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About the Authors

Helen Sharp

Helen Sharp is a Professor of Software Engineering in the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics at the Open University. Originally trained as a software engineer, it was watching the frustration of users and the clever “work-arounds” they developed that inspired her to investigate HCI, user-centered design, and the other related disciplines that now underpin the field of interaction design. She has been developing distance courses in interaction design, software engineering and business agility since the 1980s. Her research focuses on the study of professional software practice and the effect of human and social aspects on software, the software development process, and software teams. In recent years, Helen has led research projects in the areas of socio-cultural factors in design, agile transformation, motivation and security, and socio-technical resilience, working closely with practitioners to support practical impact. She is active in both the software engineering and CHI communities, and she has had a long association with practitioner-related conferences. Helen is on the editorial board of several software engineering journals, and she is a regular invited speaker at academic and practitioner venues.

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Yvonne Rogers

Yvonne Rogers is the Director of the Interaction Centre at University College London, a Professor of Interaction Design, and a deputy head of department for Computer Science. She is internationally renowned for her work in HCI and ubiquitous computing and, in particular, for her pioneering approach to innovation and ubiquitous learning. Yvonne is widely published, and she is the author of two books: Research in the Wild (2017, co-authored with Paul Marshall) and The Secrets of Creative People (2014). She is also a regular keynote speaker at computing and HCI conferences worldwide. Former positions include the Open University (2006–2011), the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University (2003–2006), and Sussex University (1992–2003). She has also been a Visiting Professor at UCSC, University of Cape Town, Melbourne University, Stanford, Apple, Queensland University, and UCSD. She has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, the ACM, the British Computer Society, and the ACM's CHI Academy. She was awarded the Royal Society Robin Milner Medal in 2021 for ‘outstanding European computer scientist’, and a MRC Suffrage and Science Award in 2020 for being one of the leading women in 'mathematics and computing.'  In 2022 she was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Research Award, “presented to individuals for outstanding contributions to the study of human-computer interaction.”

Jennifer Preece

Jennifer Preece is Professor and Dean Emerita in the College of Information Studies—Maryland's iSchool—at the University of Maryland. Jenny's research focuses on the intersection of information, community, and technology. She is interested in community participation online and offline. She has researched ways to support empathy, patterns of online participation, reasons for not participating, and interaction in technology-supported communities. She was author of one of the first books on online communities—Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (2000) published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Currently, Jenny focuses on how technology can be used in citizen science projects. Jenny’s particular interest is in technology design for data collection about the world's flora and fauna at a time when many species are in rapid decline due to habitat loss, pollution, and climate change. Jenny is a member of the ACM's CHI Academy and she is Editor-in-Chief of the online, open-access journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. She is also on the Board of Directors of Vancouver’s Stanley Park Ecology Society.

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Jennifer, Yvonne and Helen at the launch event of the fifth edition at CHI 2019.
Photo by Ben Shneiderman.

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