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Emerson is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University and Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests include the intersection between human-computer interaction and software engineering. In 2010, completed a post-doc with Gail Murphy at the University of British Columbia. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Portland State University in 2009 under Andrew P. Black. He holds a B.S. from the Evergreen State College.

Amy J. Ko is a Professor at the University of Washington Information School and an Adjunct Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. She directs the Code & Cognition Lab, where she studies human aspects of programming. Her earliest work included techniques for automatically answering questions about program behavior to support debugging, program understanding, and reuse.

My background includes a BS in Mathematics, a MS in Computer Science, a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, and experience teaching in an urban high school. This multi-disciplinary preparation has been critical to my research goal of creating educational technologies that dramatically increase student achievement. Toward this goal, I create “cognitive models”, computer simulations of student thinking and learning, that are used to guide the design of educational materials, practices and technologies.

Dr. Greg Zacharias, President and Senior Principal Scientist at Charles River Analytics, guides research in cognitive systems engineering and computational intelligence to support the development of human behavior agents for a broad range of systems applications, as well as the design, implementation, and evaluation of agent-based decision support systems. Before founding Charles River, Dr. Zacharias was a Senior Scientist at BBN Technologies, a Research Engineer at C.S. Draper Labs, and an Air Force attaché for the Space Shuttle program at NASA Johnson Space Center. Dr.

Sara Kiesler is Hillman Professor of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. She studies communication, cognitive, and social aspects of computer-mediated environments and human computer interaction. Her current research focuses on collaboration in teams, online communities, and human-robot interaction.

Sara Kiesler is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the HCII at Carnegie Mellon University. Her previous work on communication in computer-mediated contexts and on people’s interactions with human-like computer agents kindled her interest in social robots; this interest was greatly encouraged by the engineering and design work on interactive robots at CMU.

Avi Parush completed his PhD in Cognitive Psychology and graduated in 1984 from McGill University, Canada. From then on he was working as a human factors engineer and user interface designer in a variety of domains ranging from the bridge of an icebreaker and the cockpit of a jet fighter to medical and telecomm systems, to mobile devices and speech-based interfaces. Avi is the co-founder of LaHIT, one of Israel’s leading usability consulting firms, and founded and chairs the Israeli local SIGCHI.

David Parsons is the Director of the Human Centered Design Center of Excellence at Emerson Process Management. His new charter is to lead Emerson’s push into improved human interface design quality and consistency for hardware and software products. His office is in Pittsburgh, PA at the Carnegie Mellon University Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where he coordinates his activities with the Emerson Software Excellent Center located in Hamburg Hall and reaches out to dispersed company management and development partners worldwide.

Daniel Szuc is Principal Usability Consultant at Apogee, a usability consulting Services Company based in Hong Kong (where he has lived for the last 10 years) and Vice President of the Usability Professionals Association. Dan previously worked on a Usability Team for Telstra Australia and has lectured about UX & Design in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, the USA, New Zealand and Japan. He co-wrote a “Usability Kit” with Gerry Gaffney which is an implementation guide providing best practices and guidelines for usability teams.

Dr. Stevie Chancellor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Her research combines approaches from HCI and ML to build and critically evaluate human-centered systems, focusing on high-risk health behaviors in online communities.

Joel Brandt is a Research Scientist at Adobe Systems, Inc. Through a mixture of empirical work and systems building, he studies the task of programming. His recent work explores the role that information resources play during software development. Tools built as part of this research are now used by thousands of programmers on a daily basis. Joel completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2010, advised by Scott Klemmer. He received a BS with majors in Computer Science and Mathematics and an MS in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis.