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2003 SIGCHI Awards

2003 SIGCHI Awards

Lifetime Service Award

The CHI Lifetime Service Award is given to individuals who have had extended influence and impact on the growth of SIGCHI and the professional HCI community. Austin Henderson and Dan Olsen were the first recipients.

This year we present the Lifetime Service Award to Lorraine Borman.

LORRAINE BORMAN

Lorraine Borman is one of the true “foremothers” of SIGCHI. She was one who created the SIGCHI organization and nurtured it into the thriving organization that it is today. In the early ’80s, a ragtag of computer scientists, human factors engineers, and behavioral scientists began to meet in ad hoc conferences. Lorraine recognized the need for a new SIG focused on the emerging idea of human-computer interaction. Lorraine was an officer of SIGSOC, the precursor to SIGCHI. With foresight, energy, and entrepreneurial skill, she went to ACM and made the case to change its charter and name – and SIGCHI was quickly created. She lead SIGCHI as its Chair for it first six years. Lorraine also has a long record of service at the ACM level, where she championed SIGCHI interests. She is an ACM Fellow and has received the ACM Outstanding Contributions Award. Lorraine’s impact on SIGCHI is enormous, and we are delighted to be able to recognize her for her role in giving birth to the organization.

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.

You can see the first thirteen members of the CHI Academy, who were elected last two years. This year we have elected five more. In alphabetical order, they are:

THOMAS GREEN

Thomas Green is now at the University of Leeds, but most of his career was at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, England. Thomas is an experimental psychologist who focuses on notations and languages. He is one of the founders of the psychology of programming. Starting back in the 60s, he developed a theory of the relationship between the surface syntax of languages and the underlying tasks. He has challenged conventional software engineering doctrine by his deep analyses of the usability of various structured, object-oriented, and visual programming languages. Viewing human-computer interaction as an action language, Thomas and his colleagues developed the task-action grammar for describing the consistency of interactive systems. In order to formulate a more practical technique, he broadened the theory by enumerating a general set of Cognitive Dimensions of notations and their use, which enable the articulation of the usability tradeoffs in designing devices and languages. Thomas is one of our field’s most unique thinkers and analysts.

JAMES D. HOLLAN

Jim Hollan is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego. He has been chair of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and Director of well-known research groups at Bellcore and at MCC. Jim is a cognitive scientist whose focus is on how interactive representations enhance human cognition. Jim’s earliest contribution was the simulation-based training system called Steamer, which was influential in its use of graphical tools and for the explicit teaching of mental models. At MCC he led the development of one of the first tool suites for creating multimodal interfaces, including gesture, graphics, and natural language. Jim then built a group at Bellcore, where he started the work leading to his most well known system, the zoomable multiscale interface called Pad++. Jim has coauthored several memorable and infuential papers, such as “Direct Manipulation Interfaces”, “Beyond Being There”, and “Edit Wear and Read Wear”. Jim is one of the most creative thinkers and inventive tool builders in our field.

ROBERT E. KRAUT

Bob Kraut is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of HCI at Carnegie Mellon University. He was director of Interpersonal Communication Research at Bellcore; and he was professor at Cornell, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. Bob is a social psychologist with a focus on human communication and the impact of computing. In his early academic career, he carried out basic experiments in nonverbal communication that are still cited today. For over a decade at Bellcore, he studied informal group communication in the workplace, both co-present and mediated by different technologies; and he established far-reaching principles and methodologies for studying collaboration. Shortly after going to CMU, he initiated a program of studies on the impact of the Internet in the home, which was then rapidly disseminating to the public. Bob studied the social effects in a systematic scientific way, with longitudinal studies that followed new users over months and years. This widely-reported work continues to have a profound impact on the scope and power of our discipline, and on our understanding of the ways that technology design and social practices are intertwined. Bob’s work throughout his career has transformed both the methods in which we investigate social phenomena and the way people inside and outside our field think about the social impact of technology.

GARY M. OLSON

Gary M. Olson is the Paul M. Fitts Professor of HCI and Psychology and the Associate Dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Gary is a cognitive psychologist whose main focus is on how people collaborate to accomplish complex intellectual endeavors. For more than two decades, he has forged perhaps the most extensive program of research on collaboration over a distance, investigating the domains of programming, design, and science, and using both laboratory and field studies. With Judy Olson, he has produced a long series of insightful papers articulating the principles of technology design and the social and organizational conditions for effective collaboration at a distance, such as their classic paper “Distance Matters.” Gary has led the nation is the development and study of worldwide “collaboratories” in the big sciences, from astronomy to AIDS. Gary has also put tremendous energy into building the field by editing a range of top journals and chairing some of our most important conferences, including being an initiator of the DIS conference series. By his rigorous scholarship, hard-nosed empiricism, and institutional leadership, Gary is one of the principal shapers of our field.

PETER G. POLSON

Peter G Polson is a Professor of Psychology and a member of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado. Peter is a mathematical psychologist turned cognitive psychologist turned HCI researcher and aviation psychologist. The underlying theme in his work is the acquisition and transfer of cognitive skills. Peter is one of the pioneers in developing and evaluating precise cognitive models of human problem solving and complex learning tasks. He has applied his models to computer programming, learning to use software applications, and the advanced flight training of pilots. Peter is also concerned with practical techniques. With Clayton Lewis, he developed the Cognitive Walkthrough, a theory-based evaluation technique in wide use. Peter’s long record of publications is a model of rigor in steadily advancing our understanding of human learning and developing practical techniques for design.

Let’s congratulate 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. The previous winners were Stu Card, Ben Shneiderman, and Don Norman.

This year we present the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award to Jack Carroll.

JOHN CARROLL

Jack Carroll is a Professor of Computer Science, Education, and Psychology at Virginia Tech. He was also head of the Computer Science department there and, before that, a researcher and manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Jack is one of the pioneering thought leaders developing the intellectual foundations for HCI. His work, which ranges over philosophy, cognitive science, social science, systems theory, and design theory, is a creative integration of theory and practical methods, such as his work on scenario-based design methods. His work on the Blacksburg Electronic Village is one of the most successful and longest-running community participatory design experiments. Jack is probably the most prolific researcher in HCI – in addition to well over 300 papers, he has written and edited 14 influential books, including the just-published “HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks”. Jack’s multitude of contributions to our understanding of the nature and practice of HCI is profound.