There at the Beginning: The Olsons Tell the Story of HCI and CSCW from Their Own Experiences
Channel: UCIBrenICS
Date: 2019-04-29

The Informatics Seminar Series is proud to present Judy and Gary Olson, Bren Professors of Information and Computer Sciences Emerita/Emeritus, Department of Informatics. 

Recorded on April 26, 2019. 

Title: "There at the Beginning: The Olsons Tell the Story of HCI and CSCW from Their Own Experiences"

Abstract: 
In this talk, we will review our own personal histories, which happen to coincide with the emergence of HCI and CSCW as fields of inquiry. While we had particular disciplinary training in Cognitive Psychology and have used that training repeatedly in our own research, we have also been influenced by many of the other disciplinary traditions in our field. For instance, a particularly significant moment in our history was the 1989-90 year we spent at Rank Xerox EuroPARC, where we ended up spending some significant time with people like Lucy Suchman, Paul Dourish, and Victoria Bellotti. We have also built  and evaluated software, like a shared editor, which preceded commercial developments, like Google Docs, by several decades. 

We've also been involved in the activities of our disciplines, having served as program and conference chairs on a number of occasions. We were centrally involved in the creation of the School of Information at Michigan, which is an institutional player in the kind of research and teaching we have been involved in. The Department of Informatics in particular, and UCI in general, also fit in this same spirit. One thing we will stress in our presentation for attending graduate students is that while where you begin your career is not irrelevant to how it will proceed, going forward with an open mind about ideas and methods can have many rewarding surprises. We will of course tie our stories into what was happening in the broader fields, which of course also played a role in how our own careers unfolded.

Bio: 
Judy and Gary Olson are Bren Professors of Information and Computer Sciences Emerita/Emeritus in the Department of Informatics at the University of California Irvine.  For over 30 years they have researched teams whose members are not collocated, summaries of the findings of which can be found in their most cited paper, “Distance Matters,” (Olson & Olson, 2000) and their latest book, Working Together Apart (Olson & Olson, 2014). 
Both Gary and Judy are Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and together hold the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI).

Judy Olson was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.  In 2011, she was awarded the ACM-W Athena Lecture, the equivalent of Woman of the Year in Computer Science.  In 2015, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, was quoted in the book Innovations saying that the course that influenced him the most when he was an undergraduate was a course Judy taught on human-computer interaction.

Gary Olson received the Lifetime Service Award from SIGCHI, and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association.  For 6 years he was the Treasurer of SIGCHI, and chaired the 2004 CSCW conference in Chicago, the 2006 CHI, conference in Montreal, and the 2015 iConference here in Newport Beach.