2018 SIGCHI AWARDS
SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
Steven K. Feiner
Steven K. Feiner is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directs the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab. A key theme underlying his research is how computers can help people perform skilled tasks, which he has addressed across a wide range of topics in human–computer interaction and computer graphics. These include automated generation of graphics and multimedia, 3D and 2D user interfaces, wearable computing, health applications, computer games, and information visualization. His lab has been conducting virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and wearable computing research for over 25 years, designing and evaluating novel 3D interaction and visualization techniques, creating the first outdoor mobile AR system using a see-through head-worn display with GPS tracking, automating the design and layout of augmentations to meet task goals and occlusion constraints, and developing “hybrid user interfaces” that combine heterogeneous displays and devices. Steve and his colleagues have pioneered applications of AR to fields as diverse as tourism, journalism, archaeology, maintenance, field guides, and construction.
Steve is an IEEE Fellow, a member of the CHI Academy, and a recipient of the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award and the IEEE ISMAR Career Impact Award. He and his students have won the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award for their paper on supporting 2D windows in wearable AR and hypertextually linking them with each other and physical objects; the ISWC Early Innovator Award for their paper on outdoor mobile AR; and a number of best paper awards. Steve has served as general chair or program chair for over a dozen ACM and IEEE conferences, including program chair of ACM UIST 1994 and general chair of ACM UIST 2004; has been a papers subcommittee chair for ACM CHI and doctoral symposium chair for ACM UIST; and is a member of the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer–Human Interaction. He received an A.B. in Music and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, both from Brown University, and is coauthor of two editions of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice.
SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award
Arnold M. Lund
Arnold M. Lund is the Computing & Software Systems Professor of Practice in the School of STEM at the University of Washington, Bothell. He has a BA from the University of Chicago, and a PhD from Northwestern University. He was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2010, and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2011. He co-chaired the SIGCHI CHI Conferences in 1998 and 2008. He is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and served on the HFES Executive Council. He chaired the HFES Institute (which includes responsibility for human-computer interaction standards), served on ANSI and ISO standards committees and oversaw the approval of the first ANSI ergonomics standard in the software area. He also served as the president of the board of directors for the Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomics (BCPE) as it went through redefining the body of knowledge for the human factors field to better reflect current software design practices.
Arnie began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and helped build the science and technology organization at Ameritech where the work transformed the corporate branding and culture and was responsible for a rich set of innovative new products. He has managed user experience and exploratory software development teams (incl. senior leadership teams shaping communities of practice) at US West Advanced Technologies, Sapient, Microsoft and Amazon. As a Technology Leader at GE Global Research he managed their first set of labs devoted to human-computer interaction research, and their work on natural user interaction and intelligent agents has been covered widely in the press. He has 30 patents and patents pending, and authored and co-authored many articles and book chapters on a variety of topics in human-computer interaction emerging experience technologies and team management. He has been an accessibility advocate across the companies where he has worked, and has received a variety of awards and recognition for the work. He also wrote the widely used book User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams, and has spent his career mentoring students entering their careers, young professionals across the software industry, and more senior professionals and managers building HCI teams in their companies.
SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award
Maria Francesca Costabile
Maria Francesca Costabile is a full professor of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Bari Aldo Moro (UNIBA). At UNIBA, Prof. Costabile created the IVU Lab (Interaction Visualization Usability & UX Laboratory). She has held academic appointments at many other universities, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Munster, the University of Bonn, the University of Houston, and the University of Pittsburgh, PA. She has received research funds from many Italian and foreign organizations. Since 1989 her research addressed visual languages and HCI, aiming at reducing the semantic gap between computer and user by designing visual interfaces adequate to their users. In the early 2000s, she was one of the proposers of the EU Network of Excellence on End-User Development. The goal of her research is to create technology that allows (non-technical) people to pleasantly interact with it as well as to adapt that technology to their needs by modifying software artifacts during use. Over the years she has been working on visual interfaces, interaction design, information visualization, end-user development, usability engineering and UX, pervasive systems. Prof. Costabile has held many leadership roles in the international community, including being one of the three founders and organizers of the Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) conference series, Program Co-Chair of INTERACT 2005, Program Co-Chair of ACM CHI 2008. In 1996 she founded the Italian Chapter of ACM SIGCHI, which she chaired from 1996-2000. She led the efforts to get HCI introduced into the curriculum of most Italian universities.
John C. Thomas
John C. Thomas has been involved in service to SIGCHI since the original 1982 conference in Gaithersburg, where he served on the organizing committee and as publications co-chair. John has served in numerous major roles in the CHI and other SIGCHI conferences, including co-chairing the CHI conference in 1991, and serving on the SIGCHI EC, as a VP at Large and as Adjunct Chair for Mentoring (2009-2015), as well as on the EC’s Conference Management Committee from 1992-1995. He regularly serves in mentoring roles, including in doctoral consortia. John has also served on conference committees for many SIGCHI-affiliated conferences, including CSCW, Creativity and Computing, GROUP, Interact, and the ACM Conference on Universal Usability. He has served on numerous technical committees, including papers, workshops, panels, posters, case studies and the Interactive Experience. He also served as mentoring chair for CHI for two years and chaired mentoring of reviews for CSCW.
His track record of championing HCI issues in industry is extensive. For example, a couple years after joining IBM Research, and leading research efforts in HCI, he explained to top Research management about the importance of fostering the study of human computer interaction for the continued growth of the computer industry. In addition to research projects on natural language, query languages, speech synthesis, and the psychology of design at IBM Research, he also spent two years in the IBM Office of the Chief Scientist extensively selling the importance of human factors in computing systems within IBM resulting in doubling the number of relevant professionals, changing the development process, instituting scholarship and grants in the field of HCI, and visiting all the world-wide IBM development labs to evaluate, improve, or institute usability labs. In order to accomplish this, he found common cause with allies in other IBM functions including Marketing, Sales, Product Assurance, and Design.
After leaving IBM, he managed the Artificial Intelligence Lab at NYNEX where he convinced management to add a group in Human Computer Interaction and institute a partnership with the University of Colorado HCI group. In his role as Executive Director, he was partly responsible for the program for two major annual technical conferences in telecommunications, the Eastern Communications Forum and the National Communications Forum. Here, he began tracks in usability that introduced hundreds of engineers to the importance of HCI. After returning to IBM in 1992, John returned to championing HCI within IBM Research serving as the first IBM Research chair for the new “Professional Interest Community” in HCI. In addition to working as an individual researcher and manager on topics such as the business use of stories and storytelling and HCI Pattern Languages, he worked on strategy development for three IBM business opportunities, making sure that these strategies had necessary HCI components; viz., the “Smarter Cities” initiative, “IT for the Next Billions” and “Cognitive Computing.” Since retiring from IBM, he continues to be active in mentoring in HCI both in person and on social media such as Quora and LinkedIn.
SIGCHI SOCIAL IMPACT AWARD
Lorrie Faith Cranor
Lorrie Faith Cranor is the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS). She is associate department head of the Engineering and Public Policy Department and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. In 2016 she served as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission, working in the office of Chairwoman Ramirez. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc, a security awareness training company. She has authored over 150 research papers on online privacy, usable security, and other topics. She has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, having co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability (O’Reilly 2005) and founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the W3C and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P (O’Reilly 2002). She has served on a number of boards, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors, and on the editorial boards of several journals. In her younger days she was honored as one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine. More recently she was elected to the ACM CHI Academy, named an ACM Fellow for her contributions to usable privacy and security research and education, and named an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to privacy engineering. She was previously a researcher at AT&T-Labs Research and taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University. She holds a doctorate in Engineering and Policy from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2012-13 she spent her sabbatical as a fellow in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University where she worked on fiber arts projects that combined her interests in privacy and security, quilting, computers, and technology. She practices yoga, plays soccer, walks to work, and runs after her three children.
Outstanding Dissertation Award
Stefanie Mueller
Stefanie Mueller’s dissertation (‘Interacting with Personal Fabrication Devices‘) on interactive fabrication represents a major milestone in the field of personal fabrication, a recent sub field of HCI. Personal fabrication devices, such as 3D-printers, let end-users create custom objects, but it is notably difficult to create such designs. Today, users first have to create blueprints before printing, which tends to take overnight due to the slow 3D printing technology. It is not only a long process from design to result, but the process is also error-prone – the resulting objects often have mistakes requiring redrawing the model and waiting again to see it printed.
Mueller’s idea is to let non-technical users design and print in an interactive manner. Her inspiration came from the history of personal computing that went from machines that executed whole programs in one go, to decreasing the interaction unit to single requests, all the way to contemporary direct manipulation interfaces. In her thesis, she reports on several technical solutions for laser cutters as well as 3D-printers that step by step enable interactive design and printing. Instead of printing high-fi objects, low-fidelity fabrication allows users to quickly (90% reduction of time to print) print a low-fi model of their object to see whether it ‘works’. In her turn-taking systems for fabrication, users ‘draw’ sketches in the material that can then be modified once before or during printing. In her third-level exploration of fabrication, users modify the object while it is being printed – a direct-manipulation model of sorts.
Mueller’s thesis work was done at the HCI lab at Hasso Plattner Institute in Berlin, Germany. It led to 9 CHI/UIST publications (including a best paper and two nominations) and a 130-page Foundations paper.
Blase Ur
Blase Ur’s dissertation (‘Supporting Password-Security Decisions with Data‘) presents a thorough, aware, detailed, nuanced, and coherent examination of passwords and their problems – a high impact issue. Despite decades of research into developing abstract security advice and improving interfaces, users still struggle to make passwords. In a series of large studies, Ur shows that users frequently create passwords that are predictable for attackers or make other decisions that harm their security, yet can be guided toward better passwords using data-driven methods.
Ur’s thesis is an excellent use of multiple perspectives – understanding how users respond to interfaces (password meters), identifying problems with how password-guessing attacks are modeled, and unpacking people’s beliefs about what makes passwords secure. This work culminates in the design of a novel, open-source password meter that leads users to create more secure passwords without sacrificing usability. This meter uses neural networks and numerous carefully combined heuristics to score passwords and generate data-driven text feedback about a given password. Ur evaluated the meter both qualitatively and quantitatively. In a 4,500-participant online study, he shows how his data-driven meter with detailed feedback leads users to create more secure, and no less memorable, passwords than a meter with only a bar as a strength indicator.
Ur’s thesis work was advised by Lorrie Cranor (with close collaboration from Lujo Bauer and Nicolas Christin) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, US. It led to multiple papers each at CHI (including a best paper award and an honorable mention) and USENIX Security. Ur has also received best paper awards at UbiComp and USENIX Security. He recently joined the University of Chicago as Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Computer Science.
SIGCHI Academy
Amy S. Bruckman
Amy S. Bruckman is Professor and Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on social computing, with interests in online collaboration and creativity, social movements, and online moderation. Her early work applied social computing technology to create constructionist educational environments. She and her students study existing groups on the internet, and design new tools to support collaboration.
Bruckman also studies and writes about internet research ethics. She is founding chair of the ACM SIGCHI Research Ethics Committee. She is also a member of the ACM Ethics & Plagiarism Committee, and contributed to the revised ACM Code of Conduct as part of the Code 2018 project.
Bruckman is currently chair-elect of the CSCW community. She served as Co-General Chair of CSCW 2013, and Program Chair of Wikisym 2009.
Bruckman received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab’s Epistemology and Learning group in 1997, her M.S.. from the Media Lab’s Interactive Cinema Group in 1991, and a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1987. More information about her work is available at: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb
Sheelagh Carpendale
Sheelagh Carpendale is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Information Visualization and an Industrial Research Chair in Interactive Technologies co-funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the provincial Alberta Innovates Technology Futures program (AITF), and SMART Technologies. She is the recipient of several major awards including the prestigious E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which is given to the six top scientists nationally across all science and engineering fields and within 12 years of their PhD. She received the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award (BAFTA) for Interactive Learning for the project, Antarctic Waves, which was developed with BRAUNARTS, the British Antarctic Survey and the London Philharmonic. She has also received Alberta’s ASTech Award for Innovation in Information and Communications Technology and the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society (CHCCS) Achievement Award. Her numerous other awards include two graduate supervision awards and several research excellence awards at the University of Calgary and she was featured in Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council State of the Nation 2012 report.
Sheelagh Carpendale is a founding director of Calgary’s Interactions Lab; she directs the Innovations in Visualization (InnoVis) research group and initiated the establishment of the interdisciplinary graduate program, Computational Media Design. Her research focuses on information visualization, interaction design, and qualitative empirical work. It includes such projects as: visualizing energy data, decision support for medical diagnosis, constructive visualization, personal visualization, visualizing ecological dynamics, visualizing uncertainty, visualizing social activities, and multi-touch and tabletop interaction. Dr. Carpendale’s work draws upon her combined backgrounds in fine arts, design and computer science, benefiting from the rich cross-fertilization of ideas amongst these fields. By studying how people interact with information, images, technology and each other, she seeks to design and develop interactive technologies that support the everyday practices of people.
Ed H. Chi
Ed H. Chi is a Principal Scientist at Google, directing and leading a machine learning research group focused on recommendation systems and social computing research. Prior to Google, he was an Area Manager and a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC from 1999 to 2011. Ed completed his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science in from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
With 39 patents and over 110 research articles, he is known for research on Web and online social systems, and the effects of social signals on user behavior. Ed’s HCI research contribution include two major areas. For web information analytics and visualization (1994-2006), he developed both information visualization frameworks and systems for web and data analytics, as well as information scent theories and algorithms for understanding information seeking and sensemaking behavior. For social computing (2006-2017), he pioneered social media modeling and crowdsourcing methodologies for HCI research, as well as developing and applying techniques from information retrieval and machine learning to social search and recommendation systems. For example, he has directed research leading to significant improvements of recommenders for YouTube, Google Play Store and Google+.
Ed was the Technical Program Co-Chair for CHI2012, and is on the editorial boards of ACM TOCHI, ACM TIIS, and ACM TSC, and recognized as an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014. In his spare time, Ed is an avid photographer and snowboarder.
Michael Muller
Michael Muller is an internationally recognized expert in participatory design and participatory analysis. He helped to bring the methods and theory of participatory design from Europe to North America. His work in this area includes the development of methods (CARD, PICTIVE, participatory heuristic evaluation) and theory (ethnocritical heuristics), as well as the creation of taxonomies and encyclopedic descriptions of participatory methodology in handbook chapters. Michael contributed expertise on participatory and qualitative analysis to a recent book from the National Academy of Science, as part of a three-year membership in a human-systems integration committee.
At IBM, Michael joined the Collaborative User Experience group. In that group, he and colleagues studied workplace collaboration, including organizational social media systems for social-networking, file-sharing, bookmarking, and online communities. Later, Michael and colleagues extended this work into one of the first organizational forms of crowdfunding for innovation and community. Michael also contributed findings and theories regarding distinct self-selected roles that employees have chosen in relation to these systems, including new work to show the contributions of lurkers. Also at IBM, Michael is active in the employee inventor community. He is past-chair of the Invention Development Team for the Cognitive User Experience group, and has been recognized repeatedly as an IBM Master Inventor.
In addition to papers about technical and social phenomena, Michael has also made contributions to professional society social justice work. He organized the “HCI for All” paper sessions at the CHI conference, convened workshops oriented toward human needs and social responsibility, and was recently invited to moderate a CSCW panel on social justice. Michael is a member of the SIGCHI Research Ethics committee. Michael has also been active in on-going conference activities for students and emerging professionals, serving as co-chair for the CHI Early Career Symposium and the CSCW Student Reviewer Mentoring program. ACM has recognized Michael as an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
Albrecht Schmidt
Albrecht Schmidt is professor for Human-Centered Ubiquitous Media in the computer science department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. He studied computer science in Ulm and Manchester and received a PhD from Lancaster University, UK, in 2003. He held several prior academic positions at different universities, including Stuttgart, Cambridge, Duisburg-Essen, and Bonn. He also worked as a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) and at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
In his research, he investigates the inherent complexity of human-computer interaction in ubiquitous computing environments, particularly in view of increasing computer intelligence and system autonomy. Albrecht has actively contributed to the scientific discourse in human-computer interaction through the development, deployment, and study of functional prototypes of interactive systems and interface technologies in different real world domains.
His early experimental work addressed the use of diverse sensors to recognize situations and interactions. This work significantly influenced our current understanding of context-awareness and situated computing. He proposed and developed the novel concept of implicit human-computer interaction. This model considers sensing and machine perception as an integral part of the interaction process. Over the years, he has extended the scope of his investigations of interaction research into various domains, including automotive user interfaces, tangible interaction, interactive public display systems, interaction with large high-resolution screens, and physiological interfaces. Most recently, he focuses on how information technology can provide cognitive and perceptual support to amplify the human mind. To investigate this further, he received in 2016 a prestigious ERC.
Albrecht has co-chaired several SIGCHI conferences; he is in the editorial board of ACM TOCHI, edits a forum in ACM interactions, a column of human augmentation in IEEE Pervasive, and formerly edited a column on interaction technologies in IEEE Computer. He has been instrumental in expanding the scope of SIGCHI to new research areas through the co-founding of ACM conferences on tangible and embedded interaction in 2007 and on automotive user interfaces in 2010.
Jean Scholtz
Jean Scholtz has worked as a Chief Scientist in the Visual Analytics Division of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory(PNNL) since retiring from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2006. While at NIST, Jean worked on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)and User-Centered Evaluation Methodologies for Usability. She started the IUSR (Industry Usability Report) project that developed a standard report format for reporting usability test (CIF – Common Industry Format) that became an ISO standard. She also worked for 3 years at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where she managed project in Invisible Computing, Information Retrieval, Collaboration and started a project in Human Robot Interaction.
Her work at PNNL has been focused on developing methodologies and metrics for user-centered evaluation in projects such as the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge, metrics for Visual Analytics, and Situation Awareness for the Power Grid. Morgan Claypool published her synthesis lecture on User-Centered Evaluation of Visual Analytics this fall.
She was honored by SIGCHI in 2015 with the SIGCHI Lifetime Service award for her work with SIGCHI and numerous SIGCHI conferences. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska, an MS from Stevens University, and a B.A. from the University of Iowa.
Andrew D. Wilson
Andrew D. Wilson is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research. Andy has pioneered new modes of human-computer interaction beyond traditional desktop computing, including gesture-based interfaces, touch screens, augmented and virtual reality, and display technologies. Before joining Microsoft in 2001, he obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the MIT Media Laboratory.
Andy’s research focuses on using sensing and signal processing techniques to increase the bandwidth of the human-computer interface. With colleagues, Andy built the first Surface interactive tabletop prototype, founding the Surface Computing group at Microsoft. He developed the first interactive prototypes using depth cameras at Microsoft, ultimately leading to their commercialization as Kinect. He has a history of publishing simple, useful techniques that have become widely adopted and extended, such as the “$1 recognizer”, the gesture elicitation methodology, and multiple image-based gesture recognition techniques. After coauthoring several spatial augmented reality innovations such as IllumiRoom, in 2015 he open-sourced the RoomAlive Toolkit, enabling others to build novel interactive projection mapping systems. He has published more than 80 academic articles and more than 100 patents.
Andy has been active in the SIGCHI community, first demoing at CHI in 1994. He served as the general chair of ACM UIST in 2009, ACM CHI program subcommittee co-chair in 2012 and 2013, and ACM UIST program chair in 2018. He has chaired the steering committee of ACM ISS, the International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces, where he has played a key role in shaping the conference. In 2014, he received a Ten-Year Technical Impact Award for his single-authored 2004 ACM ICMI paper, “TouchLight: an imaging touch screen and display for gesture-based interaction”.
Volker Wulf
Volker Wulf is a professor of the University of Siegen and the director of its School of Media and Information (iSchool). He also heads a research group at Fraunhofer FIT in Sankt Augustin (Germany). He has degrees in computer science and business administration from RWTH Aachen, the University of Dortmund, and the University of Hamburg (Germany). On a research grant by the State of North Rhine Westfalia (NRW) he worked at MIT. Later he became a Fulbright Scholar visiting University of Michigan and Stanford University.
Standing in the tradition of the European CSCW community, Volker Wulf has grounded the design of innovative IT artefacts in an appropriate understanding of social practices. He conceptualized a practice-based perspective to computer science in general and to HCI specifically. His work is structured by Design Case Studies which look at innovative IT artefacts from the perspectives of context studies, participatory design, and appropriation in a long term perspective. Recently, Volker also initiated a meta-research agenda to study practice-oriented research in order to improve and sustain cooperation inside the academic community and towards practitioners (see co-edited book with Oxford University Press 2018). Practice-orientation also requires a focus on flexible software architectures which can be tailored by users at run time (see, e.g., co-editited books on “End User Development” (Springer 2006 and 2017).
Most of Volker Wulf’s more than 300 publications have been internationally peer-reviewed. These also include the books “Expertise Sharing: Beyond Knowledge Management” and “Social Capital and Information Technology”, both with MIT Press.