SIGCHI Social Impact Award

Abstract

SIGCHI Social Impact Award is given to individuals who promote the application of human-computer interaction research to pressing social needs. The recipient will have past or current work within the HCI profession that demonstrates social benefit. Example criteria include: 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. Reasonably active participant in the ACM SIGCHI community, although outstanding individuals active in other professional communities are considered. Crisis informatics addresses socio-technical concerns in large-scale emergency response. Additionally it expands consideration to include not only official responders (who tend to be the focus in policy and technology-focused matters), but also members of the public. It therefore views emergency response as a much broader socio-technical system where information is disseminated within and between official and public channels and entities. Crisis informatics wrestles with methodological concerns as it strives to develop new theory and support informed development of ICT and policy. Palen will describe the range of work her team has engaged in at CU-Boulder since 2006, and highlight the different branches of crisis informatics research through discussion of the multidisciplinary research they have conducted here. BIO:Leysia Palen is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a faculty fellow with the ATLAS Institute and the Institute of Cognitive Science. She is also a Full Adjunct Professor at the University of Agder in Norway. Leysia Palen is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego with a BS in Cognitive Science, and of the University of California, Irvine with an MS and PhD in Information and Computer Science. Prof. Palen is a leader in the area of crisis informatics, an area she forged with her graduate students and colleagues at CU-Boulder. She brings her training in human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work and social computing to bear on understanding and advancing socio-technical issues of societal import. Prof. Palen is the author of over 70 articles and a co-edited book in the areas of human computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, mobility, and crisis informatics. She was awarded an NSF CAREER in 2006. She is an Associate Editor for the Human Computer Interaction Journal (Taylor and Francis) and for the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Journal (Springer).