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iSchool garners three Best Paper Awards at CHI 2008

Best Paper Nominees and Awards have been announced for the CHI 2008 conference, to be held April 5-10 in Florence, Italy. Best paper nominees represent the top 5 percent of 714 full papers submitted. Best paper winners represent the top 1 percent, or 7 papers from all 714 submissions. Three papers by University of Washington authors were among the one percent selected as Best Papers. The iSchool's Jacob O. Wobbrock was honored with two Best Paper Awards.

CHI is the leading international conference for Human-Computer Interaction, a rapidly-growing field that studies and facilitates how people interact with computers. This year's conference will include 2000 attendees from 38 countries. CHI 2008 will focus on the balance between art and science, design and research, practical motivation and the process that leads the way to innovative excellence. The conference is sponsored by the Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), an active community within the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Dr. Wobbrock and the other two UW first authors who won Best Paper Awards were all part of the University of Washington DUB group (design:use:build), an alliance of faculty and students exploring Human-Computer Interaction and Design. UW Best Paper Awards went to:

Adar, E., Teevan, J. and Dumais, S. "Large scale analysis of Web revisitation patterns"

Wobbrock, J.O., Cutrell, E., Harada, S. and MacKenzie, I.S. (2008) "An error model for pointing based on Fitts' law"

Gajos, K.Z., Wobbrock, J.O. and Weld, D.S. (2008) "Improving the performance of motor-impaired users with automatically-generated, ability-based interfaces"

For Wobbrock, a co-author of the paper by Gajos, this is his third CHI Best Paper Award in the last three years, having won a Best Paper Award at the CHI 2006 conference as well. An iSchool author was on each of the three UW papers: Susan Dumais, co-author of "Large scale analysis of Web revisitation patterns," is an Affiliate Professor at the iSchool in addition to her appointment at Microsoft Research. The Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the College of Engineering also had an author on all three papers.

Wobbrock's other co-authors include Professor Daniel S. Weld from Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), Susumu Harada, a Ph.D. student in CSE, Edward Cutrell from Microsoft Research, and I. Scott MacKenzie from York University in Toronto, Canada.

"The collaborations within the DUB group at the University of Washington and with our industrial colleagues at Microsoft Research and Intel Research increase the quality, reach, and depth of DUB members' research," says Wobbrock. "The Seattle area is already one of the top places in the world to pursue work in Human-Computer Interaction, and it is only getting stronger. DUB is quickly becoming much more than the sum of its constituent parts."