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Professor Marilyn Tremaine of Rutgers University has been a major contributor to the field of Computer-Human Interaction for almost as long as this field has existed. Beginning with her first publication in this area in 1979, she has nearly 80 refereed publications to her credit on topics that include computer-supported collaboration, effective data-base usage, interface formalization and design, assistive systems for the impaired and for rehabilitation, quantitative analysis of interaction methods, real-time indexing for video conferencing, tactile and audio modes of interaction, multi-modal interaction, comprehension of visualizations, distance communication and team structure issues relating to global software development, and time management tools.

In the course of her research she has advised and successfully graduated 14 PhD and over 20 MS students. Professor Tremaine obtained her MS in 1978 and her PhD in 1982 from the University of Southern California. She has been on the faculty of the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Systems from 1979 through 1986, the University of Toronto as Associate Professor of Computer Science from 1988 through 1997, Drexel University as Professor of Computer and Information Systems from 1997 through 2001, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology as Professor and Chair of information Systems from 2001 through 2005, where she is now Professor Emerita. During these last two appointments, she has been Research Professor in the Center for Advanced Information Processing with Rutgers University from 1997 to the present. She has also held research positions with EDS, Carnegie-Mellon University, Xerox PARC, and Lawrence Berkeley Labs.

Professor Tremaine has been a trail blazer in the field of HCI and a pioneer in applying digital media to a variety of problems. She has been a mentor to multiple generations of students, and a leader in establishing HCI as a legitimate field of research, both within computer science and on its own as a highly multidisciplinary activity that goes well beyond traditional boundaries. She has made seminal contributions via both research and professional leadership to the emerging field of computer-supported cooperative work; carried out significant research into telepresence and video collaboration environments, and helped educate the human-computer interaction community on survey and interview methods.

During her distinguished career she established the HCI program at the University of Michigan, helped build the field of HCI at the University of Toronto and indirectly across Canada, developed one of the pioneering computer-supported meeting facilities for EDS, and headed the CAVECAT, Jabber and Nonspeach projects at the University of Toronto, for video desktop conferencing, real-time indexing of meetings, and investigating audio interface design, respectively. At Rutgers and the New Jersey Institute of Technology she has focussed on multi-modal interfaces, visualization, assistive systems and teamwork at a distance in software development. She is Vice President of Usability New Jersey. As one of the original founders of ACM SIGCHI in 1982 and the annual CHI conferences, and as SIGCHI Chair during 1999-2002, she has a long record of support and encouragement for human-computer interaction. This includes numerous important positions over the years in SIGCHI and other organizations, notably as Vice-Chair of Communications, Chair of the Advisory Council, Vice-Chair of Finance and Chair of the SIG SIGCHI Education, member of the SIGCHI Curriculum Development Committee, member of the SIGCHI Executive Committee Advisory Board, Chair of the Graphics Interface Technical Program, Chair of conferences on human factors, on computer supported cooperative work, on computer assistance and usability. She serves regularly on paper selection committees and on several editorial boards for journals.

Professor Booth is receiving the CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award for his long-term contributions to the development of computer graphics, visualisation, and human-computer interaction in Canada. Booth has championed interdisciplinary activities between computer graphics and other areas of research, and he has encouraged cooperation, collegiality and communication among computer graphics researchers and students across Canada. Professor Booth has provided over three decades of thoughtful, dedicated, selfless leadership and service to the HCI and computer graphics community. This is particularly evident in his inspired leadership role in institutions and organizations that have played an instrumental role in shaping the landscape of Canadian computer graphics and HCI research. His scholarly activity demonstrates an exceptional committment to interdisciplinary research. Professor Booth’s research interests are broad. He is one of the few people who has published in at least three different fields, namely theory, graphics, and HCI.

Kellogg Booth holds a professorship at the University of British Columbia, to which he came after serving on the faculty of the University of Waterloo from 1977 through 1990. Along with John Beatty, he was responsible for establishing one of Canada’s preeminent Computer Graphics Laboratories at the University of Waterloo, as well as the Department of Computer Science’s computer graphics curriculum. At the University of British Columbia he helped establish the Imager Laboratory for Graphics, Visualization and HCI at UBC with Alain Fournier and others, a group which has since grown to encompass 10+ faculty. He served from 1990 through 2002 as the founding director of MAGIC, the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre, beginning his role as a pioneer in HCI in Canada, a stalwart promotor of interdisciplinary research, and a mentor to many large-scale HCI projects spanning disciplines and universities. Professor Booth also participated in the successful multi-million dollar CFI proposal to build the new lab space for ICICS, the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems. This is UBC’s premier interdisciplinary research institute in computing, fostering a human-centred approach to emerging information technologies. More recently, from 2004 until 2008, Professor Booth has been the Associate Director, and Acting Director in the first half of 2006, of NECTAR, the Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research, a Canadian-wide NSERC strategic research network focused on collaboration technologies.

Professor Booth co-chaired the 1983 SIGGRAPH Conference. He has served as the SIGGRAPH Chair and has been involved in this organization since the late 1970’s. Moreover, Professor Booth has almost single-handedly been the key organizational force behind the Graphics Interface conferences in recent years. This has played a large role in promoting the international image for Canada in the areas of HCI and computer graphics. Since 2002, he has served as president of the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, the umbrella organization for the annual Graphics Interface conference. He was local arrangements co-chair for the CHCCS conference in 1981, general co-chair of AI/GI/VI in 1992, and general chair of AI/GI/CRV in 2005.

Professor Booth received a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1968 and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and 1975, respectively. During his studies, and before entering Canada to take his position at Waterloo, Professor Booth was a staff member at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1968 to 1976, where he had some of his early exposure to computer graphics.

Professor Booth’s Ph.D. work and early research were in the theoretical areas of computational complexity and graph theory, but at Waterloo he began to focus his interests on graphics rendering and the hardware and software needed for their support. To this gradually became added issues of human-computer interaction and the visual aspects of human interfaces. He has completed over 90 refereed publications, has written over 40 other technical works, and edited two tutorial books of collected articles. He has mentored 16 Ph.D. candidates to the completion of their degrees and supervised over 50 successful Master’s students.

This outline and these numbers do not do justice to the multidisciplinary nature of Professor Booth’s research. A notable project undertaken during the 1980’s with Rhonda Ryman and John Beatty developed an intelligent editor for Benesh Movement Notation, widely used by choreologists even today and maintained by the Royal Academy of Dance. During the 1980’s as well, Professor Booth published a number of early studies on the efficacy of using multitasking and multiprocess hardware and software support for interactive programs, notably the Benesh editor and paint programs. He worked on the leading edge of exploring what hardware would most effectively support graphics rendering, and he helped pioneer the application of controlled experimental design and experimental test-beds from psychology to the study of visual and behavioral aspects of human-computer interaction. These tools were used to investigate such issues as menu layout and placement, the value of anti-aliasing in displays, and comparative approaches to 3D design manipulation via 2D displays. During the 1990’s his interests broadened to include studies in collaborative activities on computers. Publications from this time include topics in virtual and augmented reality, group collaboration at a distance, and device and display issues for cooperative interaction.

Professor Booth’s research continues in the 2000’s along these paths. He is one of the leaders in the testing, assessing, and evaluation of human-computer interaction techniques. Together with his students, he has tackled a broad range of topics in HCI, collaborative technologies, and related areas. Examples of his more recent research include:

• designing affect into physical user interfaces
• input control in large-display and multi-display environments
• privacy-ware for multi-display environments
• structured annotations to support collaborative writing
• tools to support project memory in software development
• personalized user interfaces for heavily-featured software applications
• shared input control for children in an educational setting

Altogether, his work has significantly helped to promote the international image of Canada as a hotbed of HCI. It is also fair to say that the presence of both the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia in Canadian computer graphics is owed significantly to Professor Booth’s efforts and presence at these institutions. More broadly, Professor Booth has been the natural person to turn to for many in the community. Whenever an astute, considered opinion is required with regard to establishing and funding large-scale research projects, he has long been a source of wisdom and good judgement.

Dr. Saul Greenberg is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. A computer scientist by training, the work that he and his students are engaged in typifies the cross-disciplinary aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). He is receiving the CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award for his long-term contributions to the field of HCI through the development of software toolkits for distributed systems, groupware and hardware-based physical user interfaces, and the use of social theories and observations in the design and evaluation of groupware. These contributions have made protoyping groupware and physical interfaces accessible to a wide community of practitioners and have laid a sound theoretical foundation for evaluating the effectiveness of those tools.

Dr. Greenberg received a BSc in microbiology and immunology in 1976 and a Diploma in Education in 1978, both from McGill University, and an MSc in computer science in 1984 and a PhD in 1989 from the University of Calgary. His dissertation was on Tool use, reuse and organization in command-driven interfaces. Saul has written over 100 journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and invited publications, in addition to numerous short papers and posters at conferences, video publications, and other scholarly presentations. He has supervised over two dozen graduate students, many of whom have worked closely with researchers in industry during their degree programs. Before returning to university he worked as a high school teacher, which perhaps explains his reputation as an excellent instructor.

Toolkits developed by Dr. Greenberg and his colleagues include Groupkit, Collabrary, SDGToolkit, and Phidgets. Major systems based on social theories and observations include GroupSketch, GroupDraw, TeamRooms, Notification Collage and Community Bar, as well as numerous other experimental prototypes. These have built upon his empirical investigations of awareness, casual interaction and privacy, and the heuristic evaluation of groupware.

Saul has a strong commitment to making his tools, systems, and educational material readily available to other HCI researchers and educators. His HCI lecture notes were one of the first to be available on-line, and are heavily downloaded and used. The collection of papers he edited on computer supported cooperative work and groupware (1993) and the collection he co-edited on human-computer interaction (1995) helped to establish both of these areas as distinct fields within computer science by providing overviews of seminal papers and commentaries that placed those papers into a theoretical framework. He regularly participates on program committees for major international conferences and has served on the ACM SIGCHI Publications Board. He is currently a member of the editorial boards for the International Journal of Human Computer Studies and the Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Dr. Greenberg holds the iCORE/Smart Technologies Industrial Chair in Interactive Technologies and he was awarded a University Professorship at the University of Calgary in recognition of his research excellence. He is a theme leader and a founding member of the executive committee for the Network for Effective Collaboration Technology through Advanced Research (NECTAR), a research network funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. His achievements as both an HCI researcher and as an educator have been truly outstanding. He was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy in 2005.

An avid back-country skiier and mountain climber, he lives in Canmore, Alberta, with his wife and children.

Ronald Baecker has played a pioneering role in almost every aspect of the community that comprises the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society. He is internationally recognized for his insights on the importance of interactivity and careful attention to user-centred design. Often he has seen emerging issues well ahead of others and provided leadership by initiating research activity in new areas that have set the agenda for those who followed. The many accomplishments for which he is receiving the CHCCS Achievement Award include: establishing with his colleagues at the University of Toronto the Dynamic Graphics Project as the first (and many would say the foremost) Canadian university research group focused on computer graphics and human-computer interaction; producing in 1981 one of the first and perhaps the most famous animated algorithm visualizations, the computer-generated film Sorting Out Sorting; co-chairing and naming Graphics Interface ’82, the event that transformed the former CMCCS conference to an annual conference with a wider constituency than just interactive computer graphics; co-founding in 1989 the CAVECAT research project and in 1992 the Ontario Telepresence Project, which were testbeds for many ideas that are now common practice in computer-supported cooperative work; and organizing the Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research, a new Canadian research network.

The opportunities created by these initiatives, and Dr. Baecker’s vision of interactive technology as a key enabler, have been instrumental in establishing and maintaining Canada’s position as a world leader in the fields of computer graphics, visualization, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work. These and similar initiatives spanning more than four decades have provided inspiration for students, colleagues, and the international research community.

Dr. Baecker is Bell University Laboratories Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, Professor of Computer Science, and founder and Chief Scientist of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto. He holds cross appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Faculty of Management. He received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from M.I.T. His Ph.D. topic led to the first comprehensive conceptual framework for computer animation and the first significant interactive computer animation system. Dr. Baecker joined the University of Toronto in 1972 after working at the National Institutes for Health in the United States.

A partial list of his many research contributions includes the Genesys picture-driven animation system described in his doctoral dissertation (1969), the Shazam interactive animation system developed with researchers at Xerox PARC, the Newswhole interactive newspaper layout system designed with David Tilbrook (1976), a multi-window interactive graphical debugger developed with Sheila Crossey (1977), the See source code visualization project with Aaron Marcus (1983), the VANNA video annotation tools with Beverly Harrison (1992), research on collaborative writing with Ilona Posner and Alex Mitchell in the early 90s, the MAD movie authoring system for children with Alan Rosenthal, Eric Smith, and Ilona Posner in the mid-90s, and the ePresence open source interactive webcasting and archiving system with Peter Wolf, Gale Moore, and Kelly Rankin in the beginning years of this millenium.

Baecker is an active researcher, lecturer, and consultant on human-computer interaction and user interface design, user support, software visualization, multimedia, computer-supported cooperative work and learning, the Internet, entrepreneurship and strategic planning in the software industry, and the role of information technology in business. He has published over 100 papers and articles on topics in these areas, and is the author or co-author of two published videotapes and four books including three edited collections of readings in human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. He is co-holder of two patents and one patent pending. Baecker was the founder, CEO, and Chairman of HCR Corporation, a Toronto-based UNIX contract R&D and technology development and marketing firm, sold in 1990 to the Santa Cruz Operation. He was also the founder of Expresto Software Corp, a firm specializing in structured visual communication explaining software and other complex technology. Expresto Software was sold in 2002 to Caseware International. He has been recognized by ACM SIGGRAPH as a “Graphics Pioneer” for his contributions to interactive computer graphics and he has been inducted into the ACM ACM SIGCHI Academy for his contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.

Photograph by Louis Fabian Bachrach.

Nestor Burtnyk joined the Radio and Electrical Engineering Division of the National Research Council (NRC) in 1950 following graduation from University of Manitoba with a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering. His initial work involved the development of high-frequency radio direction-finding equipment and synthetic wide aperture antennas and related studies in ionospheric propagation.

In the late 1960’s, Mr. Burtnyk started work in 3D computer graphics as part of a team project on man-machine interaction. The main area of application was computer animation, with emphasis on developing a facility where a professional animator could communicate with the system to produce his creative work without any knowledge of computer programming. In 1970 he developed the “key-frame animation” technique and encouraged its use by animators from the National Film Board (NFB), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation to produce serious footage. The film “Hunger”, produced in collaboration with the NFB, won a prize at Cannes in 1973 and an Academy Award nomination in 1974. During those early 1970s, Mr. Burtnyk was one of the original members who participated in the formation and organization of a series of Canadian Man-Machine Communications Conferences, the precursor to the Graphics Interface Conferences.

In 1975 Mr. Burtnyk became Head of the Computer Graphics Section, continuing his involvement in computer graphics technology. In 1980 he became Manager of a newly formed Computer Technology Research Program where he initiated activities in intelligent robotics. He assumed the position of Head of the Computing Technology Section in 1982 which emphasized sensory processing and real-time computing for robotics. During the period 1983–1991, Mr. Burtnyk was the Canadian representative for the International Cooperative Programme on Advanced Robotics (IARP).

In 1990 Mr. Burtnyk returned to full-time research in the new Autonomous Systems Lab of the newly formed Institute for Information Technology. This recent work involved techniques for supervisory control of telerobots based on range sensing and 3D vision. Mr. Burtnyk retired from active research at NRC in 1995.

Postscript: In 1997 Burtnyk and former colleague Marceli Wein received an Academy Award (Oscar) for technical achievement for “pioneering work in the development of software techniques for computer assisted key framing for character animation.”

The recipient of this year’s CHCCS Achievement Award is Bill Buxton. We wish to recognize and acknowledge the significant contribution over the many years that Bill has made to the field of human-computer interaction. Bill has demonstrated that he is a leader, a creative researcher and an excellent communicator who inspires enthusiasm among his students.

Bill Buxton was born in Edmonton, Alberta and completed his first university degree, a Bachelor of Music with specialty in tenor saxophone, at Queen’s University. Bill was drawn towards exploring the role of electronics and computers in composition and performance of music and hence studied electronics and technology. Bill’s experimentation with the interactive music system at the National Research Council helped sway him towards pursuing a serious career in computational music. Following advanced studies in experimental music at Utrecht State University in Netherlands, Bill completed the transition by earning an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

From this starting point, Bill launched an active and productive career in experimental research in human-computer interaction (HCI). The recurring scheme in the transition to HCI and computer science has been that the computer was becoming a powerful tool in many specialties, however a serious obstacle to success has been the poor quality of the user interface as well as a lack of ease-of-use for specialists in their own disciplines.

As a professor of Computer Science, together with Ron Baecker, Bill brought to eminence the interaction laboratory at the University of Toronto. Students who completed graduate studies at the University of Toronto have contributed to improved user interfaces in many companies. Some of the students Bill supervised (or co-supervised) were Brad Meyers and Eugene Fiume.

Bill recognized early in his career that papers, while important and a vital component of our archival history, are inadequate for conveying the new ideas in HCI. It is really through presentations, both live and on video tape, that the ideas and innovation in HCI technology are conveyed to a wider community of researchers. Bill Buxton is an excellent and enthusiastic communicator. In addition to presenting many formal papers, he has been a sought-after invited speaker — a fact that offered him an opportunity to raise, before a wider audience, the awareness that HCI is important and is worth doing it well. Communication with this wider audience has had an impact on many organizations where the CEO of, say a bank, having heard a talk by Bill, would bring the word to the staff, making an internal case for HCI an easier “sell”.

Bill’s other activity has been as a consultant and a researcher in industrial labs. In addition to working with several manufacturers of personal computers, Bill has had an ongoing relationship with Xerox, both with PARC and with EuroPARC. These innovative collaborations led to several key papers at SIGGRAPH. Bill’s activity for the last couple of years has been at Alias Research as Principal Scientist – User Interface Research. Bill’s ambition is to enhance the ease of use and productivity of the successful Alias tools for building 3D models and animation.

Through this award, members of the CHCCS/SCDHM Society wish to acknowledge the contribution by Bill Buxton to the research in human-computer interaction.