Rate My Professor Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham is an Associate Professor in Human–Computer Interaction and Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Information Technology within the College of Engineering and Information Technology at Adelaide University. He serves as Co-Director of the Wearable Computer Lab at the Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments. Cunningham holds a Bachelor of Information Technology with Advanced Computer Science Honours from the University of South Australia (2001–2004) and a Doctor of Philosophy in Information Visualisation from the same institution, completed in 2011. Following his PhD, he worked in the mobile games industry, contributing to titles downloaded over 50 million times. In 2016, he returned to the University of South Australia as a key researcher on the Narrative Visualisation for Law Enforcement project with the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre, which earned the South Australian Australian Information Industry Association iAward for R&D Project of the Year and a national merit; the technology was subsequently acquired by a commercial venture. He has led multidisciplinary projects, including the $4 million Narrative Visualisation and Big Data to Improve High Value Manufacturing initiative with the Innovative Manufacturing CRC and BAE Systems, and serves as Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project titled Parametric VR: An Interactive Virtual Reality System for Parametric Design (AU$455,000).

Cunningham's research specializes in immersive technologies, including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, with a focus on Immersive Analytics—employing these technologies to visualize and interact with data—and Narrative Visualisation to uncover stories in data, thereby supporting human-centred decision-making across industry, policy, and society. His work addresses human-computer interaction, information visualisation, data visualisation, computational design, and collaborative sensemaking. Key publications include ImAxes: Immersive axes as embodied affordances for interactive multivariate data visualisation (UIST 2017, 304 citations), IATK: An immersive analytics toolkit (IEEE VR 2019, 193 citations), There is no spoon: Evaluating performance, space use, and presence with expert domain users in immersive analytics (IEEE TVCG 2020, 148 citations), and Embodied axes: Tangible, actuated interaction for 3D augmented reality data spaces (CHI 2020, 86 citations). He has received the 2025 Best Paper Honourable Mention at ACM CHI, 2024 MinEx CRC Technology Award, 2021 UniSA STEM Early Career Researcher Award, and 2021 IVE Recognition Award for Innovation, Value, and Enterprise. Cunningham teaches courses in human-centred design, interactive systems design, immersive technologies, and applied software development, and supervises honours, masters, and PhD students.