Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Wed, 12/02/2025 - 15:21
Congratulations to Prof Cecilia Mascolo who has today been named a 2024 ACM Distinguished Member. This accolade is awarded to computer scientists "for significant achievements in computing beyond the norm".
The ACM – the Association for Computing Machinery – is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society.
Its 'Distinguished Member' designation is highly selective. Recipients are chosen for their exceptional technical accomplishments and dedicated community service within the profession.
In Cecilia's case, she becomes a Distinguished Member for her "contributions to mobile wearable systems efficiency, and signal and data analysis enabling multidisciplinary applications".
She is one of 56 new Distinguished Members named today for their impact in the field. All were selected by their peers for significant technical achievements as well as volunteer service to their professional community.
"Each year we look forward to selecting a new class of ACM Distinguished Members from among our worldwide association of 110,000 colleagues," explained ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. "ACM’s motto is 'advancing computing as a science and profession'. The Distinguished Members Program not only celebrates innovation but also underscores the value of being part of a vibrant technical community."
Cecilia is Professor of Mobile Systems here. She also co-directs the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence here, which focuses on next-generation mobile and wearable technology, as well as mobile applications.
She is a pioneer in devising frameworks to collect sensing data from devices such as phones and wearables with the purpose of developing models to understand behaviour and health. During the pandemic, she and her colleagues developed the COVID-19 Sounds App which collects and analyses short recordings of users coughing and breathing to detect if they are suffering from COVID-19.
Since then, she has been working on ways to turn the devices we wear – such as earbuds – into mobile monitors that can collect data about our state of health, and developing cutting edge machine learning tools to evaluate that data on the device itself.
She was recently awarded an EPSRC Open Fellowship for her project 'HearFit: Hearable Sensing Systems and Machine Learning for Health and Fitness'. This project explores how to turn 'hearable' devices like earbuds into genuinely trustworthy and reliable instruments for measuring human health and fitness.
Many congratulations to Cecilia on her ACM Distinguished Member award.
