Host
Daniel P. Siewiorek
Buhl University Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering
Director Human Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Professor Siewiorek’s research interests range from computer architecture to computer reliability to design automation to wearable computers to context aware computing. He has designed or been involved with the design of nine multiprocessor systems and has been a key contributor to the dependability design of over two dozen commercial computing systems. Dr. Siewiorek leads an interdisciplinary team that has designed and constructed 20 generations of mobile computing systems. He has written eight textbooks and over 400 technical papers. Professor Siewiorek is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has served as Chairman of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing and as founding Chairman of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. Professor Siewiorek received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1968, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering (minor in Computer Science) from Stanford University, in 1969 and 1972, respectively.
Guest Speakers
Stuart K. Card
Senior Research Fellow and Manager
User Interface Research, Palo Alto Research Center
Stuart Card is a Senior Research Fellow and the manager of the User Interface Research group at the Palo Alto Research Center. His study of input devices led to the Fitts’s Law characterization of the mouse and was a major factor leading to the mouse’s commercial introduction by Xerox. His group has developed theoretical characterizations of human-machine interaction, including the Model Human Processor, the GOMS theory of user interaction, information foraging theory, information visualization, and sensemaking. These theories have been put to use in new paradigms of human-machine interaction including the Rooms workspace manager, papertronic systems, and the numerous information visualizations. Card received his A.B. in Physics from Oberlin College. At CMU, he was a student of Allen Newell and pursued an interdisciplinary program in psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science, receiving his Ph.D. in Psychology for one of the first theses in human-computer interaction. After CMU, he collaborated with Newell on HCI for twenty years. Card is a Fellow of the ACM, the first recipient of the ACM CHI Lifetime Achievement Award, and the first member of the ACM CHI Academy.
Making Sense of It All. What’s After Search?
It is common to both marvel and wring hands at the increased bounty of information available to people in recent years. A response has been the growth of an industry around search. But the real question is how to make sense of that information relative to some purpose and how to create systems that help with this. In the signature tradition of CMU, I will apply some cognitive task analysis to make sense of making sense and show some prototypes of systems that try to exploit what we have learned about it.
C. Suzanne Iacono
Division Director (Acting), Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS)
National Science Foundation
Suzi Iacono is Acting Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). She also serves as the International Advisor for the CISE Directorate. From 2003 to 2005, she headed up the Information Technology Research (ITR) Program, an NSF-wide Priority Area and prior to that was the Program Director for Social Informatics. Prior to coming to NSF, she held a faculty position at Boston University, was a Visiting Scholar at the Sloan School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was a research associate at the University of California, Irvine. Over the years, she has written journal articles, book chapters and conference papers on Social Informatics. Suzi received her PhD from the University of Arizona in Information Systems and her MA and BA from the University of California, Irvine in Social Ecology.
Cyberinfrastructure in the Making: Getting There From Here
The opportunity currently exists to build upon the Nation's investments in high performance networking, supercomputing, virtual observatories and laboratories, middleware, and large-scale databases to integrate them into federated and interoperable science and engineering knowledge environments and networks, or what NSF refers to as cyberinfrastructure (CI). The expectation is that widespread use of these environments will transform science and engineering and their related educational activities.
The technical challenges related to building and sustaining such environments are extraordinarily hard and have been discussed in many places. While we certainly agree with these assessments, we want to emphasize the socio-technical challenges related to CI (i.e., what are the social, economic, legal and ethical dimensions that are highly interrelated with technical developments, modes of use, and ability to achieve outcomes). Socio-technical challenges are often overlooked because scholarly discourse typically separates technical developments from social innovations, talking about each separately, rather than articulating how they co-evolve and shape our actions and interactions as well as transform our institutions. Yet, we believe, these socio-technical challenges, if not addressed, could comprise some of the biggest stumbling blocks for achieving a CI that is useful to people and their institutions.
We need new insights and theories that can help us explicitly understand how distributed IT resources, services and infrastructures become embedded in social practices, such as in the doing of science, the communicating of ideas, or the carrying out of group work, and where, at the same time, we need the appropriate social policies embedded in the mechanisms and protocols of those technologies in order for distributed collaborations to routinely take place.
I will discuss why CI is so important, what is meant by the socio-technical aspects of CI, and which socio-technical challenges are most critical and need to be addressed in order to move forward. Finally, I make recommendations for further research.
Dan R. Olsen Jr.
Professor of Computer Science
Brigham Young University
Dan R. Olsen Jr. is a Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. He was formerly the director of CMU's HCI Institute and founding editor of ACM's Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (TOCHI). For the last 25 years he has been working on software architectures and techniques to support the construction of user interfaces. His most recent work is in human-robot interaction and in architectures that integrate machine learning into the user interface.
The Challenge of Knowing Too Much
Our ability to store and process information is growing at an exponential rate yet human ability is not. We are rapidly approaching the ability to store in a cost effective way all of the information produced by individual human beings. What is missing is the ability to effectively do anything with it all. The information is unstructured, undisciplined and ill mannered. The challenge before us is inventing ways to bring it all to task without sacrificing our private lives.
Randy Pausch
Professor of Computer Science, HCI, and Design
Co-Founder, Entertainment Technology Center
Carnegie Mellon University
Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he is the co-founder of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow.
He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) and Electronic Arts (EA), and has consulted with Disney on user interfaces for interactive theme park attractions and with Google on user interface design and testing. Dr. Pausch is the director of the Alice software project, and has been in zero-gravity.
Alice: Making it Fun to Learn Computer Programming
Programming computers is an intrinsically difficult activity, but our current methods and technologies for teaching it could be much better. With the recent drop in CS majors (50% in the last 5 years), the need to attract and retain a larger and more diverse set of students is even greater. We have spent the last ten years developing the Alice environment, which uses interactive 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to make a student's first exposure to computer programming much easier, while still keeping the full power of a Java/C++ level language. Alice attempts to provide the benefits of a system like Papert's Logo or Pattis' Karel-the-Robot without being relegated to being a toy: we provide a system that supports everything most traditional semester-long "Introduction to Programming" courses cover, but remove unnecessary hurdles, and provide a more motivating learning environment. Alice is now in use in over 60 universities, and the associate textbook has broken sales records for a first year introductory programming text.
We have formally shown that Alice works in freshmen college courses and as a vehicle for motivating middle-school girls to take an interest in computer programming. The system is provided as a free publice service by Carnegie Mellon at www.alice.org
Panel Moderator
Brad Myers
Professor of Human-Computer Interaction
Carnegie Mellon University
Brad A. Myers is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the principal investigator for various research projects including: the Pebbles Hand-Held Computer Project, Natural Programming, User Interface Software, and Demonstrational Interfaces. He is the author or editor of over 275 publications, including the books Creating User Interfaces by Demonstration and Languages for Developing User Interfaces, and he is on the editorial board of five journals. He has been a consultant on user interface design and implementation to over 50 companies, and regularly teaches courses on user interface design and software. He became an ACM Fellow in 2005, and in 2004, he was elected to the CHI Academy, an honor bestowed on the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the discipline and led the research in human-computer interaction. Myers received a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto where he developed the Peridot UIMS. He received the MS and BSc degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during which time he was a research intern at Xerox PARC. From 1980 until 1983, he worked at PERQ Systems Corporation. His research interests include user interface development systems, user interfaces, hand-held computers, programming by example, end-user programming, visual programming, programming language design, interaction techniques, window management, and programming environments. He belongs to SIGCHI, ACM, Senior Member of IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Panel Speakers
Ben Bederson
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Director of Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Adjunct Chair of SIGCHI US Public Policy Committee
University of Maryland, College Park
Benjamin B. Bederson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His work is on information visualization, interaction strategies, digital libraries, and accessibility issues such as voting system usability.
He completed his Ph.D. in 1992 and his M.S. in 1989 at New York University in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Computer Science. He graduated with a B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1986. From 1990-1992, he was a research scientist at Vision Applications, Inc. working on miniature robotics and computer vision. Dr. Bederson worked as a research scientist at Bellcore in the Computer Graphics and Interactive Media research group, and as a visitor at the New York University Media Research Laboratory in 1993 and 1994. From 1994-1997, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico.
Dan Boyarski
Professor, Head of the School of Design
Carnegie Mellon University
Dan Boyarski is Professor and Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has been for twenty-four years. As previous Director of Graduate Studies, he helped coordinate two unique master’s programs: one in Interaction Design, the other in Communication Planning and Information Design, a joint program with the English Department.
He teaches courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in typography, dynamic information design, and interaction design. Dan is interested in time-based communication, visualizing information spaces, and how type, image, sound, and movement may be combined for effective communication. He has conducted research for organizations like Samsung Electronics, Nortel, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Microsoft.
Dan speaks at national and international conferences and symposia dealing with human-computer interaction, designing interactive systems, design education, and design and new media. In the spring of 1999, the Design Management Institute awarded Dan the Muriel Cooper Prize for “outstanding achievement in advancing design, technology, and communications in the digital environment.”
Mary Czerwinski
Senior Researcher and Manager VIBE
(Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment)
Microsoft
Mary Czerwinski previously managed HCI groups at Johnson Space Center, Compaq Computer and Microsoft (product side), and is now a Senior Researcher and Manager of the Visualization and Interaction Research group at Microsoft Research. The group is responsible for studying and designing advanced technology and interaction techniques that leverage human capabilities across a wide variety of input and output channels. Mary's primary research areas include spatial cognition, information visualization and task switching. Mary has been an affiliate assistant professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Washington since 1996. She has also held positions at Compaq Computer Corporation, Rice University, Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Corporation, and Bell Communications Research. She received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington.
Mary is active in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, publishing and participating in a wide number of conferences, professional venues and journals. More information about Dr. Czerwinski can be found at http://research.microsoft.com/users/marycz.
James A. Landay
Laboratory Director, Intel Research Seattle
Associate Professor
University of Washington
James Landay is an Associate Professor in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, specializing in human-computer interaction. His current research interests include Automated Usability Evaluation, Demonstrational Interfaces, Ubiquitous Computing, User Interface Design Tools, and Web Design. He is also the Laboratory Director of Intel Research Seattle, a university affiliated research lab that is exploring the new usage models, applications, and technology for ubiquitous computing. Landay is a founding member of the University of Washington Design & User-centered Brainstorming (DUB) Center. He received his B.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1990 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in CS from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and 1996, respectively. His Ph.D. dissertation was the first to demonstrate the use of sketching in user interface design tools. Landay is also the chief scientist and co-founder of NetRaker. From 1997 through 2003, Landay was a tenured professor in EECS at UC Berkeley.
Elizabeth D. Mynatt
Director, GVU Center
Faculty Coordinator, HCC PhD and HCI MS graduate programs
Associate Professor, College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Elizabeth D. Mynatt is the GVU Center Director, the HCC Ph.D. Program Faculty Coordinator and an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There, she directs the research program in Everyday Computing examining the human-computer interface implications of having computation continuously present in many aspects of everyday life. Dr. Mynatt is one of the principal researchers in the Aware Home Research Initiative; investigating the design of future home technologies, especially those that enable older adults to continue living independently as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting.
Dr. Mynatt is a Sloan Research Fellow. Her research is supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation including a five-year NSF CAREER award. Mynatt was recently named "Top Innovator in Technology" by Atlanta Woman magazine. Other honorary awards include the 2001 College of Computing's Junior Faculty Research award and the 2003 College of Computing's Dean's Award.
JUDITH S. OLSON
Richard W. Pew Chair in Human Computer Interaction
Professor, School of Information
Professor, Computer and Information Systems, Business School
Professor, Department of Psychology
University of Michigan
Professor Olson's current research focuses on the nature of group work and the design and evaluation of technology to support it. This field combines cognitive and social psychology with the design of information systems. She began her career at Michigan in the Department of Psychology, served as a Technical Supervisor for human factors in systems engineering at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and returned to Michigan to the Business School and then the new School of Information. She has over 70 publications in journals and books, and has served on a number of national committees, including the National Research Council Committee on Human Factors and the Council of the Association for Computing Machinery. She has recently been appointed to the CHI Academy.