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2010 SIGCHI Awards

2010 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 seven new Academy members. In alphabetical order, they are:

Susanne Bødker

Susanne Bødker is a Professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. She employed Activity Theory in her dissertation research, published as the book “Through the Interface” in 1990, and contributed to the broad post-cognitive rethinking of theory in HCI. She helped to establish the CSCW as a research area. She has developed and practiced participatory design methods in a wide variety of user domains from work safety inspection to public administration. Her current work is developing activity theoretical approaches to ubiquitous technologies, social navigation, and community technology.

Mary Czerwinski

Mary Czerwinski is the Research Area Manager of the Visualization and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research. Mary’s research focuses on designing novel information visualization and interaction techniques for a wide variety of devices, display sizes, and applications. Much of Mary’s work focuses on improved designs for managing interruptions, multitasking and group awareness. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Mary managed the usability group in the interactive media division of Microsoft and previously led user research groups at Compaq and Johnson Space Center. Mary has been an affiliate member of the Psychology Departments at the University of Washington and Rice University, and sits on several academic and professional advisory boards. Mary is a distinguished scientist of the ACM. She has served on the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee since 2001, and as conference chair for UIST 2005 and co-chair for CHI 2008.

Austin Henderson

Austin Henderson‘s 45-year career in Human-Computer Interaction includes user interface research and architecture at MITís Lincoln Laboratory, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Xerox Research (both PARC and EuroPARC), Apple Computer, and Pitney Bowes, as well as strategic industrial design with Fitch and his own Rivendel Consulting & Design. Austin has built both commercial and research applications in many domains including manufacturing, programming languages, air traffic control, electronic mail (Hermes), user interface design tools (Trillium), workspace management (Rooms, Buttons), distributed collaboration (MediaSpace), and user-evolvable systems (Tailorable “design continued in use”, Pliant “designing for the unanticipated”). These applications, and their development with users, have grounded his analytical work, which has included the nature of computation-based socio-technical systems, the interaction of people with the technology in those systems, and the practices and tools of their development. The primary goals of his work has been to better meet user needs, both by improving system development to better anticipate those needs, and by improving system capability to enable users themselves to better respond to unanticipated needs when they arise in a rich and changing world.

David Kieras

David Kieras is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan who has been an outstanding researcher, teacher, and mentor in areas that span many theoretical and applied aspects of HCI principles and methods. His most prominent contributions to HCI have come in the form of computational models of human performance, starting with his work with Peter Polson on the Cognitive Complexity Theory, epitomized by the classic 1985 International Journal of Man-Machine Studies paper, which provided a seminal application of production systems to produce quantitative accounts of performance time and knowledge transfer from one interface task to another. Viewing production systems as an implementation of GOMS models, he developed NGOMSL as a practical predictive notation to for GOMS models. With Scott Wood, he created the GLEAN system for computational simulations of GOMS models, and with Ruven Brooks he developed an approach to task analysis and the design of functionality based on higher-level GOMS models. With David Meyer, he developed the EPIC cognitive architecture to integrate perceptual, motor, and cognitive performance, pioneering the rigorous application of cognitive architectures to the fine-grain modeling of multimodal user interaction and multitasking performance.

Arnie Lund

Arnie Lund is a Director of User Experience (UX) at Microsoft, and has also managed UX teams at AT&T Bell Labs, Ameritech, US West Advanced Technologies and Sapient. He is known for his work in research and practice, and his success as a manager driving research into practice. He has 20+ patents and has published widely. He has co-chaired two CHI conferences; and has been an active “bridge” between SIGCHI and HFES where he is a Fellow and chaired the HFES Institute that created the first HCI ANSI Standard. He has funded and collaborated on research at a variety of universities and other research institutions. He and his teams have driven product innovations in areas such as interactive television, natural user interfaces, CSCW, media convergence, and in the software innovation and design process itself. Arnie has consistently contributed both through his thought leadership and through his ability to lead to further the impact of HCI.

Larry Tesler

Larry Tesler is a user experience consultant who has played a leading role in the development of today’s desktop user interface. In 1973, after working at Stanford on the PUB document compiler, he moved to Xerox PARC to work on publishing software. He identified and publicized the need to eradicate unnecessary modes from user interfaces, to the extent that this is now standard design practice. At PARC he pioneered the use of formative usability studies, and was closely involved in the invention of a number of now-familiar interaction techniques. These included cut-and-paste editing, click-and-type text entry, dialogue boxes for search and replace, between-character text insertion points, drop-down menus and paned-window browsing. At Apple during the 1980s and 1990s, Larry managed groups doing user experience design innovation, including the Advanced Technology Group and the Lisa office suite team. Subsequently he worked as Vice President for User Experience at both Amazon and Yahoo, before turning to independent consulting.

Shumin Zhai

Shumin Zhai is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Shumin is a leading researcher in applying quantitative and engineering methods in HCI, and has made fundamental contributions to text entry optimization, physical input device design, eye-tracking interfaces, and the understanding of human performance. His contributions to text entry techniques for mobile and touch screen devices include the ShapeWriter gesture keyboard which has been commercialized. Shumin has also been a visiting professor at universities in Europe and China. He has served on many editorial boards and conference committees and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.

Lifetime Practice Award

Along with the Lifetime Research Award, this is the most prestigious award SIGCHI gives. It recognizes the very best and most influential applications of human-computer interaction, work that has impacted the field over a career.

Karen Holtzblatt

Recognized as a leader in the design community, Karen Holtzblatt has pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career. At Digital Equipment Corporation, Karen introduced Contextual Inquiry — the industry standard for gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way people work. Contextual Inquiry and Contextual Design, the team based design processes based on it, provide a revolutionary approach for designing new products and systems based on a deep understanding of the context of use. Karen co-founded InContext Enterprises in 1992 to provide Contextual Design services. Their coaching and cross-company design teams deliver field data and solutions to businesses across multiple industries. The books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems, and Rapid Contextual Design, are used by companies and universities all over the world. Karen’s extensive experience with teams and all types of work and life practice underlies the innovation and reliable quality consistently delivered by InContext’s teams. Karen also has more than 20 years of teaching experience, professionally and in university settings.

Lifetime Research Award

Along with the Lifetime Practice Award, this is the most prestigious award SIGCHI gives. The criteria for achievement are the same as for the CHI Academy, only more so.

Lucy Suchman

Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Before coming to Lancaster, she held the positions of Principal Scientist and manager of the Work Practice and Technology area at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Lucy is well known for having challenged common assumptions behind the design of interactive systems with a cogent anthropological argument that human action is constantly constructed and reconstructed from dynamic interactions with the material and social worlds. She recently published an updated and expanded version of her classic book: Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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.

Mary Czerwinski

Mary Czerwinski is the Research Area Manager of the Visualization and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research, and is a distinguished scientist of the ACM. She has a long record of exemplary service to the HCI community, serving in many roles on the committee for various SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, notably CHI and UIST. She also has taken on key leadership roles: CHI 2000 Papers co-chair, CHI 2008 Conference co-chair, UIST 2005 Conference co-chair, and UIST 2010 Papers co-chair. She also served on the SIGCHI Executive Committee from 2001 to 2009, including two consecutive terms as Executive Vice President.

Social Impact Award

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

Ben Bederson

Ben Bederson is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and past Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory there. With his collaborator, Prof. Allison Druin, he led the development of many of the key technologies designed for and by kids, including KidPad and StoryKit for iPhone. He is the Technical Project Director for the International Children’s Digital Library, a multilingual free digital library of children’s books, currently consisting of over 4,000 books in over 50 languages, with more than three million users from over 160 countries worldwide. He led the library’s collaboration with the Government of Mongolia — bringing access to the library in rural Mongolia. Prof. Bederson also did influential studies of the usability of electronic voting systems, which resulted in scholarly publications, reports aimed at policy makers, and books directed to the general public. This work has served to highlight the challenges in developing usable electronic voting systems and has informed decisions on voting technology adoption.

Allison Druin

Allison Druin is Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Prof. Druin is a pioneer in the development of technology for children and the inclusion of children as partners in the design process. Her technology co-design methods have been reported on through scholarly publications, presentations, and books, and have become widely used throughout the CHI community. She founded the CHIKids program for the CHI Conference. This program enabled many CHI community members who were parents to participate in the conference while their children learned about CHI and contributed to the experience of the conference, e.g., by producing daily newsletters, websites, and plenary session videos. With her collaborator, Prof. Ben Bederson, she created the International Children’s Digital Library, a multilingual free digital library of children’s books, currently consisting of over 4,000 books in over 50 languages, with more than three million users from over 160 countries worldwide.