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.