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Top Research Labs in Human-Computer Interaction?
legLess writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Useit column lists his opinion of the best HCI research labs, from 'The Dawn of Time' (1945) 'til now. Xerox PARC made the list each decade, naturally. He says that future HCI research is in jeopardy, partly due to Universities backing away from 'real-world' research, and partly because 'HCI has rarely been the first priority of new research organizations, so by the time research managers recognize the need for it and build up a world-class HCI team, it's often too late.' Is he right about the best labs? Is he right about his other conclusions?"
Boston College, though it lacks a graduate program in CS, is still doing some really interesting work in HCI. The CameraMouse and EagleEyes use computer vision and muscle eletric potential, respectively to control the mouse cursor. While this is mainly a user-assistive technology, they're continuing to develop the technology and at some point one of these could move into the mainstream of HCI.
You're not allowed to rent here anymore!
CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute (http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/ )is worth a look - B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees are offered.
Ken Perlin was one a guest lecturer at my HCI class at Stanford. This guy has so many good ideas, check out his web page:
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/
Alot of his work is Java/Web based and so its really easy to look at and get a feel for how it would work
UC Irvine's HCI group is called CORPS:
Computers, ORganizations, Policy and Society
its at:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~corps/
As the name suggests, it is more of social sciences group, than a computer science group (as stated by the author above).
Relevant quote:
An easier road to market acceptance probably lies in the evolution of the mouse itself. Mouse Systems (Fremont, CA) first released a commercial mouse with an embedded roller for scrolling. The ProAgio included a rolling "barrel" for scrolling. However, wide market acceptance did not occur until Microsoft (Redmond, WA) introduced the IntelliMouse in 1996. In 1996, researchers at the IBM Almaden Research Center (San Jose, CA) explored various implementations of scrolling and pointing. In particular, they prototyped a mouse with an isometric, miniature joystick for 2D scrolling, located between the two mouse buttons, dubbed the JoyMouse (or JSMouse, for the combination of the joystick and mouse).
The article is a pretty good read - especially since one of the researchers taught at the university I go to until recently.
So it looks like Microsoft did copy the idea but deserves some credit in making it popular. Maybe they just put their name on Mouse Systems design, maybe they made it better. All I know is my Logitech Optical Wireless wheel hadn't existed 6 years and I can't wait to see what we're using in 2010.
Some of the best HCI work has been done in areas like Aircraft control.
I don't think anyone would disagree that the Euro fighter development team hasn't put a lot of research into HCI.
Car manufacturers are also doing a lot of good HCI work.
Nokia managed to develop a efficient interface with a low learning curve, this is a fairly major achievement.
I think things like touchtone phones, and remote control devices should have made the list.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Check out their GVU pages (some profs hold appointments in both psych and CS)
GaTechGVU
That's the problem. Today's computer user is not a highly technically literate professional the way they were a decade or two ago. The average Joe now has a PC, Mac or whatever sitting on his desk. By your own admission, interfaces have not developed to support this new class of user in performing his tasks.
Added to which, I think the state of interfaces at present is pretty sucky even for the expert user. For a long time, the productivity in most offices was known to drop significantly when "old fashioned" tools went out in favour of modern computers. Has anyone ever seen anything to suggest that this is not still the case?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Degrees in HCI vary quite widely. Some come from Psychology, Industrial Engineering, Computer Science or about any other degree since Human Factors and HCI is really a combination of disciplines.
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A couple good places to start would be the ACM SIGCHI http://www.acm.org/sigchi/ and the Human Factors and Egronomics Society http://www.hfes.org/
If you are looking for a crash course, both CMU and the University of Michigan put on yearly 1 or 2 week courses.
Info about CMU's Course is at http://www.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/
and info about U of M's course is at
http://www.umich.edu/~driving/shortcourse/ind
Hope this helps.
How rigorous. Usability pundit picks pet criteria and decides that these are the top HCI labs. Those interested in the real state of the field instead of opinion might take a look at the more rigorous listings available:
Top Research Labs by Topic, 1978 and 1997
Where Researchers Want to Work
BusinessWeek's Top 20 US Research Labs
Google Cache of 1999 US News ranking of User Interaction Grad Schools
MIT Technology Review Corporate R&D Scorecard (Requires subscription)
HCI Academic Article Imapct Rankings
I think that few of the people on avant garde of HCI research take Jacob Neilsen very seriously. He is a usability specialist, not a interface researcher.
The University of Maryland's Flagship branch in College Park has a Human-Computer Interaction Lab that focuses in part on making NEW technologies for kids. This includes computer software, and cool interactive toys (think Teddy from A.I.). They have a team of children who help with the design process, and are overall doing all kinds of really neat things. I think they should have at least received an honorable mention, if only for including kids in the research process, and making _new_ technologies.
The kid-oriented website is here:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/
The HCIL exists under the umbrella of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, their grown-up page is here:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/
Like several other responses, I thought the list was entirely too random, and didn't include nearly enough explanation of who got picked and why.
well, other people have already noted that he's too focused on human-workstation/server interaction (rather than broader human-computer interaction which includes the range of computers people don't think about as computers, like microwaves and air traffic control systems). but lets look at it within that frame.
easy stuff first: today. i think it's laughable that he'd include Microsoft rather than Apple, particularly given the criteria he states. Microsoft is very much doing evolutionary progressions on there Win95 UI on the desktop, and very unimpressive stuff in the WebTV realm. Apple, on the other hand, took a much more dramatic jump in the Aqua development. further, Apple does a much more thurough and complete job of UI definitions, work that MS has largely just ignored, leaving up to the app designer.
it's also quite interesting that Bell Labs didn't make it in the '80s. it was 1981 when rob pike wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix, and that decade when Bell Labs created the jerq, blit, and DMD (or MDM?) series of multi-tasking graphical terminals. pioneering work that led directly to much of what came after, particularly much of the Xerox PARC and Bellcore work following it.
his "fall of the good" observation is distressing, and i agree with it, but not his reasoning. Xerox and Bell Labs certainly hadn't "peaked" in any real sense by their respective apearances in the list (okay, Xerox maybe by its third).
the article is less useful without notes on why a give place made the list. i certainly hope X wasn't a positive contributing factor for MIT, for example! to my knowledge, MIT did more interesting things in the '90s. and i confess total ignorance as to what PARC's done since 2000. i'd really like to, but he doesn't say.
i think the author's assertions about HCI research in universities are bogus. while research universities may have avoided "real-world" research in the past, today that's nearly reversed. many universities are indistinguishable from corporate R&D arms. in particular, given CS departments' increasing trend towards vo-tech training over broad educational foundations, this becomes more and more true. but this just changes the cause, not the problem. now universities arn't likely to be involved in pineering HCI research because they're doing much smaller, more incremental improvement sort of stuff.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Then again, you don't necessarily need a degree in HCI, CS, or psych at all. For example, if you're coming from the programming side (as I suspect many here on /. are :) ), you could get a job building user interfaces, which is mostly programming with some HCI component. Then you could migrate pretty smoothly to doing higher-level, design type work, which would be more HCIish and less CSish.
As far as books, here are a few I like:
- The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman.
- Programming As If People Mattered, by Nathaniel Borenstein.
Dan Olsen and Ben Shneiderman have written good HCI/UI (user interface) books, too.If you want to see what the cutting edge of HCI is, check out proceedings and journals, such as the ACM conference on HCI (Human Factors in Computing Systems, a.k.a. SIGCHI) or the ACM Symposium on User Interfaces Software and Technology (UIST).