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2005 SIGCHI Awards

2005 SIGCHI Awards

CHI Academy

The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI and who have led the shaping of the field.

This year we have elected six new Academy members. In alphabetical order, they are:

Ron Baecker

Ron Baecker is professor of computer science, Bell Chair in human-computer interaction, and founder of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto. His work on picture-driven animation and the Genesys system helped launch the field of interactive computer animation. His film Sorting out Sorting began the field of algorithm animation. Ideas from the highly interactive Newswhole pagination system (developed by student David Tilbrook) foreshadowed desktop publishing and introduced the widely-adopted idea of an iconic cursor. He was one of the pioneers of CSCW and CSCL (computer-supported cooperative learning), especially in collaborative writing and in multi-modal collaboration at a distance. His co-edited books on HCI and CSCW brought together important papers and significant original overview material, and have been widely used in HCI education. His book on typography for programming (co-authored with Aaron Marcus) set new standards for the field.

Susan Dumais

Susan Dumais is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group. Before joining Microsoft, Sue was a researcher and director at Bellcore and Bell Labs. Her work focuses on algorithms and interfaces for improving information access. Her pioneering research spans across personal information management, question answering, information retrieval, text categorization and clustering, interfaces for combining search and browsing, and user modeling. Sue is perhaps best known as a co-developer of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), a statistical method for content-based retrieval which helps overcome the “vocabulary disagreement” problem. She also led the empirical efforts to validate the effectiveness of LSI in several application areas. In current work, as exemplified in her “Stuff I’ve Seen” project, Sue continues to demonstrate she is that rare combination of creative designer and elegant experimenter. Her many significant contributions to SIGCHI and SIGIR serve as an important bridge between the communities.

John Gould

John Gould worked for thirty years at the IBM T. J. Watson Research labs, and retired in 1993. John launched experimental studies of reading and writing at computer terminals, determined limiting factors, and provided solutions. He developed a long collaboration with Stephen Boies to build pioneering systems with emphasis upon usability. Together they invented digital voice messaging systems, now used by millions. John insists that his collaborations with Stephen, Clayton Lewis, and others led to his success. With Clayton, they developed a process for designing systems for usability that has become so commonplace as to be taken for granted. With Stephen, they tested this design process in building the widely-used 1984 Olympic Multi-media Message System. John developed methodologies to test the usability of new systems before they were built, such as paper and pencil experiments. John studied experimentally if an imperfect “listening typewriter” would be useful for experienced dictators, thus pioneering what later was called the ‘Wizard of Oz’ methodology. Recognizing that better development tools were necessary to achieve improved usability, John, Stephen, and colleagues developed the well known ITS tool that separated software into four layers: action, dialog, style rule and style and used ITS to build real world applications, including the EXPO’92 World’s Fair system.

Saul Greenberg

Saul Greenberg is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. While he is a computer scientist by training, the work by Saul and his students typify the cross-discipline aspects of HCI and CSCW. He and his team are well known for their development of toolkits enabling rapid prototyping of groupware and physical user interfaces (e.g. Groupkit, Collabrary, SDGToolkit, Phidgets); innovative and seminal system designs based on observations of social phenomenon (e.g. GroupSketch, GroupDraw, TeamRooms, Notification Collage); articulation of design-oriented social science theories (e.g. awareness, casual interaction and privacy), and refinement of evaluation methods (e.g. heuristic evaluation of groupware). He is also known for his strong commitment in making his tools, systems, and educational material readily available to other HCI researchers and educators. His HCI lecture notes were one of the first to be available on line, and are heavily downloaded and used.

Bonnie John

Bonnie John is Professor of HCI at Carnegie Mellon University. An early contribution was applying cognitive modeling techniques to predict human-computer interaction in a new telephone operator console system. This innovative work correctly predicted that the company’s new system for operators would actually increase call-handling time over the that used in the old system. Bonnie has since applied cognitive modeling to many complex real world tasks, such as analyzing usability problems in Web browsing and automobile driving. She also invented new modeling methods (in particular CPM-GOMS) that are more efficient and better adapted to complex tasks than previous methods. Understanding that novices have difficulty modeling, Bonnie made strides in making cognitive modeling more accessible to researchers and engineers. Her pairing of empirical science with cognitive modeling for usability evaluation is a major contribution to the field, and has inspired many other researchers. Bonnie’s evaluation studies are some of the most precise and quantitative analyses in our field. She routinely publishes influential articles on evaluation techniques that foster debate in the HCI world. In recent years, Bonnie also has done groundbreaking research to integrate the analysis of usability problems with the standardized engineering process.

Andrew Monk

Andrew Monk is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Centre for Usable Home Technology (CUHTec), a collaboration between Psychology, Computer Science and Electronics at the University of York, UK. He was a founding member of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the University of York and edited one of the first texts on HCI in 1984. Andrew was influential in the move to make formal and empirical methods for iterative design more accessible to system developers and has published “light weight” methods for work context analysis, dialogue modelling and user testing. Andrew has also published widely on video mediated communication, particularly the role of gaze awareness as a conversational resource. More recently, his workshop series “Computers and Fun” brought the HCI community’s attention to innovative work on the problem of designing for enjoyment. His current work is to capture for designers the real problems faced by frail older people, and people with disabilities, who wish to live independently.

Congratulations to this year’s Academy.

Lifetime Achievement Award

The CHI Lifetime Achievement Award is the most prestigious award SIGCHI gives. The criteria for achievement are the same as for the CHI Academy, only more so.

This year we present the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award to Tom Landauer.

Tom Landauer

Tom Landauer is Executive VP for Research of Pearson Knowledge Technologies (formerly Knowledge Analysis Technologies), of which he was founding President in 1998. Tom and the group of computer scientists, linguists and cognitive psychologists he directed at Bell Labs and Bellcore (now Telcordia) did the fundamental and applied work that led to the theory, development and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and more generally conducted research on computer and communication-based tools for enhancing human learning and performance. His company is now applying LSA to automatic analysis of essays, cross-language information retrieval, and collaborative learning. Tom is also a Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Fellow in their Institute of Cognitive Science. He has served on the faculties of Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford, and Princeton. He was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and its successors for 25 years.

Tom has contributed to our understanding of broad issues and implications of HCI with many papers, his edited The Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, and most notably in his influential book, The Trouble with Computers, which explores the productivity paradox of computing and the way that HCI can make a difference. The book received the Association of American Publishers award for best Computer Science book of 1994.

Lifetime Service Award

The CHI Lifetime Service Award goes to individuals who have contributed to the growth of SIGCHI in a variety of capacities. This award is for extended services to the community at large over a number of years and carries an honorarium of $1000. Criteria for this award are: Service to SIGCHI and its activities in a variety of capacities; extended contributions over many years; influence on the community at large.

Gary Perlman

Gary Perlman is perhaps most well known for the popular, early repository of HCI publications and bibliographic information, the HCI Bibliography. The HCI Bibliography web site has been accessed over 4.5 million times since April 4th, 1998. Gary worked on the committee for the CHI 1986 conference, served as ACM BuckCHI Chair 1997-1998, ACM SIGCHI Vice-Chair for Publications 1995-97, SIGCHI Education Chair 1991-1995; participated on many conference technical program committees; and has published in and refereed for several HCI journals over many years. In addition, Gary set up the current system of SIGCHI mailing lists. Gary served on the SIGCHI Curriculum Development Group and created the web version of the group’s 1992 report. Gary currently telecommutes as a Consulting Research Scientist at OCLC Online Computer Library Center, from Montreal, Canada where his focus there is on the design of useful and usable web-based bibliographic and full text retrieval tools.

Marilyn Mantei Tremaine

Marilyn Mantei Tremaine is known for her long-standing contributions to the HCI profession and to SIGCHI. She was a “founding mother” of SIGCHI and the CHI conferences. She was active in all early CHI conferences and served as Chair of CHI 86, industry liaison for CHI ’87, and on the Papers committees of various years. She chaired SIGCHI during 2000-2001 and was on the SIGCHI Executive Committee Advisory Board from 1990-1991. Marilyn was the SIGCHI Education Chair for 6 yrs, and is a member of the SIGCHI Curriculum Development Committee. She has also chaired CSCW 92 and ASSETS conferences. Marilyn is a respected researcher and teacher, a member of the faculty at University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Drexel University, New Jersey Institute for Technology (NJIT), and Rutgers, and a visiting professor at the Cambridge Computing lab and the University of Paris at Orsay.

Sara Bly

Sara Bly has been active in SIGCHI since its inception, especially as the liaison from SIGGRAPH to SIGCHI. Sara was a “founding mother” of SIGCHI. Sara also participated as a member on the Executive Committee and as a member of the Publications Board. Sara was involved in the SIGCHI program committee most years from 1983-1999, in various roles. Sara has been an active researcher and practitioner in qualitative user studies for more than 20 years. Her user studies have focused on understanding the context of activity as well as the specific user task. Since 1994, she has conducted numerous studies as an independent consultancy, Sara Bly Consulting. She was an early member of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Media Space. Sara has worked closely with designers, social scientists and engineers to develop methods for using ethnographic methods for informing the design of technology.

Don Patterson

A co-founder and continuous supporter of the successful BayCHI chapter, Don Patterson has been an active supporter of SIGCHI since its beginning. Don has tended to stay out of the limelight, preferring instead to take on the jobs that just need to be done. Don is especially proud that he helped influence the SIGCHI Executive Council to hold CHI in international venues, first in Toronto for CHI+GI 1987, and then in Amsterdam for INTERCHI’93. Don participated in the SIGCHI Advisory Board which was involved in the development of the infrastructure of SIGCHI and the CHI Conference. Don was also a longtime member of the SIGCHI CPC (Conference Planning Committee), involved in conference site selection, registration and served on many CHI conference committees.

John “Scooter” Morris

Scooter has worked tirelessly for SIGCHI and the CHI conferences since he was the first AV chair (ever) at CHI ’85. Since then, he has served on CHI conference committees (including panels for CHI 90), was co-chair for CHI ’92, and has served on the Conference Planning Committee (CPC) and its successor the Conference Management Committee (CMC). He served as CMC liaison to CHI ’95 and CHI ’97, conference advisor for CHI 2004, and has also been in charge of computing and technical support for both CHI 2000 and CHI 2004. He is currently on the ACM Council. Scooter is currently the Executive Director of the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics (RBVI) at the University of California, San Francisco, which develops software tools and websites to support the analysis and visualization of a variety of complex biological problems and interactions.

Social Impact Award

This award is given to individuals who promote the application of human-computer interaction research to pressing social needs.

Gregg Vanderheiden

Gregg Vanderheiden is a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the university, he serves as Director of the Trace Research and Development Center, which focuses on making standard information technologies and telecommunications systems more accessible and usable by people with disabilities. Dr. Vanderheiden has been working in the area of access to technology for over 30 years. He was a pioneer in the fields of Augmentative and Alternative Communication and assistive technology and coined the term Augmentative Communication. He then worked with the computer industry to develop and build disability access features directly into their standard products. Access features developed by Dr. Vanderheiden and his team have been built into the Macintosh Operating System since 1987, OS/2 and the UNIX X Window system since 1993, and over half a dozen access features developed at Trace are built into Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000 and XP.