2023 MEETINGS

Bio

Rebecca A. Grier, Ph.D. is the lead for Customer-Driven: EMEA at Microsoft. In this role, Rebecca is leading a team in shifting engineering culture across Europe, Middle-East, & Africa (EMEA) from tech-focused to customer obsessed. Prior to joining Microsoft, she worked as a UXR for a number business sectors. It has been her privilege to influence the development of several disruptive technologies including streaming video, augmented reality, machine learning, & autonomous vehicles. Additional highlights from her career include 4 book chapters, contributing to the first re-write in 10 years of the U.S. Department of Defense’s UX design standard, establishing user testing best practices for the U.S. DoD’s Director of Operational Test & Evaluation, elected to the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Executive Council, and chairing an SAE task force that authored an information report on design considerations for people with disabilities and autonomous vehicles. Currently she lives in Dublin, Ireland with her husband and 6-year-old son.

Bio 

Carol Smith researches the complexities of human-machine teaming and leads UX research at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute to define human-centered and responsible AI/ML development practices. She and her collaborators create tools and resources to support the creation of AI systems that provide evidence of their capabilities and integrity, so that users (and those affected by the system) can determine potential risk, and calibrate their trust accordingly. Carol also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses for the CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute. She has been leading UX research to improve human experiences across industries for over 20 years and improving AI systems since 2015. Carol is the Information Architecture Conference (IAC) 2023 Co-Chair, volunteers for UXPA and IEEE, and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Carol earned her M.S. in HCI from DePaul University, and she lives with her family in Pittsburgh, PA.

Bio

In addition to all of his academic affiliations, Mike Rayo is the owner of Cogenisys, a small design research consultancy, His research and consulting work focuses on how the design of organizations and cognitive tools contribute to both adaptive and maladaptive system behaviors.  His work in cognitive agent design, alarm design and management, visual analytics, computerized decision support, and interpersonal communication has been funded by several government agencies. He has designed and evaluated software and medical devices for several companies. 

Dr. Rayo’s recent work has focused on developing and furthering design and evaluation strategies that make meaningful human/machine teaming architectures possible. He is currently working with the National Air and Space Administration (NASA), the Air Force Research Laboratory, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to better understand the positive and negative impacts of current highly-automated and autonomous technologies. The intent of this work is to create pragmatic design seeds and evaluation methods to facilitate advantageous human/machine teaming architectures that can perform in highly uncertain, high-complexity situations.

Bio

Colin M. Gray is an Associate Professor at Purdue University and is program lead for an undergraduate major and graduate concentration in UX Design. They hold appointments as Guest Professor at Beijing Normal University and Visiting Researcher at Newcastle University. Their research focuses on the ways in which the pedagogy and practice of designers informs the development of design ability, particularly in relation to dark patterns, ethics, and design knowledge. Colin’s work crosses multiple disciplines, including human-computer interaction, instructional design and technology, policy and law, design theory and education, and engineering and technology education.

Bio

Dr. Vanderheiden is the Founder and Director Emeritus of the Trace R&D Center and Professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland. He has been active in the field of technology and disability for over 50 years and was a pioneer in the field of Augmentative Communication (a term originating from his writings), assistive technology and computer access. Access features developed by Dr. Vanderheiden and the Trace Center team can be found in every computer and mobile device internationally (Windows, MacOS, iOS and Linux,…) as well as kiosks, ticket machines and more.  He has also been a long-time leader in the area of web accessibility, creating the first set of Web Accessibility guidelines in 1995 and serving as co-editor and co-chairing the WCAG 1.0 and 2.0 Working Group. At the 6th World Wide Web Conference, he was the third annual recipient of the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial World Wide Web Award. His most recent work has focused on development of Morphic and proposing a completely different way to approach accessibility for next-next generation ICT.  Dr. Vanderheiden is a past President and Fellow of RESNA, a Founding Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and Fellow in the Human Factors and Ergonomics society.