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2013 SIGCHI Awards

2013 SIGCHI Awards

Social Impact Award

Sara J. Czaja

Sara J. Czaja is a Leonard M. Miller Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Industrial Engineering at the University of Miami. She is also the Scientific Director of the Center on Aging at the University of Miami and the Director of the Center on Research and Education for Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE). The focus of CREATE is on making technology more accessible, useful, and usable for older adults. Dr. Czaja has extensive experience in aging research and a long commitment to developing strategies to improve the quality of life for older adults. Her research interests include: aging and cognition, aging and healthcare access, family caregiving, aging and technology, and functional assessment. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the Gerontological Society of America. She served as a member of the Technical Advisory Panel of the APA Presidential Task Force on Integrative Healthcare for an Aging Population. In addition, she is a member of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences Committee on Human Factors and Home Health Care.

Lifetime Service Award

Joseph A. Konstan

Joseph A. Konstan is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota. His work in HCI started in user interface toolkits, and has included significant work in multimedia authoring, recommender systems, social computing, and computing applications in health and medicine. Prof. Konstan has received significant recognition for his work, including: being elected to the CHI Academy in 2011; being elected a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS; and honored as part of a team that won the ACM Software System Award in 2010 for the GroupLens Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems

At CHI 1994 (his first CHI conference), he volunteered to serve on the CHI 96 committee, and he has been an active volunteer since. Highlights of his SIGCHI service include serving as SIGCHI Bulletin Editor from 1999 through 2003; chairing the UIST 2003, RecSys 2007, and CHI 2012 conferences; serving on SIGCHI’s Executive Committee from 1999-2009, and serving as President of SIGCHI from 2003-2006. Prof. Konstan has also been active on an ACM-wide level, with highlights including serving three terms on ACM’s Council, serving on the SIG Governing Board Executive Committee since 2004 (including as its chair from 2006-2008), and serving on the Publications Board since 2010.

While many SIGCHI members came to know Joe through his SIGCHI Presidency and his service as Chair of CHI 2012 (complete with cowboy hat, belt buckle, and boots), his service roots go back much further. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as Chair of the Computer Science Graduate Students Association (and received much appreciation for leading an effort to eliminate written preliminary exams). He received an A.B. from Harvard where he founded and published the Harvard Computer Review and served as president of the Harvard Computer Society. We are still investigating whether he ran a conference on the use of punch cards for artistic purposes in kindergarten.

Lifetime Research Award

George G. Robertson

George Robertson is an ACM Fellow and a member of the CHI Academy. Before retiring in 2011, he was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he led an information visualization research group. Before coming to Microsoft, he was a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC, working on 3D interactive animation interfaces for intelligent information access. He developed a number of visualization and 3-D user interface systems. He was the architect of the Information Visualizer and invented novel 3-D interaction techniques and a number of visualization techniques. These include Cone Trees, the Perspective Wall, the Spiral Visualization, the Document Lens, the WebBook and the Web Forager, the Data Mountain (a document management visualization), the Task Gallery (a 3-D Windows® operating system shell), the Polyarchy Visualization for interacting with multiple intersecting hierarchies, Scalable Fabric for window and task management, and Schema Mapper for managing mappings between schemas. He also did pioneering work on animated 3D user interfaces, inventing: Point of Interest navigation, Fix and Float, Peripheral Lens, Toolspaces and Glances, and Speed-coupled Flying with Orbiting. He was the architect of the Information Visualizer. He has also been a Senior Scientist at Thinking Machines, a Senior Scientist at Bolt Beranek and Newman, and a faculty member of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University. In the past, he has made significant contributions to machine learning, multimedia message systems, hypertext systems, operating systems, and programming languages. Robertson served on the Advisory Board of the Department of Homeland Security National Visualization and Analytics Center from 2004-2011. He was an Associate Editor for the Journal of Information Visualization. He served on the IEEE Information Visualization Steering Committee from 1995-2009. He chaired UIST’97 and InfoVis 2004

Lifetime Practice Award

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen is Principal of Nielsen Norman Group (www.nngroup.com), a user experience firm he co-founded with Donald A. Norman in 1998. Nielsen is the founder of the “discount usability engineering” movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces. As part of this effort he co-invented the heuristic evaluation method. Nielsen is the author of the best-selling book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include Usability Engineering, Usability Inspection Methods, International User Interfaces, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, Prioritizing Web Usability, Eyetracking Web Usability, and Mobile Usability. Nielsen’s Alertbox column on web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and has received a cumulative 175 million pageviews. From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

CHI Academy

Patrick Baudisch

Patrick Baudisch is a professor in Computer Science at Hasso Plattner Institute at Potsdam University and chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab. After creating interaction techniques for large displays, Patrick spent most of his career creating interactive devices that explore the nature of spatial interaction. His research may today be described as research in natural user interface hardware. It includes miniature mobile devices, touch input, large displays, interactive floors, and most recently interactive fabrication. Driven by the leitmotif of unifying the virtual world of the computer with the physical world of the user into a single non-distorted space, Patrick’s techniques and hardware prototypes are characterized by clarity and simplicity. Previously, Patrick worked as a research scientist at Microsoft Research and at Xerox PARC. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. Patrick has received best CHI paper awards in 2007, 2010, and 2013 and he has served as Associate Chair, three-times Sub-Committee Chair, Technical and General Co-Chair at CHI and UIST.

Alan Dix

Alan Dix is a Professor in the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, and Senior Researcher at Talis, Birmingham, and when not in Birmingham or travelling elsewhere, lives on Tiree, a small Hebridean island. He is the son of a carpenter, wears sandals and has long hair and a beard, but thereafter all pretensions to saintliness end. Alan’s research interests are varied and eclectic, although mathematics was (and is!) his first love the majority of his work is focused around the area of human–computer interaction – what happens when people use technology and how to design technology for people. He is the author of one of the key international textbooks in the area as well as other books and over 350 academic papers. Much of his career has been in academia, but in addition he has spent time in agricultural engineering research, local government IT, submarine design and dot.com start-ups. With a colleague at Lancaster University he invented technology to make LEDs individually controllable; this is being released commercially and is expected to transform cityscapes across the world. From April through to July 2013 he is walking around the complete periphery of Wales, over one thousand miles, a looking at IT issues of walker and local communities as well as philosophical issues of walking, space and time.

Clarisse de Souza

Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza is Professor of Computer Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Having a PhD in Applied Linguistics, she started her academic career at the Department of Informatics at PUC-Rio in 1987, teaching and doing research in Natural Language Processing and Text Generation. In 1991, when she was a visiting scholar at CSLI, Stanford University, she switched from Computational Linguistics to HCI. This was the beginning of her long-term work in Semiotics and HCI, whose outcome is ‘Semiotic Engineering’, the first comprehensive semiotic theory of HCI. Clarisse also played an important role in creating and nurturing the Brazilian HCI community. She has supervised/co-supervised more than 20 PhD students in Brazil, many of which have followed an academic career in Brazilian universities. Clarisse’s major interests in research center on how people communicate and express intent, values, beliefs and culture through computer programs and their user interfaces.

Victoria Bellotti

Victoria Bellotti is a principal scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the developer of PARC’s Opportunity Discovery research and strategic investment targeting program, a systematic approach to identifying the best opportunities for technology-centered, new business ventures. Victoria also studies people to understand their practices, problems, and requirements for future technology, and designs and evaluates human-centered systems, focusing on user experience. Best known for her research on personal information management and task management, Victoria has also conducted research in the domains of context- and activity-aware computing systems, computer-mediated communication, collaboration, ubiquitous computing and persuasive computing. She is a co-inventor on 13 patents and 9 patent applications and an author or co-author on over 50 papers and book chapters. Victoria also serves as an adjunct professor in the Jack Baskin School of Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

Bonnie Nardi

Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She has conducted field research in offices, homes, hospitals, libraries, laboratories, and online video game communities. Bonnie is the author of My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (University of Michigan Press, 2010), co-author of Ethnography and Virtual World: A Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World (Oxford University Press, 2013). She co-edits the MIT Press series Acting with Technology. Bonnie is interested in digital technology and: social theory, post-sustainability, and the changing neoliberal subject.

Rebecca E. Grinter

Rebecca “Beki” Grinter is a Professor of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing & (by courtesy, the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on improving the experience of computing by understanding the human experience in the building and using of technologies. In 2010 she was recognized as a Distinguished Alumna of the University of California, Irvine. Before joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, she was a Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox PARC and a Member of Technical Staff in the Software Production Research Department of Bell Laboratories. She was also a visiting scholar at Rank Xerox EuroPARC. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Information and Computer Science both from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Leeds.

Thomas S. Tullis

Tom Tullis is Vice President of User Experience Research at Fidelity Investments. He joined Fidelity in 1993 and was instrumental in the development of the company’s usability team and state-of-the-art Usability Labs. Prior to Fidelity, he held positions at Canon Information Systems, McDonnell Douglas, Unisys Corporation, and Bell Laboratories. He is coauthor of the books Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics and Beyond the Usability Lab: Conducting Large-scale User Experience Studies. Tom is also an Adjunct Professor in the Human Factors in Information Design program at Bentley University and he holds eight United States patents. He and his usability team at Fidelity have been featured in numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Money. In 2011, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Usability Professionals Association.

Eric Horvitz

Eric Horvitz is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft, where he serves as managing co-director of Microsoft Research’s main Redmond lab. He is recognized for research at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. He developed methods for using machine learning, perception, and reasoning to enhance human-computer interaction, with studies and prototypes in desktop, mobile, and ubiquitous-computing settings. His contributions include principles of mixed-initiative interaction for interleaving automated services with user actions, methods for predicting intentions and goals of users, advances with spoken dialog systems, and principles for combining the capabilities of human and machine intelligence for joint problem solving. In a line of work on leveraging machine intelligence to understand and augment human cognition, he developed probabilistic models of human attention, memory, and judgment, leading to prototypes that harness inferences about the cost of interruption, the likelihood of forgetting, and users’ forthcoming beliefs and actions. Eric has been elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. He received PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University.