Awards

Lifetime Research Award

The SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award is presented to individuals for outstanding contributions to the study of human-computer interaction. This award recognizes the very best, most fundamental and influential research contributions. It is awarded for a lifetime of innovation and leadership and carries an honorarium of $5000. The criteria for the award are:

• Cumulative contributions to the field.
• Influence on the work of others.
• Development of new research directions

Bob Kraut is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science and Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the founding members of CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Previously he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University and a research scientist at Bell Laboratories and Bell Communications Research. Bob is a social psychologist with broad interests in the impact of computing and telecommunications on individuals, groups and organizations and ways to design them to improve human lives. He has conducted empirical research on online communities, the social impact of the Internet, the design of information technology for small-group intellectual work and related topics. Starting with his HomeNet project, he has spent over 15 years conducting research to understand how the way people use technology influences their psychological well-being and personal relationships. His research on online communities combines careful empirical studies of communities with interventions and design ideas to improve them. This approach is illustrated in his book with Paul Resnick, Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. His most recent research focuses on ways to improve productivity and creativity in online production.

Lifetime Practice Award

The SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award is presented to individuals for outstanding contributions to the practice and understanding of humancomputer interaction. This award recognizes the very best and most influential applications of human-computer interaction. It is awarded for a lifetime of innovation and leadership and carries an honorarium of $5000. The criteria for the award are:

• Cumulative contributions to the field directly and through the leadership of others.
• Innovation and the stimulation of innovation through practice.
• Impact on the field, industry, and society.
• Influence on the work of others, and the growth of other HCI practitioners and researchers.
• Successful application of human-computer interaction to products, services, and systems.

Jeff Johnson is President and Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, Inc., a product usability consulting firm.  He also is a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability and universal accessibility.  He has worked in HCI since 1978.  After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford, he worked as a UI designer, implementer, manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard Labs, and Sun Microsystems.  In 1990, he co-chaired the first Participatory Design conference, PDC’90.  Since 2004 he has served on the SIGCHI U.S. Public Policy Committee.  He has taught at Stanford University, Mills College, and the University of Canterbury.  He has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker and in 2014 was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy.  He has authored or coauthored many articles and book chapters on a variety of topics in HCI and the impact of technology on society, as well as the books GUI Bloopers, Web Bloopers, GUI Bloopers 2.0, Designing with the Mind in Mind, Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (coauthored with Austin Henderson), and Designing with the Mind in Mind, 2nd Edition.  His forthcoming book, coauthored with Kate Finn, is on designing for an aging population.

Lifetime Service Award

The SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award goes to individuals who have contributed to the growth of SIGCHI in a variety of capacities.This award is for extended services to the community at large over a number of years. Criteria for this award are:

• Service to SIGCHI and its activities in a variety of capacities.
• Extended contributions over many years.
• Influence on the community at large.

Gerrit van der Veer developed courses on interactive systems design in universities in Romania, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and China. Currently he is supervising PhD students in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and China. At the Dalian Maritime University, China, he teaches Usability Engineering, Research Methods for HCI, and Service Design. He published over 200 conference and journal papers, and edited over 10 volumes of research in HCI related domains. His research includes mental models, task analysis, individual differences, user interface architecture, experience design, ICT for cultural heritage, and design for adult learning. With his partner Elly Lammers and with Thomas Green he developed in 1982 the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics with the annual ECCE conference. In 1989 he joined IFIP TC 13 as well as SIGCHI, aiming at making both organizations more globally active. He was co-chair of the first CHI ever outside North America (Amsterdam 1993). He took many volunteer roles in SIGCHI, including Vice President for Conferences, Chair for CHI 2005 (Portland), and President (2009-2015). He received the IFIP TC13 Pioneer award, and was awarded by the former Dutch Queen (like his wife Elly Lammers) the title of Knight for long term services to society.

Gary M. Olson is Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to 2008, he was the Paul M. Fitts Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Michigan. He along with Judy studies how information technology can play a role in collaboration. Mostly this work focused on collaboration at a distance, and led to the often-cited paper in 2000, “Distance Matters.” Later they published an edited book on Scientific Collaboration on the Internet (MIT Press, 2008), and more recently, Working Together Apart (Morgan & Claypool, 2014). He has long been active in SIGCHI. He co-chaired the first two DIS conferences, the CSCW conference in 2004, and chaired the CHI conference in 2006. He chaired or co- chaired numerous conference functions, mostly at CHI or CSCW. He chaired the SIGCHI Awards committee 2007-2010, the CSCW Steering Committee 2008-2012, and served as Vice-President for Finance on the SIGCHI Executive Committee 2009- 2015. He is an ACM Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2003, and along with Judy Olson, received the SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

Social Impact Award

This award is given to individuals who promote the application of humancomputer interaction research to pressing social needs. The recipient should have past or current work within the HCI profession that demonstrates social benefit according to criteria such as:

• facilitating use of computer and telecommunication technology by diverse populations
• increasing access to technology for those with limited educational opportunities
• reducing economic barriers for access to information and communication technologies
• promoting privacy, security, trust, and safety
• improving medical care, education, housing, water supplies, and nutrition
• supporting technologies for international development and conflict resolution
• improving human communication and reducing isolation

Dr. Jonathan Lazar is a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University, where he serves as director of the undergraduate program in Information Systems. He has authored or edited 10 books, including Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy (2015, co-authored with Goldstein and Taylor), and Research Methods in HumanComputer Interaction (2010, co-authored with Feng and Hochheiser). Dr. Lazar has published over 140 refereed articles related to web accessibility for people with disabilities, user-centered design, and public policy, and has been granted 2 US patents for his work on web-based security features for blind users. He frequently serves as an advisor to government agencies, regularly provides testimony to legislative committees, and multiple US Federal regulations cite his research. Dr. Lazar has been honored with the 2015 AccessComputing Capacity Building Award (sponsored by the University of Washington), the 2011 University System of Maryland Regents Award for Public Service, and the 2010 Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award from the National Federation of the Blind. In 2012, Dr. Lazar was selected as the Shutzer Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, to investigate the relationship between human-computer interaction for people with disabilities, and US Disability Rights Law.

CHI Academy

The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in HCI. The criteria for election to the CHI Academy are:

• Cumulative contributions to the field.
• Impact on the field through development of new research directions and/or innovations.
• Influence on the work of others

Margaret Burnett is a Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University. She began her career in industry, where she was the first woman software developer ever hired at Procter & Gamble Ivorydale. A few degrees and start-ups later, she joined academia, with a research focus on people who are engaged in some form of software development. She was the principal architect of the Forms/3 spreadsheet language, and pioneered the use of information foraging theory in the domain of software debugging. As founding Project Director of the EUSES Consortium, she and her collaborators re-imagined the area of end-user programming to cofound the area of end-user software engineering. She and her team also performed seminal work that systematically investigates “gender-neutral” software, uncovering pervasive gender bias in software from spreadsheets to programming environments. She has published more than 200 papers, with several receiving best paper awards and honorable mentions, and has presented invited talks and keynotes over her research in 14 countries. Burnett is also an award-winning mentor, particularly to women and underrepresented groups.

Elizabeth Churchill is a Director of User Experience at Google. Her work focuses on the connected ecosystems of the Social Web and Internet of Things. For 2 decades, Elizabeth has been a research leader at well-known corporate R&D organizations including Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Silicon Valley (FXPAL), the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), eBay Research Labs in San Jose, and Yahoo in Santa Clara, California. Elizabeth has contributed groundbreaking research in a number of areas, publishing over 100 peer reviewed articles, co-editing 5 books in HCI related fields, contributing as a regular columnist for ACM’s interactions magazine since 2008, and publishing an academic textbook, Foundations for Designing User Centered Systems. Her upcoming book, Designing with Data, will be published in 2016. She has also launched successful products, and has more than 50 patents granted or pending. An ACM Distinguished Scientist and Speaker, Elizabeth has held many leadership roles in SIGCHI, including serving on the SIGCHI Executive Committee for 8 years, 6 years of those as Executive Vice President. Elizabeth’s undergraduate degree was in Experimental Psychology and her Masters in Knowledge Based Systems both from the University of Sussex. Her PhD was from the University of Cambridge in Cognitive Science.

Allison Druin is Special Advisor for National Digital Strategy for the National Park Service, on leave for 2-years from the University of Maryland. Prior to her government work, she was Chief Futurist for the University of Maryland’s Division of Research, a Professor in the iSchool, and a researcher in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. In her 20 years of research, she has led design teams of children and teens, computer scientists, educators and more to develop new educational technologies for young people with codesign methods. Her research focuses on developing co-design methods that give voice to children in the technology development process. Over the years, her team has created a variety of new technologies, including new mobile storytelling devices, digital libraries to support cultural tolerance, and robotic toys for active learning. She has been honored by SIGCHI for her work by receiving the 2010 SIGCHI Social Impact Award. She has been active as a CHI conference volunteer for over 20 years and is currently conference co-chair for CHI2016. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in K-12 technologies, a M.S. from the MIT Media Lab, and a B.F.A in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Susan R. Fussell is a Professor in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. She received her BS degree in psychology and sociology from Tufts University, and her Ph.D. in social and cognitive psychology from Columbia University. Prior to joining Cornell University in 2008, she was an Associate Research Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2010 to 2012, she served as a Program Officer in the Human-Centered Computing cluster in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (CISE/IIS) at the National Science Foundation. Susan’s primary interests lie in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work and computermediated communication. Her earlier work focused on how gesture, gaze and other communication channels help people coordinate their efforts on physical tasks. Her current projects examine the effects of culture and native language on computer-mediated communication, collaboration among intelligence analysts, tools to motivate people to reduce their energy usage, human-robot interaction, and telepresence robotics.

Yves Guiard, an experimental psychologist specializing in the study of human movement, earned his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Marseilles, France. He spent two year-long sabbaticals in Britain, one in Oxford (1984-85) and the other in Cambridge, UK, where he was elected a French Government Fellow of Churchill College (1996-97). Now an Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS, he works in Paris in the VIA team of the LTCI, a joint research laboratory between the CNRS and Telecom-ParisTech. The kinematic chain model Yves proposed in 1987 was found useful by HCI researchers a decade later when they began exploring the intriguing possibility of two-handed interaction. His other research interests include stimulus-response compatibility and the speed/accuracy trade-off of aimed movement, currently his main focus. With colleagues and PhD students, he has introduced a number of tricks for facilitating target acquisition in GUIs and has designed and tested many novel interaction techniques, especially for mobile devices. He has extended Fitts’ law to the challenges of pointing in multiscale electronic worlds and pleaded for perspective visualization of everyday documents. Yves has sat on several program committees for CHI and is currently an associate editor of ACM TOCHI.

Leysia Palen is Professor and Founding Chair of the  Department of Information  Science  at the  University of Colorado Boulder  (USA), where is  also Professor of  Computer Science, and faculty fellow with the  ATLAS  and Cognitive Science Institutes.  She is a  Full Adjunct Professor at the  University of Agder  in Norway. Palen is the author of over  80  manuscripts  in  the areas of human computer  interaction and computer supported cooperative  work, with an emphasis on crisis informatics, an area she forged with her graduate students and colleagues at Colorado. For this work, Palen was awarded the 2015 ACM Computer Human Interaction Social Impact Award. Her research is supported by the US National Science Foundation, including a CAREER award  She serves as Associate  Editor for the  Human Computer Interaction Journal  and the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Journal. Prof. Palen graduated from UCSD with a BS in Cognitive Science, and UCI with an MS and PhD in Information and Computer Science. As an undergraduate, she spent time at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and as faculty member at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and the University of Agder, Norway. She has worked at Boeing  Commercial, USWEST Advanced  Technologies, Microsoft Commercial and Xerox PARC.

Daniel M. Russell is a senior research scientist at Google where he works in the area of search quality, with a focus on understanding what makes Google users happy in their use of web search. As an individual contributor, Dan is best known for his studies of sensemaking behavior of people dealing with understanding large amounts of information. He has created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) called “PowerSearchingWithGoogle. com” which has taught search skills to over 2.8M students. Before joining Google, he also held research positions at IBM’s Research Almaden Research Center (San Jose, CA),   Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG), and Xerox PARC.  Dan has also been an adjunct lecturer in computer science at University of Santa Clara and at Stanford University, and is currently an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Russell received his B.S. in Information and Computer Science from U.C. Irvine, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Rochester (1983).  While at Rochester, he did research work in the neuropsychology of laterality, models of apraxia and aphasia, coordinated motor movements and computer vision.

John Stasko is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. With his students and colleagues, John has published over 170 papers on humancomputer interaction and related subareas such as software visualization, computer science education, peripheral and ambient displays, information visualization, and visual analytics. Most recently, his research has focused on developing ways to help people and organizations explore, analyze, and make sense of large amounts of data, primarily through the use of visualization. John received the IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2012, in part for his work on the Jigsaw visual analytics system. He has been on the editorial boards of multiple journals including ACM ToCHI, IEEE TVCG, and Information Visualization.  He also has been Papers Co-Chair of the IEEE InfoVis and VAST Conferences, and General Chair of the IEEE VIS meeting in 2013.