Google recently announced its 2009 Google Fellowship recipients, and I was pleased to find a name I recognize among them. Nicholas Chen (University of Maryland) won the fellowship for HCI. Nick’s been doing very interesting research on multi-screen reading devices (check out this CHI 2008 video) and pen-based computing. Congrats to Nick on this impressive achievement! It’s great to see this interesting part of the HCI field being highlighted in this fashion.
It is ironic, however, that there is no award for research in anything resembling information seeking support systems. There are awards for research areas such as cloud computing, machine vision, distributed systems, and natural language processing, but nothing integrative that could be used to improve information seeking interfaces. Sigh.
Google certainly hires people with such research interests, e.g., Dan Russell and Anne Aula. But perhaps it’s still not a high enough priority for them to justify inclusion in their fellowship program.
Given Google’s core competencies, you might think they’d be more biased toward retrieval, indexing, and perhaps interaction around retrieval. Still seems weird to the Bayesian in me.