Two Faculty of IT researchers named ACM Distinguished Members

Professor Jianfei Cai and Professor Florian Mueller from Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology have been recognised among only 61 recipients globally as 2025 Distinguished Members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Professor Cai was recognised for his achievements in vision language understanding and visual computing, and Professor Mueller for his contributions to human-computer interaction and playful not-easy-to-use interfaces.

Selected by their peers, the annual honour recognises ACM members for significant technical achievements and sustained contributions to the computing community.

‘This achievement acknowledges Professor Cai and Professor Mueller’s standing in their respective fields and the Faculty’s international reputation for world-class research,’ said Professor Jesper Kjeldskov, Deputy Dean (Research) in the Faculty of IT.

The ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, bringing together computing educators, researchers and professionals to exchange knowledge and tackle the key challenges facing the field.

Jianfei Cai

Professor Jianfei Cai

With over 20 years’ experience in the field, Professor Cai continues to drive advances in visual computing, computer vision and multimedia. Earlier this year he secured a $700K+ Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant to create personalised, interactive and responsible AI avatar agents.

He was the inaugural Head of the Faculty’s Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, where he now serves as Director of Research and leads the Vision and Language discipline group.

Professor Cai holds key leadership roles in the global research community, chairing numerous top-tier conferences including most recently as General Chair of ACM Multimedia 2024. He also contributes to the editorial landscape, currently serving on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) and the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV).

A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since in 2021, he has published over 300 papers and has received multiple best paper awards at leading international conferences.

Floyd Mueller

Professor Florian Mueller

Professor Mueller has helped shape the role of games and play within human-computer interaction (HCI) for over two decades, recognised by his 2023 induction into the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Academy.

He currently directs the Exertion Games research group within the Department of Human-Centred Computing, which investigates the future of play and games to improve our understanding of how to design better interactive experiences.

Professor Mueller co-established the ACM CHI subcommittee on ‘Games and Play’ and co-founded the ACM CHI PLAY conference series. He has authored more than 250 publications, and his games and interactive experiences have been featured in media such as the BBC, ABC, Discovery Science Channel and Wired.

Alongside his academic career, Professor Mueller has also held research roles at Microsoft Research, the MIT Media Lab, Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Labs, Xerox PARC and Australia’s national science agency CSIRO.