SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award: Wendy Mackay

Part of the 2024 ACM SIGCHI Awards Talks series, Wendy Mackay shares her story in accepting a SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.

• Title: WWW — Wendy’s Words of Wisdom

• Time: Tuesday, July 9, 4pm EDT (in your time zone)

• Location: MIT (Hewlett Room 32-G882)

• Streaming link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96939675190

Abstract: The original title for the SIGCHI Lifetime research award was: “The Design of Interactive Things: From Theory to Design and Back”. However, after I joked that I should just entitle it “WWW” for “Wendy’s Words of Wisdom”, I was surprised to see the latter title appear in the CHI '24 program. Yet when I considered how to structure this talk — Just how do you compress 40 years of research into 40 minutes? — I realized that I can trace both my history and SIGCHI’s through a series of insights that each launched a new research theme.This talk offers a whirlwind tour of my research interests, including interactive video, tangible computing, multi-disciplinary design, collaborative systems, human-computer partnerships, and generative theories of interaction. Of course, such research is highly collaborative and I appreciate this opportunity to show off the contributions of the many students, colleagues, friends and mentors who have influenced my thinking and collaborated on this work.

Bio: Professor Wendy Mackay is a Research Director, Classe Exceptionnelle, at Inria, France's national research laboratory for Computer Science and a full Professor at the Université Paris-Saclay, where she also served as Vice President of Research for the Computer Science Department. She runs the joint ExSitu research lab in Human-Computer Interaction with five faculty members plus 20 Ph.D. students, post-doctoral fellows and research engineers. She received her Ph.D. from MIT and managed research groups at Digital Equipment and Xerox EuroPARC, where she pioneered research in customizable software, interactive video and mixed reality systems. In addition to receiving the ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Research award, she was the 2021-2022 Annual Chair for Computer Science for the Collège de France, and is a Doctor Honoris Causa, Aarhus University, an ACM Fellow and a member of the ACM CHI Academy. She received a six-year European Research Council Advanced Grant for her research on human-computer partnerships, where she introduced the theory of reciprocal co-adaptation. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed research articles in the area of Human-Computer Interaction. Her work combines theoretical, empirical and design contributions with a current focus on re-envisioning the interaction between human users and intelligent systems. She has introduced numerous multi-disciplinary design and evaluation methods, and is currently exploring how to design systems where users and intelligent agents share agency, both interactively and over long time periods, to avoid deskilling and instead increase human capabilities. Current application areas range from work with creative professionals (choreographers, designers, and musicians) to safety critical settings (smart cockpits, hospitals and emergency control rooms).