2019 SIGCHI AWARDS
SIGCHI LIFETIME RESEARCH AWARD
HIROSHI ISHII
Hiroshi Ishii is the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. After joining the Lab in October 1995, he founded the Tangible Media Group to make digital tangible by giving physical form to digital information and computation. Here, he pursues his visions of Tangible Bits (1997) and Radical Atoms (2012) that will transcend the Painted Bits of GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), the current dominant paradigm of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction).
He is recognized as a founder of “Tangible User Interfaces (TUI),” a new research genre based on the CHI ’97 “Tangible Bits” paper presented with Brygg Ullmer in Atlanta, Georgia, which led to the spinoff ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) from 2007. In addition to academic conferences, “Tangible Bits” was exhibited at the NTT ICC (2000) in Tokyo, Japan, at the Ars Electronica Center (2001-2003) in Linz, Austria, and many other international arts and design venues. For his Tangible Bits work, he was awarded tenure from MIT in 2001, and elected to the CHI Academy in 2006.
In 2012, he presented his new vision of “Radical Atoms” to leap beyond “Tangible Bits” by assuming a hypothetical generation of materials that can change form and properties dynamically and computationally, becoming as reconfigurable as pixels on a GUI screen. His team’s Radical Atoms works, including Shape Displays and Programmable Materials, contributed to form the new stream of “Shape-Changing UI” research in the HCI community. His “Radical Atoms” vision was selected as the overarching theme of Ars Electronica Festival 2016, with the subtitle “The Alchemists of our Time.” Ishii’s team ran a 3 year long Radical Atoms Exhibition at the Ars Electronica Center, which has been extended to run through to the summer of 2019.
Ishii and his team have presented their visions of “Tangible Bits” and “Radical Atoms” at a variety of academic, design, and artistic venues (including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, ICC, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Milan Design Week) emphasizing that the design of engaging and inspiring tangible interactions requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review, encapsulated by his motto, “Be Artistic and Analytic. Be Poetic and Pragmatic.”
Prior to joining the MIT Media Lab, from 1988-1994 Ishii led the CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) research group at NTT Human Interface Laboratories Japan, where he and his team invented the TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. He received a B.E. degree in electronic engineering, and M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 1978, 1980 and 1992, respectively.
His greatest treasure is the email message he received from Dr. Mark Weiser in 1997 regarding his CHI ‘97 Tangible Bits paper which was on the verge of rejection.
SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award
DANIEL ROSENBERG
Daniel Rosenberg is currently a UX consultant (rCDOUX.com) and an adjunct professor of HCI at San Jose State University. He serves on the advisory board of the Interaction Design Foundation and edits the “Business of UX” Forum in ACM Interactions magazine.
Early in his career he introduced many UX methods and inventions that are now common practice. At Eastman Kodak he assembled the HF department’s first rapid prototyping lab, taught many workshops on this topic and coauthored the Prototyping chapter in the first Handbook of HCI (Elsevier 1988). At a CHI 1988 special session he introduced the UX community to the concept of GUI look & feel as an integral part of corporate branding. During this period, he also coauthored (with W. Cushman) Human Factors in Product Design (Elsevier 1991), the first consumer product focused HF textbook.
As User Interface Architect for Ashton-Tate & Borland, Dan designed the first GUI Integrated Development Environment, defining the workspace style UX for programming tools. He invented Tabs as a UI mechanism along with several other innovative UI patterns while at Borland. He also designed the first GUI administration UX for Oracle, again creating a pattern still commonly used today.
Dan’s contribution to UX management practice building large corporate UX departments began when he was hired in 1994 to establish the first UX team at Oracle, growing to more than 120 people during his 11-year leadership tenure. He was also the UX SVP at SAP for seven years. During this 18-year period he conducted UX management workshops and served on numerous conference panels. He also published many UX leadership articles, the most controversial of which was “The 7 myths of Usability ROI” (Interactions, Sept. 2004).
SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award
BILL HEFLEY
Bill Hefley, PhD, CCP, CDP, COP, is a clinical professor at the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he serves as director of Business Analytics programs and as secretary of the faculty. He also is a founding director of ITSqc, LLC, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University. He previously was on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a founding member of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and a member of the committee that developed the Master’s in HCI degree. He has also been involved in curriculum efforts within SIGCHI and the Project Management Institute (PMI).
In 1990, Bill stepped in as the third editor-in-chief of the SIGCHI Bulletin. Shortly after becoming the SIGCHI Bulletin editor, Bill began investing a notable amount of his leadership talent in the effort to create a magazine for HCI/UX/UI professionals and academics, a forum beyond traditional journals. He served as SIGCHI’s adjunct chair for user interface magazine from 1991 to 1993, and he became SIGCHI’s vice chair for publications, which helped him to realize the initiative supported by many colleagues within SIGCHI to bring interactions to reality. He served as founding editor for interactions, along with the late John Rheinfrank, through 1995. During that time, interactions went from a concept to a prototype and mock-up and into production, launching with its first issue in January 1994. Bill served as managing editor responsible for producing each issue in its first two years following launch. BIll set the direction and operating practice for the magazine, now, in its twenty-sixth year of publication, powerfully influential not only within SIGCHI, but also, as HCI has grown, more broadly within ACM and the computing profession. interactions continues to be a forum where people from all continents can meet independent of their location, a media meeting space in the spirit of SIGCHI-sponsored conferences. In this way, Bill’s creation enabled, as well as stimulated, global participation in SIGCHI.
In 1993, Bill, with Dianne Murray and Wayne Gray, founded the Intelligent User Interface (IUI) conference series. Thereafter, Bill continued to be active in CHI conferences, leading panels and serving on conference committees. He also served on the SIGCHI Executive Committee and on the SIGCHI Conference Management Committee, which oversaw SIGCHI’s portfolio of conferences, for several years. He also has served as vice chair of ACM SIGCAS.
Bill has served in many roles and at many levels in SIGCHI and the ACM, and for that, the group always will be grateful. But it was in the creation and initial leadership of interactions that he made an indelible contribution, and it is primarily that significant contribution and service to SIGCHI now being acknowledged by the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award.
SIGCHI SOCIAL IMPACT AWARD
GILLIAN HAYES
Gillian Hayes is Robert A. and Barbara L. Kleist Professor in Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and in the School of Education and School of Medicine at UC Irvine. Her research interests are in human-computer interaction, assistive and educational technologies, and health informatics. Her research focuses on supporting vulnerable populations, such as children and under-represented groups, in engaging with design and research activities. She has spent most of her career focused on driving input from and engagement with the people most affected by a new process, technology, or product. As such, she is particularly interested in using community-based collaborative research approaches, such as Action Research and Participatory Design to drive innovation. She is a Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research fellow and co-organizes a cohort of researchers focused on issues of technology, media, and children with support from the foundation and the Society for Research in Child Development. She is an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction.
Dr. Hayes works to translate research to practice in a variety of ways. As the Director of Technology Research for the Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders and the Chief Science Officer at Tiwahe Technology, she has made her research available to numerous clinical and educational stakeholders across California and around the world. Her students’ software can often be found online and open-source or available for free in app stores. Outside of research, she served as the Faculty Director for Civic and Community Engagement in the Division of Teaching and Learning at UC Irvine. She currently sits on the Board of Directors for Team Kids, an innovative nonprofit that teaches children to be philanthropists and engaged citizens. She is a sustaining member of the Junior League of Orange County and regular volunteer for a variety of causes focused on the well-being of children and families.
Outstanding Dissertation Award
CHRIS ELSDEN
Chris Elsden’s dissertation (‘A Quantified Past: Fieldwork and Design for Remembering a Data-Driven Life’) is an exquisitely written exploration of the relationship people can have and want to have with self-tracking tools and how those tools might be designed to be more editable and more effective as longer-term resources for ‘documentary informatics’. The research entailed an enormous and wide set of readings, a very thorough user study and then a speculative design intervention related to weddings and their documentation.
Elsden’s thesis work included field studies informed by ethnographic methods, exploring how communities of people worked with ‘data’ to track aspects of their lives, through for example, activity logging in sports contexts or through diary keeping. Based on theses studies, alongside extensive readings on works by authors such as Bartlett, Bergson, and Middleton and Brown, Elsden constructed a philosophical engagement with human memory with substantial depth and nuance. Inspired by emerging Speculative Design techniques in design research communities, Elsden developed a new method for the HCI community called ‘Speculative Enactments’. This marries the strengths of critical and speculative design approaches that continue to gain traction and visibility in HCI, with the field-based approaches commonly applied in HCI contexts.
The thesis work resulted in a remarkable number of studies that were published at strong venues, such as CHI, DIS and the Human-Computer Interaction journal, but also more design-oriented conferences such as RtD (Research through Design).
ANNA MARIA FEIT
Anna Feit’s dissertation (‘Assignment Problems for Optimizing Text Input’) integrates empirical research, combinatorial optimization, and modeling to open new ways for designing text input methods that are fast, ergonomic and learnable. While researchers at the forefront of HCI thought 10 finger typing was an intractable problem to quantitative optimization, Anna Feit took a much more optimistic, daring and simple approach using big data processing. She applies the same conceptual framework in developing three novel text input applications: 1. Text input with multi-finger gestures in mid-air; 2. transferring the skill of pianists by enabling text input on the long piano keyboard; and 3. optimal input of special characters on the physical keyboard. Furthermore, Feit published two large datasets of everyday typing behavior that are unique in size and the data they capture: 1) an online study of transcription typing with over 169,000 users; and 2) motion capture data, eye tracking data and reference videos of 30 everyday typists. Her conceptual and empirical work challenges many conventional wisdoms of the field. For example, her large dataset-based-observation confirms what many intuitively felt about rigid 10 finger touch typing taught in classical typing lessons. As it turns out, the high performers in her data often do not use full fledged, rigid touch-typing.
Overall, her work is a success story for the positive impact of HCI research on real world problems. Amazingly, Anna Feit was able to work with the French standardization organization, applying her principled methods to develop France’s new keyboard standard which will soon be adopted in France – potentially impacting the life of all of French speaking computer users.
Feit’s thesis work was done at Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Helsinki, Finland. Feit has published her work in ToCHI, as well as the CHI and DIS conferences, receiving honorable mentions for two of her papers at CHI.
ROBERT XIAO
Robert Xiao’s dissertation (‘On-World Computing Enabling Interaction on Everyday Surfaces’) introduces on-world computing, an interaction paradigm in which touch-sensitive interactive content is projected out onto surfaces in the natural world. This is both very challenging and very timely since these solutions have the potential to take the familiar touch interactions from the smartphones of today and apply them to a wide variety of Augmented Reality scenarios of the future. One of the main contributions lies in the technical solution for tracking fingertip/touch using depth cameras. Xiao introduces several best-in-class algorithms for this task which can be used by others off the bat. Apart from these input solutions, the thesis work also covers design aspects of interaction techniques and capabilities, culminating in fully integrated, usable prototype systems. Here we see a combination of really important advances on a technical level with the understanding of the requirements and the combination into a complete system of use to end-users. The resulting systems are technically very strong and show great skill in user interface technologies.
Xiao’s thesis work was done at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Xiao has already published 25 papers and has attracted more than 900 citations. Most of his publications are at top venues of HCI: 8 CHI and 6 at UIST. Two of his papers have received Best Paper awards.
SIGCHI Academy
GEORGE FITZMAURICE
George Fitzmaurice is the Director of the User Interface Research Group at Autodesk Research. In collaboration with his colleagues, he has co-authored over 110 research papers and has been awarded over 90 patents in a range of areas spanning the field of Human-Computer Interaction, including 3D User Interfaces, AR/VR Interactions, Wearable and Mobile Interaction, Software Learnability and Learning Systems, Interactive Visualizations of HR data and Organization Knowledge, Sketch-Based Animation, Pen-based interactions, Interactive Fabrication, Physical Crowdsourcing and Human-Robot Interaction. He was instrumental in establishing the field of Graspable UIs, the pre-cursor to what is known as Tangible UIs. He also pioneered the concept of spatially-aware displays and situated information spaces with his Chameleon research project.
In addition to HCI research, George has led efforts to productize many of his own research projects and those carried out in his lab. Some notable achievements in this vein are Autodesk SketchBook Motion (awarded the 2016 Apple iPad App of the Year), the ViewCube™ and SteeringWheels™ widgets (the standard 3D navigation mechanisms across Autodesk products), and the productization of the research project Chronicle into Autodesk Screencast, which has created a rich community of learning content attracting over 3 million site visitors and generating thousands of tutorial videos. Earlier in his career, he contributed to the design of the Maya 1.0 animation product, and the Sketchbook pen-based drawing tool.
Dr. Fitzmaurice received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and also holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Brown University, and a B.Sc. in Mathematics with Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
BATYA FRIEDMAN
Batya Friedman is a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington where she codirects the Value Sensitive Design Lab and the Tech Policy Lab. In 2012 she was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award.
Batya pioneered value sensitive design (VSD), an approach to account for human values in the design of technology. First developed in human-computer interaction, VSD has since been used in architecture, civil engineering, computational linguistics, computer security, energy, human-robotic interaction, information management, legal theory, moral philosophy, science and technology studies, and transportation. Batya has worked on technologies and values in a wide range of systems, from security for implantable medical devices to informed consent for cookies and web browsers, reputation in knowledge base systems, privacy in mobile technology, and equitable representation in large-scale computer simulation for land use and transportation planning. She is currently working on multi-lifespan design—generating design knowledge for envisioning and building information systems to support sociotechnical solutions as they unfold over longer periods of time, on the order of 50 or 100 years.
To bring VSD into human-computer interaction, design and tech policy research and practice, Batya has developed practical methods and toolkits. Among these, Envisioning Cards help technologists consider stakeholders, values, time, and pervasive uptake in their technical work; Security Cards, with a focus on threat analysis, help to develop a security mindset; and Diverse Voices aims to create more inclusive tech policy. Her new book with David Hendry, Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination (2019) is published by MIT Press.
Batya is also a stone sculptor and mixed media artist. She received her BA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
TAKEO IGARASHI
Takeo Igarashi is a professor in the computer science department, the University of Tokyo, Japan. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2000. He directed the JST ERATO Igarashi Design Interface Project (2007-2013) and is currently directing the JST CREST “HCI for Machine Learning” project (2017-2023). He made major and unique contributions in both computer graphics and human-computer interaction.
In graphics, he is known for the development of design tools for casual users. The most significant achievement in his early career is a 3D sketching system called Teddy (SIGGRAPH 1999 Impact Paper). Another important contribution is a 2D shape manipulation technique, which is now widely used in various applications. His colleagues and he later developed interactive design systems for fabricating functional physical objects such as plush toys, garments, musical instruments, furniture, and gliders.
In HCI, his group developed various innovative interaction techniques such as beautification and suggestions for drawing, speed-dependent automatic zooming, multiple cursor pointing for large screens, spatial grouping of desktop icons, and non-verbal vocal control. In the JST ERATO project, his group developed various interactive robotic systems such as cards-based control for home robots, an actuated manikin, an interactive plush toy, and carpet drawing.
Takeo served as program co-chair for UIST 2013 and general co-chair for UIST 2016. He is appointed as technical program co-chair for CHI 2021. He served as program co-chair for Pacific Graphics 2008 and as technical papers program chair for SIGGRAPH ASIA 2018. He received a significant new researcher award from SIGGRAPH in 2006 and the JSPS Prize in 2010. He has published more than 290 peer-reviews articles with more than 280 co-authors.
JENNIFER MANKOFF
Jennifer Mankoff is the Richard E. Ladner Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. The focus of her work is on tools for improving inclusion in and accessibility of our digital future. One of her primary application domains is revolutionizing the production and delivery of 3D printed assistive technology. She also was a pioneer and leader in addressing sustainability through computation.
Jennifer received her PhD at Georgia Tech and her B.A. from Oberlin College. Her previous faculty appointments include UC Berkeley’s EECS department and Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute. Jennifer has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, IBM Faculty Fellowship and Best Paper awards from ASSETS, CHI and Mobile HCI.
NURIA OLIVER
Nuria Oliver is Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone and Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance. She has pioneered the development of intelligent, interactive systems that are able to recognize and predict different types of human behavior on desktops, mobile phones and even cars. She received a PhD in Perceptual Intelligence at the MIT Media Laboratory. She has published more than 180 papers and 40 patents.
She is a Fellow of the ACM (2017), a Fellow of the IEEE (2017) and a Fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence (2016). She is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Academia Europaea. She received an honorary PhD from the University Miguel Hernandez in 2018. Her work has received many awards, including the MIT TR35 Young Innovator Award (2004), the European Ada Byron Award (2016), the Spanish National Computer Science Award (2016) and the Spanish Engineer of the Year Award (2018). She is a member of the scientific advisory board of six European universities, of Mahindra Comviva and the Future Digital Society. She advises the Spanish Government and the European Commission on AI related topics. She is a member of a Global Future Council at the World Economic Forum. In addition to her scientific work, Nuria devotes part of her time to outreach through talks and media articles with the goal of inspiring the next generation -and especially girls- to study STEM careers.
Nuria has been active in the SIGCHI community. She has served as general chair of UMAP 2011, ACM MobileHCI 2018 and ACM IUI 2020, technical program chair at ACM IUI 2009, area chair at ICMI 2012, doctoral symposium chair (and founder) at ACM IUI 2012 and sponsorship chair at ACM ICMI 2011.
LOREN G. TERVEEN
Loren Terveen is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin and spent 11 years at AT&T Labs / Bell Labs before joining the University of Minnesota. Terveen has published over 100 scientific papers, holds 9 patents, has advised several startup companies, consulted on intellectual property cases, and has held many leadership positions in his profession, including chairing the ACM CHI (Human Factors in Computing Systems) conference, serving as President of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, and serving on the ACM Council.
Terveen’s career has been centered on addressing the opportunities and challenges raised by the emergence and eventual universal adoption of the World Wide Web, with a focus on: (i) developing algorithms and user interfaces to help people locate information more effectively; (ii) analyzing how people communicate and work together online, to identify problems and unmet needs; and (iii) creating new interaction techniques to address these problems and meet these needs. Methodologically, his work has been characterized by the following properties: (i) focusing on problems of social importance; (ii) using social science theory to guide technical innovations; and (iii) deploying innovations in working systems with real users, both to test the innovations empirically and offer practical solutions for the problems being addressed.
JACOB O. WOBBROCK
Jacob O. Wobbrock is a Professor in the Information School and, by courtesy, in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 2006. He was a co-founder of the DUB Group (design: use: build:) and the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design (MHCI+D) degree, which bring together faculty, students, and affiliates from across the UW campus and beyond to form one of the world’s most prolific HCI and Design communities. Prof. Wobbrock’s work seeks to understand people’s interactions with computers and information, and to improve those interactions through design and engineering, especially for people with disabilities. His specific research interests include input and interaction techniques, human performance measurement and modeling, HCI research and design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing. He has co-authored over 140 peer-reviewed publications and received 23 paper awards, including 7 best papers and 8 honorable mentions from CHI. For his work in accessible computing, he received the 2017 SIGCHI Social Impact Award. Some of his notable contributions include Ability-Based Design, the $-family gesture recognizers, the end-user elicitation design method, the Slide Rule design for accessible touch screens, ARTool for nonparametric factorial statistical analyses, and the EdgeWrite text entry system. These and his many other projects have had traceable impact on both subsequent research and on commercial products. Prof. Wobbrock holds a B.S. and M.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, where upon graduation, he received the Distinguished Dissertation Award.
JOHN ZIMMERMAN
John Zimmerman is the Tang Family Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University’s HCI Institute. He is an interaction/service designer and researcher. He pioneered the use of Research through Design within the HCI research community, helping to create space for design research contributions. He co-founded DARIA (Design as Research in the Americas), a new design research organization. He has expertise on Research through Design, on interaction with intelligent systems, on the use of AI as a design material, and on the use of product attachment theory to improve user experience. He teaches classes and regularly consults on interaction design, service design, lean startup, and on the design of AI products and services. He made the transition from design practice to design research during his time at Philips Research. There he worked on personalized TV systems, and he invented a method of scrolling touchscreens currently used by most phones and tablets. Before joining Philips, he worked in film and multimedia production.