Information Science Advisory Team

Gary M. Olson

 is the Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, as well as Emeritus Professor at the University of Michigan. His research spans the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). His longstanding contributions to the area of collaborative technologies and their role in supporting long-distance work are detailed in the 2014 book Working Together Apart. He is also interested in cognition, problem-solving, reasoning and information visualization.

Olson is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychological Association. In 2003, he was elected to the CHI Academy and in 2006 he received the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award along with his wife, Dr. Judith Olson.

Gary Olson

Judith Olson

 is the Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences in the Informatics Department at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in the School of Social Ecology and the Merage School of Business. For over 20 years, she has researched teams whose members are not collocated. Her contributions to this field are detailed in the books Scientific Collaboration on the Internet (2008) and Working Together Apart (2014) More recently, she has extended her research to the area of collaborative writing, using visualizations of authorship to reveal patterns.

Olson is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and with her husband and colleague, Dr. Gary Olson, holds the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011, she was awarded the ACM-W Athena Lecture, the equivalent of the Woman of the Year in Computer Science. Google CEO Larry Page is quoted as crediting Olson’s undergraduate HCI class as the college course that most influenced him.

Judith Olson

Daniel Russell

 is a research scientist at Google. Sometimes called a “search anthropologist,” Russell’s work focuses on understanding how to help people use the tools of technology to amplify their intelligence, and ultimately make Google users happy, skilled and competent in their search practices. His research methods draw on ethnography and field work, lab studies, classical usability analysis, eyetracking experiments and large-scale logs analysis. Russell has published widely, and is a frequent interview subject in the media, helping to portray complex technology to the non-technical world.

Before joining Google, Russell held research and management positions at the User Experience Research Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the Advanced Technology Group at Apple and the User Sciences and Experience Research lab at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. He has also been an adjunct lecturer for the Engineering and Computer Science faculty of the University of Santa Clara and has taught special topics classes in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University.

Dan Russell

Lucy Suchman

 is a Professor in the Center for Science Studies and Department of Sociology at the University of Lancaster. She comes to academia after 20 years as a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Her research spans the fields of computer-supported cooperative work, science and technology studies, and feminist theory, and has focused on applying ethnographies of everyday practice to new technology design. Suchman’s 1987 book Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, along with its 2007 sequel Human-Machine Reconfigurations, have been highly influential to the field of human-computer interaction.

Suchman is a recipient of the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, the Outstanding Contribution to Research Award from the American Sociological Association, and the 4S John Desmond Bernal Prize for Distinguished Contribution to the Field. She also holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Culture and Society, Malmo University, Sweden, and serves as an Adjunct Professor at both the University of Technology, Sydney and the Information Technology University, Copenhagen. She is the Collaborating Editor for the Journal of Social Studies of Science and President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

Lucy Suchman

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