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2012 SIGCHI Awards

2012 SIGCHI Awards

CHI Academy

Ben Bederson

Ben Bederson is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and past Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. Ben is well known for his pioneering work in zoomable user interfaces and visualization techniques for a variety of devices. Ben has a strong record of publications and core achievements in software toolkits and applications. He has consistently applied his research to social concerns including electronic voting systems and technologies for children. He won the SIGCHI social impact award as well as three Microsoft and four Google research awards. Ben has also pursued technical transfer of his research to industry as co-founder and chief scientist of Zumobi, a startup to commercialize mobile media, and most notably as co-founder and technical director of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation (ICDL at www.childrenslibrary.org), a library of free online children’s book from around the world. ICDL has won the American Library Association President’s 2010 Award for International Library Innovation.

Steve Benford

Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing and co-founded the Mixed Reality Laboratory at The University of Nottingham in the UK, where he researches interactive technologies for the creative industries. Steve’s contributions range from theory to technical development to participatory design and artistic practice. His early contributions include a classic model of interaction in Collaborative Virtual Environments, as well as work on embodiment, time and persistence in virtual worlds. Later, his interests encompassed mixed reality and ubicomp, which merged with a longstanding interest in technologies for art and performance. For more than ten years now, Steve has worked with artists, ethnographers and scholars from the arts and humanities to create, tour and study a series of mixed reality performances. In addition to leading the technical development of these works, ethnographic studies of these and related pieces have led Steve to document the challenges of supporting live interactive experiences, ultimately informing theoretical work on ambiguity, spectator interfaces, and trajectories. Steve has published over 250 academic papers (receiving best CHI paper awards in 2005, 2009 and 2011). His artistic collaborations have led to the award of the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica for Interactive Art, the Nokia 2007 Mindtrek award for innovative applications of ubiquitous computing, and four British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nominations.

Hugh Dubberly

Hugh Dubberly is a design planner and teacher. He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in graphic design and earned an MFA in graphic design from Yale. He has deep roots in typography. At Apple Computer in the late 80s and early 90s, Hugh managed cross-functional design teams and later managed creative services for the entire company. While at Apple, he co-created a technology-forecast film called “Knowledge Navigator,” that presaged the appearance of the Internet in a portable digital device. While at Apple, he served at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena as the first and founding chairman of the computer graphics department. Intrigued by what the publishing industry would look like on the Internet, he next became Director of Interface Design for Times Mirror. This led him to Netscape where he became Vice President of Design and managed groups responsible for the design, engineering, and production of Netscape’s Web portal. In 2000, Hugh co-founded Dubberly Design Office, putting people at the center of design of a broad spectrum of products for many influential companies. He writes the “Modeling” column for interactions magazine. Hugh’s Concept Maps are a powerful articulation and teaching tool for designing and explaining complex ideas and products.

Carl Gutwin

Carl Gutwin is Professor of Computer Science and director of the Human-Computer Interaction lab at the University of Saskatchewan, and is a past holder of a Canada Research Chair in Next-Generation Groupware. He received his PhD in 1997 from the University of Calgary, where he developed the idea and nuances of workspace awareness as a design factor for distributed groupware systems. Dr. Gutwin has varied research interests in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Human-Computer Interaction, including group awareness, groupware usability, interaction techniques, human performance modeling, and information visualization. His work spans the breadth of HCI, and his contributions range from hard-core technical aspects of systems architectures, to the design and implementation of interaction techniques, to social theory as applied to design. He and his students and collaborators have published more than 150 papers in CSCW and HCI, and have received several best paper and honorable mention awards. Dr. Gutwin was papers co-chair at CHI 2011 and general co-chair of CSCW 2010, and has served on program committees for CHI, CSCW, UIST, Group, ECSCW, GI, and several other conferences.

Joy Mountford

S. Joy Mountford is currently a consultant to eBay on the future of ecommerce. Through her long career in human-computer interaction she has been an internationally recognized leader in the field. She has designed and led teams designing a wide variety of systems. She has led teams designing and developing a wide variety of computer systems. She was a VP of User Experience Design at Yahoo!, a VP of Digital User Experience and Design at Barnes and Noble and an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA. She was a senior project lead at Interval Research, and continues to consult to a variety of companies and to present innovative talks world-wide. She headed the acclaimed Human Interface Group at Apple in the late ’80s and ’90s; beginning her career as a designer at Honeywell and a project leader in the Interface Research Group at Microelectronics Computer Consortium (MCC). Her impact continues through the International Design Expo, which she created over 20 years ago to challenge the next generation of interdisciplinary graduates.

Alan Newell

Alan Newell, Emeritus Professor at Dundee University, has spent over forty years conducting HCI research, primarily into supporting elderly and disabled people. He founded and headed the University’s School of Computing, and later set up within it the Queen Mother Research Centre, now one of the largest academic groups in the world researching digital systems for older and disabled people. His team developed stenograph transcription systems and television subtitling systems for the deaf and hearing-impaired, and a range of communication systems for non-speaking people. More recently the team has investigated techniques for use in studying older people, including those with dementia, and for developing systems to support them. Alan pioneered the use of Interactive Professional Theatre for gathering requirements and increasing awareness of this field. Since then he has made presentations of Interactive Theatre events at a number of international conferences, showing how this technique addresses the challenges that older people face with technology. He has published widely, and has given numerous keynote lectures at conferences in Europe, North America and Japan, including InterCHI 1993 and ASSETS 2002. Jointly with colleagues, he received best paper awards at the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, and at the ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies. In his recent book “Design and the Digital Divide” he describes his research and the insights he has gained from it. He was a Deputy Principal of Dundee University between 1992 and 1995. He is a Member of the Order of the British Empire, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy. He was named ACM Fellow in 2006 for his contribution to computer-based systems for people with disabilities, and was awarded the CHI Social Impact Award in 2011.

Yvonne Rogers

Yvonne Rogers is a professor of Interaction Design and director of the Interaction Centre at University College London (UCLIC), UK. Yvonne’s career spans the UK and US; before joining UCL she was a professor at the Open University (UK), Indiana University (US), and Sussex University (UK). She has also been a Visiting Professor at Stanford, Apple, Queensland University and University of California – San Diego. She is known for her wide range of contributions to HCI, beginning with her PhD work on iconic interfaces, to her most recent work on public displays and behavioral change. Her research focuses on augmenting and extending everyday learning and work activities with a diversity of interactive and novel technologies. She has developed several influential theoretical frameworks in HCI, including external cognition and distributed cognition. She is also known for promoting a visionary research agenda of user engagement in ubiquitous computing. She was one of the principal investigators on the UK Equator project (2000-2007), where she pioneered and experimented with ubiquitous learning. Yvonne loves writing and is one of the authors of the bestselling textbook “Interaction Design; Beyond Human-Computer Interaction” and more recently, “Being Human: Human Computer Interaction in the Year 2020.” She has served on numerous conference committees and advisory boards, and was recently elected a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Lifetime Practice Award

Joy Mountford

S. Joy Mountford most recently has been a consultant advisor to the VP of Product and User Experience at eBay. In 2010 she was the VP of Digital User Experience and Design for Barnes and Noble managing the color Nook eBook experience, and in 2009 was an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA. Through her long career in human-computer interaction she has been an internationally recognized leader in the field. Joy has designed and led teams designing a wide variety of systems including airplane cockpits, personal computers, ecommerce, consumer electronics, musical instruments, and toys. She was a VP of User Experience Design at Yahoo! and led the Design Innovation group doing Data Visualization. Joy had her own design consultancy, idbias, and before that was a senior project lead at Interval Research where she led a series of musical and eBook development projects. She headed the acclaimed Human Interface Group at Apple in the late ’80s and ’90s; and began her career as a designer at Honeywell and a project leader for Visual Metaphors in the Interface Research Group at Microelectronics Computer Consortium (MCC). Joy presented widely and assembled the team who wrote the media-rich chapters in the seminal book “The Art of Human Computer Interface Design.” She is on various boards across the design and interaction community, including as an elected board member of the International Design Conference in Aspen. She has also been an invited plenary speaker across the industry, including at CHI’94. Her focus areas have been interdisciplinary team management, data visualization, innovation, and advising corporations on the place of design, as a source of value and of delight. The International Design Expo which she created and continues to lead (with various corporate sponsors) has touched the lives of thousands of students for more than 20 years, and has created an amazing legacy that has helped grow the next generation of interdisciplinary graduates in design.

Lifetime Research Award

Dan Olsen

Dan Olsen Jr. is a Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University and was the first director of the CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU. He is one of the earliest and most influential researchers in the user interface software domain. His first contributions were in using formal language techniques (such as finite state machines and Backus-Naur Form) to specify the syntactic structure of a user interface. He has published three books on user interface software: “Building Interactive Systems: Principles for Human-Computer Interaction,” “Developing User Interfaces,” and “User Interface Management Systems: Models and Algorithms.” His 1988 MIKE system was an early and influential system for automatically generating a user interface from semantic specifications. Dan has continued to make important research contributions and novel systems in a wide variety of areas, from CSCW to Interactive Machine Learning, and developing Metrics and Principles for Human-Robot Interaction. Dan has also received CHI’s Lifetime Service Award for his many years of service on behalf of the SIGCHI community. He was the founding editor of TOCHI, and played a key role in establishing the UIST conference and in making it one of the most successful SIGCHI conferences.

Lifetime Service Award

Michael Atwood

Mike Atwood is Professor and Associate Dean at the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University. Previously, he was a Technical Director at the NYNEX Science and Technology Center. He has a long record of service to SIGCHI and the CHI community, beginning with the Program Committee for the first Human Factors in Computer Systems Conference in Gaithersburg in 1982. He has held a range of conference positions since then for dozens of international conferences and workshops. He reviews for and serves on the boards of HCI journals. He served on the SIGCHI Executive Committee from 1993 to 2002, including four years as Chair.

Kevin Schofield

Kevin Schofield is General Manager for Strategy and Communications at Microsoft Research. His organization drives consensus on technical strategy and priorities for Microsoft’s research efforts. Mr. Schofield joined Microsoft in 1988, and has worked in Microsoft Research since 1997. Over the course of his tenure at Microsoft, he worked in both development and program management for a number of Microsoft product efforts, including networking, operating systems, MSN, and multimedia authoring tools.

Mr. Schofield has been involved with the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research field for a number of years. He previously served as Chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) and co-chair of the “CHI 96” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He is the co-author of three issued patents and several pending ones.

Social Impact Award

Batya Friedman

Batya Friedman is a Professor in the Information School, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington where she directs the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab. Batya pioneered value sensitive design (VSD), an approach to account for human values in the design of information systems. First developed in human-computer interaction, VSD has since been used in information management, human-robotic interaction, computer security, civil engineering, applied philosophy, and land use and transportation. Her work has focused on a wide range of values, some include privacy in public, trust, freedom from bias, moral agency, sustainability, safety, calmness, freedom of expression, and human dignity; along with a range of technologies such as web browsers, urban simulation, robotics, open source tools, mobile computing, implantable medical devices, computer security, ubiquitous computing and computing infrastructure. She is currently working on multi-lifespan information system design and on methods for envisioning – new ideas for leveraging information systems to shape our futures. Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal is an early project in this multi-lifespan information system design program. Batya received both her B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.