Research Area | Example | Origins | Significance/Impact |
---|---|---|---|
User interface toolkits | Sustained academic and industry research in tools to easily construct graphical user interfaces began in the late 1980s with research in composable widgets and constraint-based layout. These and other approaches (e.g., cartoon based animation) become integrated into open source and industry tools. | Late 1990s integration into the Windows operating system and Java/Swing created the now de facto standards for reusable and composable UI components and techniques. | |
User interface design tools | Sustained academic and industry research in sketching techniques to prototype direct manipulation interfaces gained momentum in the 1990s. | Tools to sketch interfaces and digitally prototype user experiences propel the use of tools and training in low-fidelity prototyping across a growing industry of UX designers. | |
Natural user interface (voice and gesture input) | Research began in the late 1960s and proceeded in bursts to recognize human speech (see AI, above) and physical gestures. First work on real-time, turn-by-turn navigation instructions at MIT (1988). | For voice interaction, a key breakthrough was Nuance partnering with Apple to develop Siri which started the smart assistant space (Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana followed). | |
Interaction on mobile devices (gestures, sensors, multitouch, 3D physics manipulation) | Multitouch research originated in the 1970 at Bell Labs, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, with many further contributions by the human-computer interaction (HCI) and user interface research communities to improve multitouch sensing and interaction techniques in the 2000s. Gesture recognition using wireless signals (University of Washington, 2013) | Smartphones and tablets combine a history in innovations from gestures for zooming, shaking for deletion, flipping for orientation, and detection of placement to the human body (e.g., holding to your ear). Wireless signal gesture recognition inspires radar-based motion tracking such as Google Soli. | |
Social media | Research in online communities and ambient awareness began in the 1990s with compelling successes (Media Space, Lambda Moo). Knowledge-based online communities gathered together with Wikipedia gathering steam. | Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook launched the social media industry in 2004 leading to Twitter and other companies. Twitter, Instagram, and others publicly credit the HCI community for its influence on their products. |
C
Presentations to the Study Committee
October 3, 2019, Washington, DC
Nicholas Bell, General Motors (ret.)
Randel E. Bryant, Carnegie Mellon University (remotely)
Byron Cook, Amazon Web Services
Gregory D. Hager, Johns Hopkins University
Matt Might, University of Alabama, Birmingham
Bart Selman, Cornell University
William W. Stead, Vanderbilt University Medical Center (remotely)
Alex Waibel, Carnegie Mellon University
December 11, 2019, Washington, DC
Ranveer Chandra, Microsoft
Chandra Krintz, University of California, Santa Barbara
Susan McCouch, Cornell University (remotely)
John Reid, John Deere