Sunny is a human-computer interaction researcher who focuses on persuasive technologies, ubiquitous computing systems, mobile computing, and Web technologies.
She is currently a User Experience Researcher at Google. Sunny has previously worked as a Principal User Experience Designer & Researcher for Amazon and a Research Scientist at Intel Labs Seattle. While at Intel, she investigated how to use mobile technologies to encourage health & wellness — particularly physical activity and healthy sleep behaviors — and to help people be more aware of the privacy implications of sensing and inference systems.
Sunny has also investigated peoples’ understanding of and privacy concerns related to Wi-Fi use, designed and evaluated tools to help people be more aware of what they expose when they use Wi-Fi, examined privacy implications of location-enhanced technologies, and developed technologies to help elders age in place.
Before Intel Labs Seattle, Sunny worked in Silicon Valley on Web design and usability. As a co-founder of Propel, she recruited and led their user experience team to develop e-commerce storefronts and tools for merchandising, customer support, and site administration. Sunny was also a usability specialist at Infoseek and Go.com where she worked on search, email, chat, message boards, registration, personalization, and the properties espn.com, abcnews.com, and mrshowbiz.com.
Sunny received her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington's Information School. She is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in UW's Human Centered Design & Engineering Department and Information School. Sunny is also a member of DUB. She recently joined the Editorial Board of IEEE Pervasive Computing and became a Certified Information Privacy Professional (US).