Dr. John Karat

An internationally recognized researcher in the field of human-computer interaction, over his career with IBM Development (1982-1987) and Research (1987-current) he has worked on the development of guidelines and principles for user interface design (including chairing committees for the development of ANSI and ISO standards). He has researched and advised on design collaboration; researched and developed speech-based systems (including the design of IBM?s large vocabulary desktop speech recognition system); researched and designed electronic medical record systems for Kaiser Colorado Region and Barnes Hospital in St Louis); and information search and unstructured knowledge management, entertainment applications, personalization. He is currently involved in research on privacy and information system policy management. At IBM Research, he has been a researcher, project leader, and manager. He is currently co-leader of the IBM Privacy Research Institute, researcher on a project to enable end-to-end management of privacy policies in natural language, and project leader for an open collaborative research (IBM OCR) initiative in privacy and security policy management with Carnegie Mellon and Purdue Universities. He has been awarded several patents (addressing speech recognition interfaces, and general help systems) and received a number of internal IBM awards for invention achievement and other contributions. Recent publications have been in the areas of speech user interfaces (best paper award at the 1999 IFIP INTERACT conference), personalization (including an edited book ?Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce? published by Kluwer), and development of a policy management workbench for privacy (Best paper nominee at ACM SIGCHI 2006). He has served ACM in a number of ways. He has been a member of the SIGCHI Extended Executive Committee since 1994, serving to expand its international base. From 1995 to 1998, he was a member of the Board of Directors for the ACM and IEEE/CS FOCUS organization (Federation on Computing in the United States) established to represent the US in the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). He was the U.S. representative to the IFIP Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (TC13 from 1991 to 1998), the ACM representative to this organization from 1998 through 2006, and Chair of TC13 from 2001 to 2004. In this period he helped organize the first international HCI conferences in China (2002), India (2004) and Brazil (2007). He contributed to the expansion of the HCI field to bring design into a more prominent role ? organizing an early workshop on the topic, and editing a book, ?Taking software design seriously?, published by Academic Press in 1991. He helped establish the successful ACM conference Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) in 1995 and chaired the conference in 2000. In 2008, he was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Contribution Award. He received an honorable mention for best privacy-related paper of the year from Microsoft at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies conference ? PET 2006). In 2008, he received the Lifetime Service Award from ACM SIGCHI, and was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2009. As a leading researcher in HCI, he has published over 100 articles in professional and technical journals, delivered keynote addresses at international conferences (most recently Asia Pacific CHI in Beijing in 2002 and India International Conference on HCI in Bangalore in 2004), taught courses, edited a book on software design techniques, and has authored numerous chapters in recently published books. Throughout his career he has balanced contributions to his employers with contribution to the professional community. He served as chair of national (ANSI 200) and international user interface standards development committees (ISO TC 159), on the editorial board for 3 Journals (International Journal of Cognitive Ergonomics, Universal Access in the Information Society, and Interactions) and as editor of one (Behaviour and Information Technology), has held executive positions in several professional societies, and is currently co-editor-in-chief of the Springer book series in human-computer-interaction.