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2006 SIGCHI Awards

2006 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:

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon is Director of the Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique at Université Paris-Sud and CNRS and Professor in Computer Science at Université Paris-Sud. Michel was instrumental in establishing human-computer interaction as a discipline in France and he was one of the founders, and first president, of AFIHM, the French national equivalent of ACM SIGCHI. In recent years he has played major roles in CHI, UIST and ECSCW conferences and is currently member-at-large of the ACM Council and member of the ACM Publications Board. His research includes both technical/engineering aspects of interface construction and development, and design aspects with work on novel interaction techniques including recent work on two handed zoom and point interactions that support Fitts’ Law selection over many orders of magnitude, even on small screens. He started his academic career working on Petri Nets, but his interest in interfaces developed early including a paper in 1987 on “A framework for man-machine interface design” at a major UNIX conference, and whilst covering many areas since then, some of his recent innovative interface techniques are still applied to Petri Net design environments. Michel’s research work continues to inspire and excite readers and his AVI paper in 2004 has been one of the most heavily downloaded papers in the ACM Digital Library

Scott Hudson

Scott Hudson is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU where he directs the HCII PhD program. His research focuses on exploration of new interaction techniques and software tools to assist interface development. With over 30 CHI and UIST papers, his impressive body of work includes investigation of database management, interactive and spreadsheet-based specification of user interfaces, direct manipulation interfaces (e.g. integrating snapping and gesture, rule-based techniques, layout by example, light-weight constraints), authoring multimedia documents, information visualization (e.g., ambient displays, information percolator, information collages, kinetic typography), pen-based interaction, sensor-based statistical models of interruptability, and privacy and disruption tradeoffs in awareness systems. His community service record is equally impressive. He serves as a regular member of CHI and UIST program committees and was a founding associate editor of ACM TOCHI.

Hiroshi Ishii

Hiroshii Ishii is Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he founded and continues to head the Tangible Media Group. He has led the field in exploring how people live on the border between the digital and tangible worlds. His research group has developed an impressive series of creative and influential demonstrations, such as mediaBlocks, Luminous Room, ambientROOM, musicBottles, metaDESK, Illuminating Clay, I/O Brush, Actuated Workbench, and numerous others. These explorations all integrate the digital with the physical, pointing the way to a world of ubiquitous computing that draws on human physical embodiment and appeals to the senses. In addition to his keen understanding of the underlying philosophy and principles, Ishii has brought a unique sense of beauty and playfulness to interaction design.

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen is a principal of Nielsen Norman group. He coined the term “discount usability engineering” and is one of the most prolific authors of the HCI field. A co-inventor of the heuristic evaluation method, Nielsen has made strong academic contributions to HCI through his publications while worked as a researcher at Bellcore, IBM Research, and as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. Since he co-founded Nielsen Norman group, he has made even stronger contributions to the practice of HCI. His highly visible work and often provocative commentary have enhanced the visibility of the HCI field in the business world. Jakob is one of the few individuals in our field who have been highly successful at both academic research and making real world impact. He has also been an active member of SIGCHI since its founding, serving as paper co-chair of CHI 1993, among other roles.

Peter Pirolli

Peter Pirolli is a Research Fellow at PARC and one of the most important theorists of HCI. His work has concerned the interaction of human and computational knowledge-based systems, first in intelligent tutoring systems, then in cognitive models for human-computer interaction, methods for analyzing information seeking and Internet behavior, sensemaking, visual attention, and most recently in social foraging. The LISP tutor built with colleagues one of the first industrial-strength, successful tutor. Information foraging theory reframed the conventional approach to information retrieval. His work combines bold theoretical moves with concern for how these can shape systems in HCI. Pirolli was formerly a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Director of the UC Berkeley Cognitive Science Program. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Education and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

George Robertson

George Robertson is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. Robertson has been involved in interactive technologies almost from the beginning. He has been one of the few people able to work across the intersection between systems programming at the operating system design level, and human-computer interaction. His early contributions include ZOG (one of the earliest operational hypertext systems), Diamond (the first multimedia messaging system), and co-designing the predecessor to the Mach operating system. While at Xerox PARC, he coined the term “information visualization” and was the architect for the Information Visualizer system and built early visualization paradigms, including Cone Trees and Web Forager. He has been innovative in his use of animation to highlight and show relationships in information. More recently he has contributed to visualizing polyarchies of data, interacting with large screen real estate and the visualization of tasks. Robertson is a Fellow of the ACM.

Congratulations to this year’s Academy.

Lifetime Achievement Award

The 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 Judith Olson and Gary Olson.

Judith Olson and Gary Olson

Gary M. Olson is Paul M. Fitts Collegiate Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the University of Michigan, a professor and associate dean for research in the School of Information, and a professor in the Department of Psychology. Since 1993 he has been professor of psychology at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing.

Judith S. Olson is Richard W. Pew Collegiate Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the University of Michigan, a Professor in the School of Information, the Michigan Business School, and the Department of Psychology.

Both have been extremely active in CHI affairs: Gary is Conference Chair of CHI 2006. Judith served as co-chair for papers for CHI 94. Gary and Judith together served as technical program co-chairs for CHI 91 and as papers co-chairs for the 1996 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 96. Gary served as conference co-chair for DIS 95, DIS 97, and CSCW 2004.

The fact that they co-chaired the program for CSCW-96 is symptomatic, for their major contributions have been to the study of collaboration, which they do by practicing what they preach and study. For many years they have studied collaboration, first in the School of Business at the University of Michigan and now in the School of Information. Although both have published prolifically, they have been co-authors together on approximately 49 of their papers.

Both Gary and Judith have each made substantive, independent, original contributions to the fields of human-computer interaction and collaboration, both have served these fields well through academic and leadership positions at the University of Michigan, on editorial boards of the major journals, service to the professional societies (CHI, CSCW, ACM) and as major members of the organizing committees of CHI’s international conferences. Although each stands alone as a strong, independent contributor and was each separately inducted into the CHI academy, this award recognizes their major, lifetime impact as the collaborative study of collaboration: not only making a major contribution to the development of the science of collaboration, but living the same role themselves. We therefore feel it is only fitting that this award be made to the joint team of Gary M. Olson and Judith S. Olson. This award honors their long, productive collaboration as a single, unique contribution to the field of computer-human Interaction, or perhaps more accurately, of human-human collaboration, mediated and enhanced through modern technologies.

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.

Susan Dray

Since 1979, Dr. Susan M. Dray has worked in the field of human factors to increase the quality and intuitiveness of user interface designs for users around the world. She has worked as both an internal and external consultant, and combines expertise in interface evaluation, usability evaluation, and contextual and ethnographic research with a cross-cultural and organizational perspective.

As President of Dray & Associates, Inc., she consults internationally on interface design and usability. She has evaluated and helped redesign user interfaces for all types of websites, desktop and Web applications, as well as both hardware and software consumer products and technical equipment. She specializes in international user studies, and has conducted user research in 17 countries, including one of the largest international usability evaluations ever done – studying 120 users in 8 countries in Europe and Asia.

A pioneer in Human-Computer Interaction, she was Director of Human Factors at IDS [now American Express Financial Advisors], where, in 1988, she developed one of the first corporate usability labs outside the computer industry. Previously, at Honeywell, she was involved in evaluating usability of consumer product hardware and software, as well as military technologies. Dr. Dray was also an pioneer in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) as liaison from the established Human Factors organization in the early 1980’s. She was instrumental in building an interdisciplinary CHI community and continues to work tirelessly for CHI today, teaching tutorials, lecturing world-wide, and editing the Business column of the ACM magazine, interactions.

As a leader in the Human Factors profession nationally and internationally, Dr. Dray has given over 80 talks at conferences and symposia in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, including the invited Plenary Address to the 10th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association in Sydney, Australia, and the Keynote address at the 2nd South African Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, in Pretoria, South Africa in September, 2001. In addition, she has published numerous papers and book chapters. Dr. Dray was the North American editor of the prestigious international journal Behaviour and Information Technology. She was elected a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and has chaired both the Organizational Design and Management Technical Group and the Computer Systems Technical Group of this same organization, as well as the Computers and Communications Scientific and Technical Committee of the International Ergonomics Association.

Dr. Dray received her doctorate in Psychology from UCLA (1980) and is a Board Certified Human Factors Professional.

Social Impact Award

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

Ted Henter

As a young man, Ted Henter was ranked eighth in the world on the motorcycle racing circuit. After a race in London, England he was in an automobile accident that left him blind. Determined not to let this tragedy alter his active lifestyle, he set out to become the U.S. Blind Water Skiing Champion and achieved this honor six years running, plus one world championship. Mr. Henter graduated from the University of Florida in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. After he was blinded, he took several computer courses at the University of South Florida, which led to his passion for assistive technology. In 1985, he started his own business. Two years later, he founded Henter-Joyce (now a division of Freedom Scientific) and began developing his first screen reader software that converts computer text to speech so people who are vision impaired can use a computer. In 1987, Mr. Henter and his new company invented JAWS, then a DOS based program and in 1995, he developed a Windows version of the product. Today, JAWS for Windows is the world’s best selling screen reading software, exceeding seventy-eight thousand users worldwide and growing. By allowing persons who are blind or with low vision achieve the same or higher productivity in computer-based jobs as sighted people, JAWS has increased employment and educational opportunities while helping employers meet requirements established by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements. Henter-Joyce also developed other software products including MAGIC screen magnification and Connect Outloud Web access software. Ted Henter has received numerous national honors, including the Smithsonian Institute Award for developing JAWS.