Master's Final Projects: 2005 Judge Bios

Track 1: Collecting and Modeling Information

Hosted by Bob Glushko and Ray Larson

Emily Liggett, Interaction Designer
Emily Liggett is an Interaction Designer in the Usability and Interface Design Department at Oracle Corporation, where she focuses primarily on Business Intelligence applications. Emily's interest in Business Intelligence stemmed from her SIMS final Master's project, the GSO Executive Dashboard system developed alongside Vishal Badiani, Naidu Buyyala, and Holly Liu for Sun Microsystems. Emily received her BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2001 and her Master's Degree from SIMS in 2003.

Chick Markley, Software Consultant
Chick was the original programmer and became the chief software architect of the library automation company, Innovative Interfaces, Inc. Innovative Interfaces is the worlds largest supplier of computerized systems to libraries, with systems installed in over 39 countries. Prior to working for Innovative Interfaces, Chick worked on software for speech synthesis at National Semiconductor. He received a A.B.. in Physics from U.C. Berkeley in 1981. Currently he is consulting and pursuing disparate interests in the longevity problem, cellular biology, indigenous technology and sand volleyball.

Scott McMullan, Software Developer
Scott is a software industry entrepreneur and product manager and is currently Director of Developer Relations at JotSpot, an application wiki company. Before joining JotSpot, Scott was founder and CTO of Inovie Software, maker of a project collaboration product called TeamCenter that bootstrapped the company to 120+ customers. TeamCenter is offered today by UGS following the company's acquisition in 2001. Scott kicked off his working days as a software developer at Peregrine Systems and NCR, and has also lectured at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems and Center for Document Engineering. Scott received his MS and BA in Computer Science from UC San Diego (UCSD).

Track 2: Social Media

Hosted by Yale Braunstein and Marc Davis

Maggie Law, Prototype Developer
Maggie Law (MIMS 2003) designs and develops prototypes for a design services team working out of the Office of the CEO at SAP, an enterprise software provider. Previously, she was a senior interaction designer at PeopleSoft/Oracle, focused on supply chain management (SCM) applications. Maggie has contributed support to The CIO Collective, a non-profit network of more than 100 IT executives, since its inception in 2000, and served on its advisory committee reviewing nominees for the 2004 Amy B. Kahn "Women in IT: Excellence in Leadership" Award. Maggie has consulted in the field of knowledge management (a complex topic that informs her appreciation of the challenges of human-computer interactions), and is a strong advocate of user-centered design. Her final Master's project, the SF Muni Map, co-developed with Kaichi Sung, earned the 2003 Dr. James R. Chen Award.

Michael Smith, Research Scientist
Michael Smith is the Director of the Research at France Telecom R&D, San Francisco and director of the digital media partnership between France Telecom and the University of California, Berkeley. A noted researcher in video content analysis, Dr. Smith is the author of numerous papers and a book on the subject. His innovations include patented video analysis and summarization technology used by SonicFoundry, MediaSite and the OGIS Research Institute in Osaka. Before joining France Telecom, he founded AVA Media Systems and worked as a visiting professor in the Computer Vision Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Dr. Smith holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master's in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a Bachelor's degree from Tuskegee University and North Carolina A&T State University.

Karon Weber, Interaction Designer
For over twenty years, Karon Weber has been working with technology to either create or interact with moving images. Her roots are in documentary film and moving image archiving. Karon discovered the world of software design when she joined the research staff at Xerox PARC. There she investigated technology to support people using video in the workplace, and designed a series of tools to assist people logging, editing, and archiving moving images. She then lead design teams that created feature animation production software for DreamWorks SKG, Alias|Wavefront, and Pixar Animation Studios. At Pixar, Karon contributed to tools developed for the production of Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Recently, Karon joined Yahoo! as the principal designer of Search. Marrying her deep knowledge of digital production, archival work practices and interaction design, Karon is working to further the user experience of finding the world's knowledge on the web.

Track 3: Understanding People Using Technology

Hosted by Nancy Van House and Peter Lyman

Coye Cheshire, Social Scientist
Coye Cheshire is a social scientist who investigates issues of cooperation, trust-building, and social exchange in computer-mediated environments. As a sociological social psychologist, much of his current collaborative work attempts to identify cross-societal differences in trust formation. His other primary avenue of research deals with the use of social psychological incentives as a basis for cooperation in public goods problems on the Internet. He currently works for the Institute for Social Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, and as a research software consultant for the Stanford academic community. Coye received a BA in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997, followed by a Master's Degree (1998) and Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University in 2005.

Elizabeth Churchill, Research Scientist
Elizabeth Churchill is a research scientist working on the design and use of communication technologies. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has drawn on diverse areas to consider how to design effective communication situations--both face to face and technologically mediated. Influences on her work include psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, architecture and film studies. Applications developed and/or evaluated include cell phone interfaces, textual and 3d graphical environments, interactive digital posterboards and animated interface personas. Until recently she was the project lead of the Social Computing Group at FX Palo Laboratory, Fuji Xerox's research lab in Palo Alto. She currently works at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Her most recent work at PARC addresses sociotechnical configurations for effective software design and development in large organizations. Continuing her previous research threads, her focus in this work foregrounds informal and playful person-to-person relationships, communications and collaborations. (For more information see her nascent website elizabethchurchill.com.)

Nicolas Ducheneaut, Social Scientist
Nicolas Ducheneaut is a social scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include the sociology of online communities, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interaction. He has studied social interactions in a wide variety of environments ranging from real-time, massively multiplayer games to large bureaucracies. These studies led to the design of novel technologies to better support electronic communication in virtual environments. Nicolas's research is based on a combination of qualitative methods (ethnography) with quantitative data collection and analysis (such as data mining and social network analysis).