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2015 SIGCHI Awards

2015 SIGCHI Awards

Social Impact Award

Leysia Palen

Leysia Palen is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, and Chair and Associate Professor of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also a Full Adjunct Professor at the University of Agder in Norway. Palen is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego with a BS in Cognitive Science, and of the University of California, Irvine with an MS and PhD in Information and Computer Science. Prof. Palen is a leader in the area of crisis informatics, an area she forged with her graduate students and colleagues at CU-Boulder. She brings her training in human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work and social computing to bear on understanding and advancing socio-technical issues of societal import. Prof. Palen is the author of over 70 articles and a co-edited book in the areas of human computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, mobility, and crisis informatics. She was awarded an NSF CAREER in 2006. She is an Associate Editor for the Human Computer Interaction Journal (Taylor and Francis) and for the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Journal (Springer).

Lifetime Service

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon is Professor of Computer Science, Classe Exceptionnelle, at Université Paris-Sud (France) and a senior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked in human-computer interaction for 30 years and was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2006. His research interests include fundamental aspects of interaction, novel interaction techniques, computer-supported cooperative work and engineering of interactive systems. He has published over 150 papers and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. His current research is conducted in the Ex Situ group, a joint lab between Université Paris-Sud, CNRS and Inria, where he heads the 22M€ Digiscope project.

Michel is heavily involved in the management of research. He has been vice-president of the computer science department at Université Paris-Sud. He was director of LRI, the laboratory for computer science joint between Université Paris-Sud and CNRS (280 faculty, staff, and Ph.D. students), where he now heads the Human-Centered Computing lab. He participates in the evaluation of many research institutions and research proposals at the French, European and international levels. He currently sits on the Scientific Committee of CNRS for Computer Science.

Michel has worked tirelessly to develop HCI in France. He has advised twenty-eight Ph.D. students and has served on more than 100 Ph.D. and French “habilitation” committees. He founded and co-directs two international masters in HCI, and is co-director of the graduate school in computer science. He founded AFIHM, the Francophone association for human-computer interaction, and was its first president. Michel has also been active in ACM and SIGCHI for over 20 years. He has served on the program committees of many conferences, especially CHI and UIST, several times (7) as chair or co-chair. He was chair of UIST 2001, co-chair of IHM 2004, co-chair of ECSCW 2005, and Technical Program Co-chair for CHI 2013 in Paris. He sits on the editorial boards of ACM Books and ACM TOCHI. He has served on the ACM Council and the ACM Publications Board, and on several award and nominating committees of ACM and SIGCHI. He is currently serving on the ACM Europe Council and on EUACM, the new European policy office of ACM.

Jean Scholtz

Jean’s first CHI conference was in 1988 where she worked as a student volunteer. Since then, she has volunteered at many CHI conferences in various positions including: reviewer, session chair, associate reviewer, co-chair of late breaking submissions, co-chair of Technical notes, Co-chair of Organizational Overviews, Co-Industry Liaison, Co-chair of Panels, and Special Area Chair – robotics. She was also the Vice-Chair of Finance of the SIGCHI from 1997-2001.

Jean was involved in starting a local SIGCHI in Portland, OR in 1991. CHIFOO (The Computer Human Interaction Forum of Oregon) is still going strong. She also was involved in starting a local Chapter in the District of Columbia in the late 90’s.

Jean’s research in the CHI area started with studying transfer of skill in programming languages and identifying the elements needed for tutoring systems to help experienced programmers move to new languages. She continued this work as a faculty member at Portland State University where she developed a master’s degree track in HCI. She spent several years working at Intel where she conducted usability tests and did user requirements for audio and video conferencing systems. She moved to the east coast with her husband and worked at the National Institute of Standards (NIST) and Technology where she helped in developing test environments and metrics for Urban Search and Rescue Robots and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robots. She was also the driving force behind the NIST Industry Usability Reporting (IUSR) Project. This project developed the Common Industry Format (CIF) that enabled companies to request usability data on software being considered for purchase. The CIF became an ANSI/INCITS standard in 2001 and an ISO standard in 2006. Jean also served as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where she managed work in Collaborative Systems and the Invisible Computing Initiative.

Today Jean is retired from NIST but is a chief scientist in the Visual Analytics Group at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA. She works part-time and spends the rest of her time gardening and creating mosaics at her home on the Oregon Coast.

Lifetime Achievement in Research

Jim Hollan

Jim Hollan is Professor of Cognitive Science & Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he co-directs the Design Lab. Following a postdoc in AI at Stanford, Hollan led the UCSD Intelligent Systems Group in the Institute for Cognitive Science and the Future Technologies Group at NPRDC. He left UCSD to become Director of the MCC Human Interface Lab and subsequently established the Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Research Group at Bellcore. He then moved to the University of New Mexico as Chair of the Computer Science Department. He returned to UC San Diego in 1997. Hollan’s early work explored graphical interfaces to aid understanding of complex dynamic systems. This work resulted in a series of training systems (e.g., Steamer and Moboard) and one of the first object-oriented graphics editors. The science that accompanied these development efforts made significant contributions to understanding direct manipulation interfaces and advancing research on mental models. The next phase of Hollan’s research focused on designing multimodal interfaces to high-functionality systems. He lead the Human Interface Lab at MCC in creating the Human Interface Tool Suite (HITS), which was among the first prototyping systems to integrate gestures, graphics, sketching, and natural language. Other work begun at MCC on history-enriched digital objects, collaborative filtering, and beyond-being-there continued when he moved to Bellcore, where he initiated a large scale project to explore multiscale information visualization. The resulting system, Pad++, was a precursor to current zoomable interfaces. When he returned to UCSD he focused on developing distributed cognition as a theoretical and methodological base for advancing HCI research. In recent work, Hollan and his students are developing tools (ChronoViz) to aid visualization and analysis of multiple streams of video and other time-based data and exploring techniques to help reestablish the context of interrupted activities.

Lifetime Achievement in Practice

Susan M. Dray

Susan Dray has worked to advance human-centered design since 1979, initially in a human factors research group at Honeywell, and later championing usability of corporate systems at American Express. She was one of the founders of SIGCHI in 1982. Since 1993, her consulting firm, Dray & Associates, has provided user experience research for a long list of clients to help them create innovative products and services that are useful, usable, and desirable. Through her publications, teaching, mentoring, and many speaking engagements, Susan has contributed significantly to the evolution of UX research practice, especially in field research, naturalistic usability evaluation, and international usability and user research. Extensive experience doing research in developing countries led to her involvement in forming a professional community focused on user-centered design for development (UCD4D), applying UCD to technological aspects of economic development. She is currently pursuing this interest as a Fulbright Scholar on the faculty at the Technological University of Panama. Susan is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, recipient of the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award, member of the CHI Academy and an ACM Distinguished Engineer. She is a long-time Column/Forum editor for Interactions and served as Director of Publications on the Board of the User Experience Professionals Association. Susan holds a doctorate in Psychology from UCLA.

SIGCHI Academy

Stephen Brewster

Stephen Brewster is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. He got his PhD in auditory interfaces at the University of York. After a period spent working in Finland and Norway, he has worked in Glasgow since 1995.

His research focuses on multimodal HCI, or using multiple sensory modalities and control mechanisms (particularly hearing, touch and gesture) to create a rich, natural interaction between human and computer. His work has a strong experimental focus, applying perceptual research to practical situations. A long term focus has been on mobile interaction and how we can design better user interfaces for users who are on the move. He pioneered the study of non-speech audio and haptic interaction for mobile devices with work starting in the 1990’s. According to Google Scholar, he has 375 publications. He has served as an Associate Chair, Sub-Committee Chair and Papers Chair, and has chaired the Interactivity, Doctoral Consortium and Student Design Competition tracks at CHI.

Andy Cockburn

Andy Cockburn is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he directs the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Andy’s research focuses on designing, evaluating and modelling user interfaces that exploit underlying human factors. His contributions include many interface designs that use human spatial memory to support expertise development in basic tasks such as file retrieval, command invocation, window switching, and scrolling. With his colleagues and students he has published more than 150 papers, with several receiving best paper and honourable mention awards. Dr Cockburn serves on the Editorial Board of ACM ToCHI, and he was papers co-chair for CHI 2014 and 2015.

Anind K. Dey

Anind Dey is the Charles M. Geschke Chair, and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He has spent much of career doing research at the intersection of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing and machine learning, with a particular focus on context-aware computing. He has authored over 100 papers on these topics and serves on the editorial board of several journals. Before joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, Anind was a Senior Researcher at Intel Labs in Berkeley. Anind received his PhD in computer science from Georgia Tech, along with a Masters of Science in both Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering. He received his Bachelors of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from Simon Fraser University.

Ernest Edmonds

Ernest Edmonds is a Research Professor specializing in creative technologies and interactive art systems and is based at the University of Technology, Sydney and at De Montfort University Leicester. His publications include nearly 300 books and papers, including some of the first articles about interactive art (1970), iterative design methods (1974), user interface architectures (1982) and the support of creativity (1989). He founded HCI research centres including Loughborough University Computer Human Interaction Research Centre and the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 1993, he founded the Creativity & Cognition conference series, a SIGCHI sponsored event since 1999, and was a founding member of the Steering Committee of the ACM SIGART/SIGCHI Intelligent User Interface Conferences. He is well known for his pioneering use of computers in art and has exhibited artwork in many countries. The Victoria and Albert Museum London collects his art and archives. He is currently an active member of the Art.CHI community and will be the Arts Exhibit Chair at CHI2016.

Scott MacKenzie

Scott MacKenzie is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University, Toronto. His research is in human-computer interaction with an emphasis on human performance measurement and modeling, experimental methods and evaluation, interaction devices and techniques, Fitts’ law, text entry, touch-based and sensor-based input, language modeling, mobile computing, and accessible computing. He earned a PhD in Education from the University of Toronto in 1991.

Sharon Oviatt

Sharon Oviatt is internationally known for her work on human-centered, multimodal, mobile, and educational interfaces, as well as interface design and evaluation. She has published over 150 articles in a multidisciplinary range of venues. She was recipient of the inaugural ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award for innovative, long-lasting, and influential contributions to defining the field of multimodal and multimedia interaction, interfaces, and systems. She also was recipient of an NSF Special Creativity Award for pioneering research on mobile multimodal interfaces. Sharon was one of the founders of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, and has served as General or Program Chair five times. She is an Associate Editor of the main journals and edited book collections in the field of human-centered interfaces. Sharon currently serves as President and Director of Incaa Designs Nonprofit. For most of her career, she has been in academics, where she has been as a professor of Computer Science, Psychology, and also Linguistics. She received her PhD in Experimental Psychology at University of Toronto. In 2013, Sharon published The Design of Future Educational Interfaces (Routledge Press). Her latest book, The Paradigm Shift to Multimodality in Contemporary Computer Interfaces (co-authored with Phil Cohen) will be published in 2015.

Catherine Plaisant

Catherine Plaisant is a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and Associate Director of Research of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. She earned a PhD in industrial engineering in France.

She enjoys working everyday with PhD students and nurturing the supportive environment of the Maryland HCIL community. Inspiration and fun have come from working closely with epidemiologists, engineers, librarians, geographers, intelligence analysts and teachers. Or was it when throwing ideas or polishing interfaces with physicians, literary scholars, social workers, families or persons with disabilities? Early pioneering work focused on touchscreen interfaces, search and browsing, then information visualization became a central theme of research, as well as evaluation strategies. Recent projects include novel designs for electronic health record systems and visual analytics environments for the analysis of temporal event sequences.

She co-authored with Ben Shneiderman the 4th and 5th Editions of Designing the User Interface. She launched the Information Visualization and Visual Analytics Challenges, and has served on the editorial boards of Information Visualizationand Interacting with Computers, and as guest editor of multiple special issues. Most happy outdoors, enjoying life with friends and family.

Bill Verplank

Bill Verplank is an interaction designer and educator known for his diagrams and sketches. He studied engineering at Stanford and MIT. At Xerox, he participated in testing and refining (and presenting at CHI’83), the Xerox Star. He helped write (and diagram) the SIGCHI Curricula. At Stanford, he learned to teach visual thinking from Bob McKim and helped Terry Winograd create an HCI design course. He was hired by industrial designer Bill Moggridge at ID2 and started “interaction design”. At Interval Research, he developed design methods: “body storming” and “informance design”; and pioneered tangible user-interfaces (TEI) and experimented with haptic force-feedback. When Interval closed in 2000, he joined Max Mathews at Stanford’s CCRMA to develop a course on HCI for computer music and a conference (spun off from CHI) called NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression). He was on the steering committee at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) and once or twice a year continues to teach at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID).