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2008 SIGCHI Awards

2008 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:

Gregory Abowd

Gregory Abowd is the Distinguished Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech where he directs the Ubiquitous Computing Research Group and is well known for his work on the Aware Home Research Initiative. His Ph D was obtained at the Programming Research Group at the University of Oxford in the UK. He has also worked at the University of York (UK) and CMU. His mathematical background is evident in the rigorous analysis that is the basis of his many research papers and his work has lead the way in demonstrating how ubicomp can solve real problems in our everyday lives.

Paul Dourish

Paul Dourish is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of Computer Science and social science, with a focus on the domains of computer-supported cooperative work and ubiquitous computing. From social science, he draws not only empirical and methodological considerations but also theoretical and conceptual frameworks that illuminate the role of technology in social and cultural production. His recent work has focused in particular on problems of location and of privacy, considering how people achieve concerned social action with, around, and through mobile technologies and digital media.

Wendy Kellogg

Wendy A. Kellogg is one of the founders of the field of social computing, forming the first research group focusing on Social Computing in 1998: the Social Computing Group at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center. Topics addressed by the group have included social translucence (a conceptual framework pioneered by Erickson and Kellogg), computer-mediated communication, social proxies, the design of social software, knowledge management, awareness systems, enhanced audio conferencing, collaboration and human productivity in high performance computing, social and task visualizations, and most recently, serious games, virtual worlds for business use, and “Enterprise 2.0.” Kellogg’s work in human-computer interaction (HCI) over more than two decades has spanned areas including theory, evaluation methods, design, and development. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Oregon. She is author and editor of publications in the fields of HCI and CSCW, and currently serves on the editorial board of ACM’s Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Wendy chaired CHI 2005 Technical Papers, DIS 2000’s Technical Program, and was General Co-Chair of CSCW 2000, and CHI’94. She was named ACM Fellow in 2002 for contributions to social computing and human-computer interaction and service to ACM.

Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon University where he co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center. A pioneer in the application of virtual reality, he began his career inspiring researchers with his work building “Virtual Reality on Five Dollars a Day.” His research continued through the development of a range of innovative 3D interaction techniques, and expanded boundaries by bringing HCI methods to the worlds of theme park attractions, games, and other entertainment applications. Winner of the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award as well as the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education, he has passionately applied his expertise in interactive technologies to support teaching of programming and computer science concepts. For example, his SUIT system in the early 1990s made building of interactive systems accessible to college freshman, and later his Alice programming environment has inspired and taught middle school, high school, and college students around the world. Over his years of work, Randy Pausch has been an inspirational force both within, but also outside, of our community. His work and life has inspired many to be more ambitious, more collaborative, more inclusive, and to be more joyful.

Mary Beth Rosson

Mary Beth Rosson is Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University. She received a PhD in experimental psychology in 1982 from the University of Texas. Prior to joining the new School of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State in 2003, she was a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech for 10 years and a research staff member and manager at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center for 11 years. In her pioneering work on object oriented programming, she spent many years developing and evaluating tools and training for professional programmers. One of her abiding interests has been the interplay between the concerns of human-computer interaction and software engineering. Recently she has been studying the tools and practices of end-user developers in educational and general business contexts. With Jack Carroll, she developed a design method that is based on scenarios of use and the claims about expected behavior a design embodies. This work has culminated in a book on the method. Also with Jack Carroll, she helped develop and study the Blacksburg Electronic Village online community center, a seminal contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of participation in online communities. She has been a leader in OOPSLA and CHI, both conferences for which she served as Chair.

Steve Whittaker

Steve Whittaker is Chair in Information Studies and Head of the Information Retrieval Group at Sheffield University. His research combines empirical analysis of human behaviour, with the design, implementation, and evaluation of novel CMC and HCI tools. His current research focuses on Computer Mediated Memory (CMM), the design and analysis of tools for organizing and accessing both personal and shared digital archives of meetings, pictures and digital notes. In previous work, he made novel contributions in three areas: empirical studies of the role of vision in communication and tools to support distributed real time interaction; the development of novel email and IM clients based on studies of common CMC technologies and their limitations; cognitively motivated models of audio browsing and interactive interfaces to support access of audio data. Previously he led research groups at HP, Lotus/IBM and AT&T Bell Labs. He has authored over 100 refereed journal or conference papers, and is holder of 11 US and EU patents.

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 Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton is a principal researcher at Microsoft. That’s the simple, formal description. The real description somewhat defies the imagination: Musician, mountain climber, skier, equestrian, inventor, artist, inventor, designer of museum exhibits, advisor to the premier of Ontario and the Canadian Film Centre, company executive, and university professor. Note too that he just doesn’t do these events, he does all of them at a professional, world-class level.

Buxton’s influence has been enormous. His contributions to the field of human-computer interaction start with music: coupling sound, music, and computers through tools, instruments, and even score editors. (His undergraduate degree is in Music and even his Computer Science thesis was on the development of a tool for music composition.) Musicians use the entire body in performance, an observation Bill has repeatedly used to advantage in moving from simple, one handed mouse interactions to a rich, full-body experience – whether through a drum machine or multiple touch, multiple hand displays. Thus, he has been working on multi-touch systems for almost 25 years, helping establish the foundations for today’s recent “discovery” of the technology. His knowledge of and love for the arts has driven his insistence on making, doing, and sketching as fundamental design tools.

Bill put his talents to practice when serving as Chief Scientist for Alias | Wavefront where he helped develop a powerful drawing program, still heavily used, even as the company got swallowed by Silicon Graphics (where Bill also served as Chief Scientist), and is today sold by Autodesk. His publications include contributions to music and the arts, articles on exploration and mountaineering, and “eventing,” an equestrian event combining dressage, cross-country jumping, and show jumping. His recent book, “Sketching User Experiences,” should be required reading for everyone in the field of design and HCI. Michael Schrage called it the best innovation book of 2007. Business Week simply stated “It’s a book written primarily for designers, but one that could and should be read by any engineers and executives who share Buxton’s desire for better and more successful products.” Bill Buxton is clearly a life-time achiever in Human-Computer Interaction: may he have several lifetimes.

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. 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.

John Karat

Dr. John Karat is a research staff member at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center. With this award we recognize Dr. Karat’s contribution to SIGCHI and the ACM over many years. He has been a member of the SIGCHI Extended Executive Committee since 1994 and currently serves as the IFIP liaison. From 1995 to 1998, he was a member of the Board of Directors for the ACM and IEEE/CS FOCUS organization (Federation on Computing in the United States) established to represent the US in the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). John was the US representative to the IFIP Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (TC13 from 1991 to 1998), the ACM representative to this organization since 1998, and Chair of TC13 from 2001 to 2004. In this period he helped organize the first international HCI conferences in China (2002), India (2004), and Brazil (2007). He contributed to the expansion of the HCI field to bring design into a more prominent role. John helped establish the successful ACM conference Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) beginning in 1995 and chaired the conference in 2000.

Marian Williams

Dr. Marian Williams attended her first CHI conference as a graduate student and became a committed member of the field and the SIGCHI organization on the spot. Dr. Williams was broadly involved in building HCI’s educational base including leading CHI’s tutorial program; organizing conference panels, workshops, and SIG sessions on HCI education; and chairing the CHI Doctoral Consortium. She also helped establish HCI as a vibrant area of research and study at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell by directing the UMass Lowell HCI Research Group and sponsoring LowellCHI, the first student chapter of SIGCHI in the US. Her research interests include participatory design and empirical studies of visual programmers. Dr. Williams served Vice Chair and Chair of the Greater Boston chapter of SIGCHI; then as SIGCHI’s Vice Chair for Operations and Executive Vice Chair; and later a liaison between SIGCHI’s research community and its conference planning and operations — a position for which she was uniquely qualified thanks to both her good nature and the respect she had earned from the full SIGCHI community. She also served as General and Technical Program Co-Chair for the CHI conference in 1999. Marian “retired” early, with Emeritus status, and is now an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and pastor of the North Congregational Church in Woburn, MA, US.

Social Impact Award

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

Vicki Hanson

Dr. Vicki Hanson has been involved in working with people with disabilities for 30 years. With this award, SIGCHI celebrates Dr. Hanson’s work and its impact over nearly 30 years involving persons with disabilities. From 1978 to 1986, she conducted research in the areas of American Sign Language (ASL) and reading, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Language and Cognition at the Salk Institute and then as a Research Associate in the Reading Research Group at Haskins Laboratories. She joined the IBM Research Division in 1986 and currently manages the Accessibility Research group at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center. Holding a doctorate in Cognitive Psychology, her primary research areas consist of computer usability, aging, web accessibility, and learning and cognitive disabilities. Through an Award from the Leverhulme Trust to the University of Dundee, she is serving as a Visiting Professor at the university during 2007–08, focusing her research on approaches to improving computer technology to make it more useful and usable for older adults.

Dr. Hanson is Chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Accessibility (SIGACCES) and has chaired their ASSETS’02 conference on Assistive Technologies. She has received multiple awards from IBM for Outstanding Technical Achievement in the areas of education and accessibility and in 1992 was an award winner in the Johns Hopkins National Search for Computing to Assist Persons with Disabilities. She serves on Advisory Boards for universities and non-profit organizations in disability areas (AccessComputing Alliance, CAST, and the University of Colorado RERC for Advancement of Cognitive Technologies), and on government review panels in the U.S. and U.K. She is the founder and co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, Associate Editor for Accessibility of ACM Transactions on the Web and has served as guest editor for several Special Issues on accessibility topics for journals. She was named ACM Fellow in 2004 for her contributions to computing technologies for people with disabilities.