations, and varying levels of sporting expertise.
A recurring challenge she addresses is that many commercial sports and health technologies, such as wearables, fail to capture the everyday realities of our changing bodies, ever-evolving needs, and dynamic lives. To overcome this, her work focuses on designing feedback that is transparent, self-compassionate, and empowering, with the ultimate goal to return control to users.
She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer and data science in the Netherlands, and later began her PhD studies at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden before joining TU Wien. Her research has appeared in leading HCI venues such as CHI, IMWUT, DIS, and PACMHCI. In addition to her publications, she has been recognised with multiple awards for her student volunteering in the UbiComp and HCI communities, and has received an Honourable Mention paper award at MobileHCI.
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