2017 SIGCHI Awards
Social Impact Award
Jacob O. Wobbrock
Jacob O. Wobbrock is an Associate Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Mobile & Accessible Design Lab. He is a founding member of the design: use: build: Group (DUB Group) and the multi-departmental Master of HCI & Design program at UW. Dr. Wobbrock’s research seeks to scientifically understand people’s interactions with computers and information, and to improve those interactions through design and engineering, especially for people with disabilities. His specific research topics include interaction techniques, human performance measurement and modeling, HCI research and design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing. He pursues “Ability-Based Design,” where the human abilities required to use a technology in a given context are questioned, and systems are made operable by or adaptable to alternative abilities. For example, his Slide Rule project (with Shaun Kane and Jeffrey Bigham) was the first to make touch screen smartphones accessible to blind people using gestures, influencing Apple’s VoiceOver design for iOS. Dr. Wobbrock has co-authored over 120 peer-reviewed publications, receiving 19 paper awards, including seven best papers and seven honorable mentions from ACM CHI. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and five other National Science Foundation grants. He is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. His advisees, to whom he owes his success, have become professors at Harvard, Cornell, Colorado, Maryland, Brown, Simon Fraser, and elsewhere. Dr. Wobbrock received his B.S. in Symbolic Systems and his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University; he received his Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. Upon graduation, he was honored with CMU’s School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award.
Indrani Medhi Thies
Indrani Medhi Thies is a Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research in Bangalore, India. Her research interests are in the area of User Interfaces, User Experience Design, and ICTs for Global Development. Over the years, Indrani’s primary work has been in user interfaces for low-literate and novice technology users. As a part of this research, Indrani spent hundreds of hours in the field among low-income communities in rural and urban India, the Philippines and South Africa, conducting ethnographic design, iterative prototyping and user evaluations. Indrani is considered a world expert in interfaces for low-literate users. Her recent work is in user experience of conversational agents, mainly chatbots. Indrani also serves on the board of Digital Green, a not-for-profit international development organization that uses an innovative digital platform for community engagement to improve lives of rural communities across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Indrani’s distinctions include an MIT TR35 award, ACM SIGCHI and ACM CSCW best paper honourable mentions, a “Young Indian Leader” award from CNN IBN, and featuring in the list of Fortune magazine’s 2010 “50 Smartest People in Technology”. Indrani has published over 20 refereed research articles in leading conferences and journals. She has a Ph.D. from the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, India; a Masters’ degree in Design from the IIT Institute of Design, Chicago, USA; and a Bachelors’ degree in Architecture from VNIT, Nagpur, India.
SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award
Scott E. Hudson
Scott Hudson is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he serves as the director of the HCI Institute PhD program, which he founded in 1999. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1986, and has previously held faculty positions at the University of Arizona and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Elected to the CHI Academy in 2006, he has published extensively on technology-oriented HCI topics, and recently received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence at CMU. His research interests range over many HCI topics, and currently include new fabrication technology applied to HCI, the development of new sensors, devices, and interaction techniques, as well as Human-Robot Interaction, and software systems for user interface implementation.
He is currently the steering committee chair for the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST). Beginning in 1989, he has regularly served on program committees for the SIGCHI and UIST conferences (serving on these committees more than 30 times). He has served as the General Chair (1993) and Program Chair (1990, 2000) for the UIST conference, and he founded the UIST Doctoral Symposium in 2003. He also served as papers co-chair for the SIGCHI 2009 and 2010 conferences, and was one of the principal architects of the revised review process that has been in use since that time. He was a founding Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, and has served on advisory boards for the University of Colorado and Georgia Institute of Technology.
Zhengjie Liu
Zhengjie Liu is a professor of human-computer interaction (HCI) at Dalian Maritime University, China. He has been involved in HCI since 1989. His pioneering academic and organizational activities since then have contributed to the development and growth of HCI, especially user experience practice in industry in China. He has helped to bring China and the rest of the HCI world closer together. He has also played a key role in SIGCHI’s initiatives to connect with the HCI communities in the developing world in Asia, Latin America and Africa, and to help the local communities to develop as well. He is a co-founder of SIGCHI China and SIG on HCI, Chinese Computer Federation (CCF). He has served on various roles on the SIGCHI Executive Committee, including Adjunct Chair for Developing Worlds (2009-2015), Chair of Gary Marsden Student Development Fund Committee, and member of Asia Development Committee. He is active in the IFIP TC.13 Committee on HCI since 1999 as the Chinese Representative and an Expert Member. He is awardee of IFIP TC13 Pioneers Award in 2013.
His area is research and practice in human-computer interaction design focusing on issues related to usability, user experience and user-centered design. He founded the Sino European Usability Center in 2000 as the first research center dedicated to promoting usability in China and the first postgraduate program focusing on interaction design in computer science schools in this country. He is an experienced consultant and provides training to industry including many multinational companies.
Lifetime Research Award
Brad A. Myers
Brad A. Myers is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the CHI Academy, a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and winner of nine best paper type awards and three Most Influential Paper awards. He is the author or editor of 475 publications, including 85 at CHI, and is one of a select few who has attended every CHI conference. He has served on the editorial boards of six journals, including HCI, ToCHI and IwC. His MIT Master’s thesis on “Incense” was one of the earliest data visualization systems. While working for PERQ Systems Corporation, Brad created one of the first commercial window managers with a number of features which later became widespread. His PhD dissertation from the University of Toronto featured an interactive tool called “Peridot,” a programming-by- demonstration system that specified the look and behaviors of widgets without conventional programming. At Carnegie Mellon University, he created the “Garnet” and “Amulet” toolkits, which incorporated novel designs for objects, constraints, output handling, input handling, command objects, and interactive tools. Many of the innovations in these projects have been adopted by later research and commercial systems. Brad was one of the early researchers on innovative uses for handheld devices. More recently, he has focused on using HCI techniques to improve programming for novice, expert, and end-user programmers. He has advised over 200 students, including 16 PhD students, many of whom are also professors, or are at top research labs.
Lifetime Practice Award
Ernest Edmonds
Ernest Edmonds is a pioneer computer artist and HCI innovator for whom combining creative arts practice with creative technologies has been a lifelong pursuit. His art was already computer based before 1970, and his future vision was to transform user participation with interactive and distributed works. From that time he began a quest to transform user interface design to an adaptive and iterative process and by 1973 he had made HCI at Leicester Polytechnic a priority research area. From this work came some of the first published articles about interactive art (1970), iterative design methods (1974), user interface architectures (1982) and the support of creativity (1989). His books include The Separable User Interface (Academic Press), Explorations in Art and Technology (Springer) and Interacting: Art, Research and the Creative Practitioner (Libri), the last two co-authored with Linda Candy.
Ernest was born in London in 1942 and continues to work in the UK as Director of the Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at De Montfort University. He founded several HCI research centers including Loughborough University’s Computer Human Interaction Research Centre and the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 1993, he co-founded the Creativity & Cognition conference series, a SIGCHI sponsored event since 1999, and was a founding member of the Steering Committee of the SIGART/SIGCHI Intelligent User Interface Conferences. Ernest was elected to the CHI Academy in 2015 and was Co-Arts Exhibit Chair at CHI2016. He is an Honorary Editor of Leonardo and Editor-in-Chief of Springer’s Cultural Computing book series.
Over the last fifty years Ernest has exhibited his artwork across the globe. In March 2017 a full retrospective will be shown at De Montfort University where he first began his HCI and art research. In the last two years he has shown in Beijing, Shanghai and Rio de Janerio, where Primary Codes was a major exhibition of computer art pioneers that brought his art together with Harold Cohen, Frieder Nake and Paul Brown. He has previously shown in, for example, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Moscow, Riga, Rotterdam, Berlin and Washington DC. The Victoria and Albert Museum London collects his art and archives.
SIGCHI Academy
Elisabeth André
Elisabeth André is a full professor of Computer Science and Founding Chair of Human-Centered Multimedia at Augsburg University in Germany where she has been since 2001. She has multiple degrees in computer science from Saarland University, including a doctorate. Previously, she was a principal researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) in Saarbrücken.
Elisabeth André has a long track record in multimodal human-machine interaction, embodied conversational agents, affective computing and social signal processing. She has undertaken very successful interdisciplinary collaborations with psychologists, pedagogues, medical scientists and media artists that have resulted in several award-winning multimodal user interfaces, among them pedagogically well-grounded and empirically validated learning environments for children and young people. Drawing on the concept of computer-based role play with virtual characters, she has promoted a novel form of experience-based learning, for example, to help children and young people cope with bullying at school, develop intercultural sensitivity or master socially challenging situations, such as job interviews.
Elisabeth André has served as a General and Program Co-Chair of major ACM SIGCHI conferences including ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) and ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). She has given invited keynotes at top tier scientific conferences, such as ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) or IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and Human Interactive Communications (RO-MAN).
Elisabeth André has been elected a member of the prestigious Academy of Europe, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and AcademiaNet. To honor her achievements in bringing Artificial Intelligence techniques to HCI, she was awarded a EurAI fellowship (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence) that recognizes “individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe”.
Lorrie Faith Cranor
Lorrie Faith Cranor is a Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. In 2016 she served as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission, working in the office of Chairwoman Ramirez. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc, a security awareness training company. She has authored over 150 research papers on online privacy, usable security, and other topics. She has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, having co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability (O’Reilly 2005) and founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the W3C and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P (O’Reilly 2002). She has served on a number of boards, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors, and on the editorial boards of several journals. In her younger days she was honored as one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine. More recently she was named an ACM Fellow for her contributions to usable privacy and security research and education, and an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to privacy engineering. She was previously a researcher at AT&T-Labs Research and taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University. She holds a doctorate in Engineering and Policy from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2012-13 she spent her sabbatical as a fellow in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked on fiber arts projects that combined her interests in privacy and security, quilting, computers, and technology. She practices yoga, plays soccer, and runs after her three children.
Vicki L. Hanson
Vicki Hanson, the current ACM President, has worked for many years in support of the HCI community. She has contributed to SIGCHI and the CHI conference in various capacities, most recently as the elected SIGCHI Vice President at Large. She was also part of the group that created the NSF Human-Centered Computing research agenda. Vicki revitalized ACM’s Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS), established a successful annual conference in this field, co-founded and served as the first co-editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, and has served as guest editor of special issues of several journals including TOCHI. Through these and many other roles she has helped to shape and grow the field, mentoring young researchers and building a strong international research community.
Vicki is a Distinguished Professor in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and holds a Chair in Inclusive Technologies at the University of Dundee in Scotland. She has been working on issues of inclusion for older adults and disabled people throughout her professional career, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and subsequently at Haskins Laboratories and at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center where she founded and managed the Accessibility Research group.
Her research focus is on accessibility of technology for people with disabilities, the aging population, and related issues of research ethics. In her position at RIT she has returned to her roots in education and American Sign Language. Working with students from RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf she is exploring wearables for supporting the language needs of deaf signers in traditional classrooms. Recently-funded work from an NSF Ethics initiative is also examining means by which HCI instructors can create learning situations that both inform computing students about accessibility requirements and make considerations of accessible software development a foundational element of their design and development practices. Recent work as a Visiting Professor at England’s Lancaster University has begun exploring aging and technology use from the perspective of older adults’ values and priorities.
Vicki’s contributions have been recognized by numerous industry and professional honors. A Fellow of the ACM, the British Computer Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, she has received the Social Impact Award from ACM SIGCHI, the Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society, the Woman of Vision Award for Social Impact from the Anita Borg Institute, an IBM Corporate Award for pioneering technology and innovation supporting IBM’s contributions to accessibility, and an Honorary Doctor of Science degree for her contributions to inclusion and commitment to increasing the participation of women in computing. As a fun fact, Vicki is the Ace of Clubs in the highly collectible deck of “Notable Women in Computing” playing cards created by CRA-W and the Anita Borg Institute.
Marti A. Hearst
Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.
Prof Hearst’s HCI research includes user interfaces for search, information visualization of text, web site usability, and innovation in education. She wrote Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on this topic and her search projects include usability analysis of search results clustering, the TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for navigation and search. Faceted navigation became the standard search interface for e-commerce, digital libraries and image collections for at least a decade.
Prof. Hearst has been on the editorial board of ACM TOCHI since 2004 and has reviewed for CHI, UIST, and Infoviz for 20 years. She has developed and shared HCI course materials with the community and has received four student-initiated Excellence in Teaching Awards. She successfully introduced user-centered design into a technology-centered U.S. federal agency and was named a Fellow of the ACM in 2013.
Gloria Mark
Gloria Mark is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. She received her PhD from Columbia University in experimental psychology. Her primary research interest is in understanding the impact of digital media on people’s lives and she is best known for her work in studying people’s multitasking, mood and behavior while using digital media in real world environments. She has also contributed to understanding distributed collaboration as well as social media use among people living in disrupted environments. She has published over 150 papers and is author of the book Multitasking in the Digital Age. Her work has received best paper and honorable mention awards and she has been a Fulbright scholar. She has held leadership roles in SIGCHI conferences: she is general co-chair of the ACM CHI 2017 conference, was papers chair of ACM CSCW 2012 and ACM CSCW 2006, and served on the first ACM CSCW steering committee. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the ACM TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction journals. Her work has been recognized outside of academia: she has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Philippe Palanque
Philippe Palanque is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III, France, where he leads the Interactive Critical Systems group, since 2001. Prior to that, he was lecturer at the Université Toulouse Capitole, France since 1993. He received a PhD in Computer Science in 1992 from the same University. Starting 1995, he worked two years at CENA (the French Research Center on Air Traffic Control).
In the early 2000, he, along with his colleague Rémi Bastide, started the first master in HCI in France (a joint programme with University Toulouse 1 Capitole and ENAC (the Engineering School on Civil Aviation)). From the very beginning, he has been working on the development and the application of formal description techniques to interactive system. The main driver of Philippe’s research has been to address in an even way Usability, Safety and Dependability in order to build Trustable and Resilient safety-critical interactive systems. He has worked on research projects dealing with interactive Ground Segment Applications and is also involved in the development of software architectures and user interface modeling for interactive cockpits in large civil aircraft as well as Air Traffic Management workstations. His work has been supported by the French Department of Defense (DGA), French Civil Aviation (DGAC), Thales, the French National Center on Space Studies (CNES) and most recently Airbus Group. He was involved in multiple European Union-funded projects and in the Network of Excellence ResIST (on resilience) and the research network HALA! (High Automation Level in Aviation).
Together with Fabio Paternó he published an edited book on Formal Methods for Human Computer Interaction (Springer, 1997), and more recently, the Handbook on Formal Methods for Human Computer Interaction (Springer, 2017).
He has long been active in SIGCHI and other international societies such as IFIP. He chaired or co-chaired numerous conference functions, mostly at CHI, EICS and INTERACT and was general chair of the CHI conference in 2014 and EICS in 2016. He has also been actively involved in the committees of conferences in the domain of safety and dependability such as SAFECOMP, IEEE DSN. He is currently chair of the CHI and EICS steering committees and served as Adjunct Chair for Specialized Conferences on the SIGCHI Executive Committee 2007-2015. He is also the current chair of the IFIP Technical Committee on HCI and an ACM Distinguished Speaker He is a recipient of the IFIP silver core award and IFIP pioneer award.
Paul Resnick
Paul Resnick is the Michael D. Cohen Collegiate Professor of Information and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs at the University of Michigan School of Information. He was a pioneer in the field of recommender systems (sometimes called collaborative filtering). The GroupLens system he helped develop was awarded the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award. An article written with Eric Friedman, “The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms” received the inaugural ACM EC Test of Time Award. His 2012 MIT Press book, co-authored with Robert Kraut, was titled “Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-based Social Design”. His current research is especially focused on socio-technical approaches to reducing political polarization. He is a past program co-chair and Steering Committee chair for the ACM RecSys conference.
Thad Eugene Starner
Thad Starner is a Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech and a wearable computing pioneer. By wearing a computer and head-worn display in his daily life since 1993, Thad became a “living laboratory” to explore the advantages and challenges of such devices. Through creating a community of “cyborgs,” Thad and his colleagues at Georgia Tech and MIT explored how people constantly augmented with computing might live and work together, more than a decade before smartphones were commonly available. These efforts led to Professor Starner becoming a Technical Lead and Manager on Google Glass, which was named by Time Magazine one of the “50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time.”
Thad’s academic efforts include inventing a wireless glove that teaches how to play piano melodies without active attention; creating a game for deaf children using computer vision-based sign language recognition that helps them acquire language skills; designing wearable computers to enable two-way communication experiments with wild dolphins; making wearable computers for working dogs to facilitate communication with their handlers; recovering phrase-level sign language from brain signals; and recognizing English speech without vocalizing. Thad hopes to use wearable computers to create a “symbiotic AI,” where an intelligent agent assists the wearer in daily life and leverages the wearable’s first-person perspective to learn how to interact in human society.
Thad is an active community builder, including being a founder of the annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, now in its 21st year, and the recent IEEE Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies Special Technical Community. Thad has produced almost 500 papers and presentations with nearly 300 co-authors and is an inventor on over 90 United States utility patents awarded or in process. Dr. Starner received undergraduate degrees at MIT in Computer Science and Brain & Cognitive Science and a Masters and PhD at the MIT Media Laboratory. Thad loves table tennis and chocolate chip cookies.