Handbook Contributors

Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems, 2009

Contributors

Mark Aakhus

Mark Aakhus is Associate Professor of Communication in the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies at Rutgers University. Aakhus‘ research focuses on the emergence and management of conflictas people organize and make decisions, solve problems, and learn.These investigations explore how innovations in communication practice and technology affect the quality of human activity and reasoning in complex situations. His publications appear in international journals on communication, technology, discourse, argumentation, and disputing processes. He earned his PhD at the University of Arizona in Communication with an emphasis on Management Information Systems.

José Abdelnour-Nocera

José Abdelnour-Nocera is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Information Technology, Thames Valley University. His interests lie in the design of people-centred systems, having worked in this area as both researcher and consultant in Latin America and Europe. He has been involved in several projects in the UK and overseas in the areas of e-learning, including social development, e-commerce, e-government and enterprise resource planning systems. Dr. Abdelnour-Nocera gained an MSc in Social Psychology from Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela and a PhD in Computing from The Open University, UK

Mary Allan

Mary Allan completed her PhD in 2005 at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her thesis investigated internet mediated collaborative learning at tertiary level, and proposed a new methodology that enables micro and macro investigation of computer mediated collaborative actions. A software pack is currently under development, converting the methodology into a usable tool. Mary’s research focuses on electronically mediated interactions for the construction of collaborative knowledge across diverse contexts such as tertiary teaching and learning, workplace training, and research institutions working across sites nationally and internationally. Mary has been awarded the 2008 BRCSS post doctoral fellowship in which she will be investigating ways of encouraging and facilitating wide spread of sustainable research activities using teleconferencing technologies for lowering carbon footprint.

Dee Alwis

Dee Alwis is currently involved in teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the areas of financial accounting and company performance. This follows her professional career working in major multinational organisations based in the UK including Wilkinson Swords, Dell Computers and THORN-EMI, where she held the positions of management accountant, financial analyst and financial controller. Trained and qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant, Dee is an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA). She obtained a Master of Science degree in Information Systems and a doctoral degree on intellectual capital from Brunel University. Her Ph.D. thesis examined the impact of intellectual capital on organisational performance and value creation. Her current research interests relate to: Intangible assets and their effects on organisational performance; Corporate governance with a particular focus on corporate financial reporting; Disclosures in Annual Reports.

Junghyun An

Junghyun An is currently a Visiting Instructional Designer at Academic Outreach in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She graduated from Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois, with a specialization in instructional technology (2008). Her research interests include online communities for collaborative and inquiry-based learning, cultural and identity issues emerging within a virtual learning space, discourse analysis, and ethnographic research in technology studies. In examining educational computing policies and practices, she has engaged in the study of alternative and interdisciplinary curriculum development for technology education in pursuit of fostering socially responsible professionals and teachers in the field.

Theresa Dirndorfer Anderson

Theresa Dirndorfer Anderson is an early career researcher who explores the relationship between people and emerging technologies. She has a particular interest in examining ways information systems and institutional policies might better support creative and analytic activities. Her research builds on her PhD thesis (“Understandings of relevance and topic as they evolve in the scholarly research process”) to focus on human decision processes, information retrieval interactions and e-scholarship. In 2005 Theresa’s thesis was awarded the 1st Annual Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award (Information Science category). She designs and delivers courses (postgraduate & undergraduate) in information retrieval & organisation as well as in social informatics. Theresa is active in a cross-Faculty e-Learning research group, and has a particular interest in developing integrated online and face-to-face teaching strategies. Prior to joining UTS, she served as a diplomat, technical writer and environmental education officer.

Jeff Axup

Jeff is a user experience researcher and designer currently based in San Diego, CA, USA. He has a B.S in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Interaction Design, which primarily focused on mobile device concepts and research methods for studying mobile communities of backpackers . Jeff is currently Sr. UI Design Engineer and Lead of the User Experience team at Websense, Inc, where he helps develop a range of enterprise security products. He keeps active in his spare time running Mobile Community Design Consulting and the associated blog mobilecommunitydesign.com.

Ronald Batenburg

Ronald Batenburg (1964) is Associate Professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University. He studied sociology at Utrecht University and completed his PhD in 1991 at the University of Groningen. His research interests are in field of business/IT alignment, and the adoption and implementation of Enterprise Information Systems, including ERP, e-procurement, CRM and PACS. He is Member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Electronic Health and the Dutch Tijdschriftvoor Arbeidsvraagstukken.

Mohamed Ben Ammar

Mohamed Ben Ammar is a Ph.D. Student for the REsearch Group on Intelligent Machines (REGIM), at the University of Sfax, Tunisia. His research interests include affective computing in learning environments, intelligent environments, human-like learning in machines, emotionally expressive avatars and facial expression analysis. He received his Master Degree in Cognitive Science from Victor Segalen University of Bordeaux-2, France. He has published in journals like International Research Journal on Digital Future. (FormaMente), Transactions on advances in engineering education and International Journal of the Computer, the Internet and Management. See http://membres.lycos.fr/emaspel/ for more details.

Jos Benders

Jos Benders (1965) holds the Chair “Organization Concepts” at the Department of Organization Studies at Tilburg University and is a Senior Researcher at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University Nijmegen. He studied business administration in Tilburg (MBA) and Indiana, and completed his PhD in 1993 at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. His research interests include employment relationships, organization concepts, and technology, work and organization. He serves as Associate Editor Europe of New Technology, Work and Employment.

Jeremy Birnholtz

Jeremy Birnholtz is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. He also holds an appointment in the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto. Jeremy received his Ph. D. from the School of Information at the University of Michigan in 2005, and is interested in improving the usefulness and usability of collaboration technologies through a focus on human attention, and in the intersections of social science theory and technology design. He uses both laboratory and field methods and has conducted field research in a diverse range of settings.

Ann Borda

Dr. Ann Borda is the Executive Director of the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (http://www.versi.edu.au), a five-year Australian State Government funded Program to provide a coordinated approach to accelerating the uptake of eResearch on State and national levels. Concurrently, Dr Borda is a Research Fellow at London South Bank University, where she has been investigating HCI and collaborative technologies. Previously, Dr Borda held the position of Programme Manager with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk) based at King’s College London, responsible for government-funded projects in developing a UK-wide e-Infrastructure. Dr. Borda has published in a number of areas, including HCI, data modeling & knowledge transfer.

Jonathan P. Bowen

Prof. Jonathan P. Bowen (http://www.jpbowen.com) is Chair of Museophile Limited, a museum and IT consultancy company. He is also a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and an Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University. In 2007, he was a visiting academic at University College London and in 2008 he has been a visiting academic at Brunel University. Previously he was at the University of Reading, the Oxford University Computing Laboratory and Imperial College, London. In 2002, Bowen founded Museophile Limited (http://www.museophile.com) to help museums online, including the areas of virtual communities, wikis, etc. Bowen is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and of the British Computer Society. He holds an MA degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University.

Paul J. Bracewell

Paul Bracewell is the Director of Analytics at Offlode Ltd., an Australasian analytical consultancy firm. Prior to joining Offlode, Paul lectured in statistics at Massey University’s Albany Campus (New Zealand), where in 2003 he earned a PhD degree in statistics. Paul is an accredited Doctoral and Masters Associate Supervisor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne and is also a SAS Institute certified trainer delivering training throughout Asia-Pacific.

Petter Bae Brandtzæg

Petter Bae Brandtzæg joined SINTEF ICT and the Department of Cooperative and Trusted Systems in 2000. His expertise is in analysing user trends and patterns of use in new digital media, and in with a particular focus on online communities. Brandtzæg holds more than 30 international publications. He is at present researching a Ph.D on online communities/social networking sites at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo and SINTEF.

Bertram (Chip) Bruce

Bertram (Chip) Bruce is a Professor in Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He conducts research on democratic education. This includes research on community inquiry through collaborative community-based work, the theory of inquiry-based learning, and new media for learning. Recent publications include Libr@ries: Changing information space and practice (2006, with CushlaKapitzke) and Literacy in the information age: Inquiries into meaning making with new technologies (2003), various articles, and presentations. He is co-founder of the Community Informatics Initiative co-developer of computer systems to support collaboration and community action, such as Quill, the Inquiry Page, and Community Inquiry Labs (iLabs).

Jamika D. Burge

Jamika D. Burge is currently a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. She is managing a wireless network research project under the guidance of John M. Carroll at Penn State University. Burge completed her PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 2008. She has received several awards, including IBM PhD Research Fellow (2005-2006). Burge is affiliated with several professional organizations, including the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the CSE (Computer Science Education) and CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) Special Interest Groups.

LiciaCalvi

LiciaCalvi is head of the Learning Centre at Lessius, a College of the University of Leuven (K.U.Leuven). She is also (part-time) senior researcher at the Centre for Usability Research, within the Centre for Media Culture & Communication Technology, at K.U.Leuven. Her research interests are in the area of reading and writing new media, sociability and virtual communities, digital libraries and repositories, design, usability and evaluation of IT systems, specifically e-learning and mobile systems.

John M. Carroll

John M. Carroll is Edward M. Frymoyer Chair Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. He was Professor of Computer Science, and Head of Department, at Virginia Tech (1994-2003). Recent books include Making Use (MIT Press, 2000), HCI in the New Millennium(Addison-Wesley, 2001), and Usability Engineering (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2002). Carroll serves on several editorial and advisory boards, and is Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interactions. He received the Rigo Award and CHI Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Alfred N. Goldsmith Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Laurence Claeys

Laurence Claeys is a sociologist and communication scientist. She received an M.A. in Sociology, an M.A. in Gender Studies and obtained a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences at the University of Ghent, in Belgium. She does research within the Residential Networked Application team of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Antwerp, Belgium.

Elayne Coakes

Elayne Coakes is a Senior Lecturer in Business Information Management at the University of Westminster. Her current research relates to knowledge sharing in organisations. As the Vice-Chair of the BCS Sociotechnical Special Group she is active in promoting this view of information systems and has edited three books of international contributions in this field. Since then she has co-authored ‘ Beyond Knowledge Management’ and an ‘ Encyclopedia of Communities of Practice in Information and Knowledge Management’ in July 2005. Additionally, she has published more than 60 book chapters, peer reviewed journal chapters, and conference chapters. She is Editor in Chief of the forthcoming Journal: International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development. She is an internationally acknowledged expert on sociotechnical thinking and knowledge management and was Visiting Professor in Seville University, Spain, under the Government grant scheme for Distinguished, International Scholars; a Visiting Research Fellow in Queens University, Canada; and a Keynote speaker at Manchester University, UK, at the Tribute Day for Enid Mumford.

Tanguy Coenen

Tanguy Coenen has a Master’s degree and a PhD in Economic engineering from the Solvay Business School at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research investigates knowledge sharing and how this can occur over social networking systems and social media in general. Besides research, he does consultancy, teaches and performs development in this area.

Piotr Cofta

Piotr Cofta is with British Telecom (UK) as a Chief Researcher, Identity and Trust. He is responsible for strategic research in trust, identity and privacy. Previously he has been working for many years for Nokia and more recently for Media Lab Europe, concentrating on the relationship of trust between technology and society. Dr Cofta has recently published his book “Trust, Complexity and Control: Confidence in a Convergent World”. He is an author of several patents and publications, from areas such as trust management, digital rights management and electronic commerce. Dr Cofta is a contributor to several international standards, he publishes and speaks frequently. Piotr Cofta received his PhD in computer science from the University of Gdansk, Poland. He is a member of BCS and IEEE. You can contact him at piotr.cofta@bt.com or through his site http://piotr.cofta.eu

Johan Criel

Johan Criel studied engineering in computer sciences at the university of Ghent. He focused his work since some years on the topic of ‘context aware applications’. Since 2005 he is researcher within the Residential Networked Application team of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Antwerp, Belgium.

David Davenport

David Davenport holds a BSc. & PhD. in Electronics from Birmingham University in the U.K. Following several jobs in industry and independent consultancy work, he joined the engineering faculty of Bilkent University in 1987. His research interests include philosophy of mind and computation, computers in learning, and social and ethical issues related to information technology. He is a member of ACM and acting chair of the local SIGART chapter.

Peter Day

Dr Peter Day has a long history of academic and practical experience of community technology. A senior lecturer at the University of Brighton, he is a founder member of the Sussex Community Internet Project (SCIP) and Principal Investigator of the ESRC funded Community Network Analysis project and BSCKE funded Community Needs Assessment project. He is a founder member of the Community Informatics Research Network. Peter has published extensively in the field of community informatics and is particularly interested in promoting dialogue between community practitioners, policy-makers and academics about the potential of community media and community network research and practice for community development in the Network Society.

Claire de la Varre

Claire de la Varre is a Ph.D. student in educational psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently a research assistant at the National Research Center on Rural Education Support and holds a master’s degree in information science. She recently spent three years at the Learning Technology Section at Edinburgh University in Scotland, as an e-learning developer on the Edinburgh Electronic Medical Curriculum (EEMeC), which was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2005. Ms. de la Varre has also worked as a health services research librarian, and digital library programmer.

Harry S. Delugach

Harry S. Delugach is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has over 20 years of teaching experience, as well as an extensive scholarly publication record in knowledge based systems, conceptual graphs, and formal models in software engineering. He serves on several conference program committees, including a senior role in the International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS). He is the author of CharGer, an open-source conceptual graph visualization package. He serves on the USA ANSI L8 committee, which is one of the technical advisory groups to ISO/IEC JTC1’s SC32 subcommittee on data interchange, under whose auspices he served as editor of the Common Logic standard (ISO/IEC 24707:2007).

Aldo de Moor

Aldo de Moor (ademoor@communitysense.nl) is owner of CommunitySense, a research consultancy firm on community informatics. In 1999, he got his Ph.D. in Information Management from Tilburg University, the Netherlands. From 1999-2004, he was an assistant professor at Infolab, Dept. of Information Systems and Management, Tilburg University. In 2005-2006, he was a senior researcher at the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Aldo’s research interests include the evolution of virtual communities, communicative workflow modeling, argumentation support technologies, Language/Action theory, conceptual graph theory, and socio-technical systems design. Aldo has been a visiting researcher at the University of Guelph, Canada, and the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Aldo has been Program Co-Chair of the International Conference on Conceptual Structures, the Language/Action Perspective Working Conference on Communication Modeling, and the Pragmatic Web Conference. Key publications have appeared in journals like Communications of the ACM, Data and Knowledge Engineering, Group Decision and Negotiation Information Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, and Information Systems Journal.

Peter Denning

MIT alumnus Peter Denning is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he chairs the CS department and directs the Cebrowski Institute for innovation and information superiority. He discovered the locality principle, now universally used to optimize storage systems; he codeveloped powerful performance prediction models for computer networks; he cofounded CSNET, the precursor of the NSFNET and modern Internet; he led the team that designed and produced the ACM digital library; he created a great principles framework for computing; and he codiscovered the eight generative practices of innovation. He is a past president of ACM and a prolific author. He holds twenty-four awards for distinguished service and technical contribution.

Cleidson Ronald Botelho de Souza

Cleidson Ronald Botelho de Souza is an Associate Professor of the Faculdade de Computação at the Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil. He received his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Irvine, in 2005. He is the author of a number of technical publications in journals and conferences. In general, his research interests are in the field of collaborative software engineering, i.e., computer-supported cooperative work as applied to software engineering.

Ines Di Loreto

Ines Di Loreto graduated in Philosophy, and is currently a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the UniversitàdegliStudi di Milano – Italy. Her research interests include Social Media and their societal impact. In particular, she investigates the relationship between ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and the representation of self, analyzing how it impacts the resulting relationships, in the web 2.0 framework.

Dan Dixon

Dan Dixon is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, but has 10 years of commercial web design and development experience. His main interests are around designing multi-platform services that make the best use of the social aspects of shared use. Prior to moving to academia he had roles as a senior consultant with Headshift, a leading social software company, product manager for the BBC’s online communities and production director for new media agency Syzygy. Currently he is carrying out research on online social spaces, service design, and pervasive gaming.

Ken Eason

Ken Eason is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Ergonomics at Loughborough University and Senior Consultant at the Bayswater Institute in London. He has worked on socio-technical systems theory in its application to work systems for 40 years including a period at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He has conducted many research studies of the way user communities in work systems adopt and adapt to new technology and, at the Bayswater Institute, has been particularly involved in the formulation and use of methods of engaging user communities in the development of new working practices using electronic resources.

Rebecca Ellis

Dr Rebecca Ellis is a researcher and PhD supervisor at the Institute of Social and Technical Research, University of Essex. The Institute was formed as a hybrid organisation to cut across disciplinary boundaries in examining the social use of technology. Rebecca has a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Sheffield. She was funded on a two year project by the UK Economic and Social Research Council to explore the social and cultural aspects of eBay, the Internet auction site. Her publications include chapters in Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire and Intelligent Spaces: The Application of Pervasive ICT.

Thomas Erickson

Thomas Erickson is an interaction designer and researcher at IBM Research in New York to which he telecommutes from his home in Minneapolis. His primary interest is in studying and designing systems that enable groups of all sizes to interact coherently and productively over networks. More generally, Erickson’s approach to systems design is shaped by methods developed in HCI, theories and representational techniques drawn from architecture and urban design, and theoretical and analytical approaches from rhetoric and sociology. In addition to computer-mediated communication, other research interests include virtual communities, game-like interactions, genre theory, personal information management and pattern languages.

Umer Farooq

Umer Farooq is a PhD candidate in Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, and his advisor is John M. Carroll. His research interests include understanding and supporting group and community collaboration through the design and evaluation of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) tools. In June 2008, he successfully defended his dissertation, which investigates the feasibility, effectiveness, and consequences of supporting everyday creative scientific collaboration with computer-supported awareness in distributed settings. He has many refereed articles in national and international conferences and journals.

Thomas Finholt

Thomas Finholt is research professor and associate dean for research and innovation at the School of Information, University of Michigan, and an adjunct assistant professor of psychology. He is also director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) and the Center for Information Technology Integration. Finholt’s research focuses on the design, deployment, and use of cyberinfrastructure in science and engineering. He was a co-developer of the world’s first operational collaboratory, the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC) , which was a finalist in the science category for the 1998 Smithsonian/Computerworld awards. His recent work has focused on the development of NEESgrid , the collaboratory component of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). He has also conducted research on the impact of geographic dispersion and computer-mediated communication on trust and performance in virtual teams, on the effect of electronic and cash incentives on response rates for online surveys, and on the use of archived digital content. He co-founded the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW), and has served as the director of CREW since 1997.

Brent Furneaux

Brent Furneaux is a doctoral candidate at York University’s Schulich School of Business specializing in the field of Information Systems. His current research interests include the processes surrounding individual and organizational decision making, the strategic management of organizational knowledge, and questions related to end of life phenomena such as the end of the information system life. He is currently pursuing dissertation research that seeks to better understand the factors that drive organizational decisions to discontinue their use of information systems. Brent is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

GöranGoldkuhl

GöranGoldkuhl, PhD, is professor in information systems at Linköping University and Jönköping International Business School, Sweden. He is the director of the research group VITS (www.vits.org). He has published several books and more than 120 research papers at conferences, in journals and as book chapters. He is currently developing a family of theories, which all are founded on socio-instrumental pragmatism: Workpractice Theory, Business Action Theory, Information Systems Actability Theory. He has a great interest in qualitative and pragmatic research methods and he has contributed to the development of Multi-Grounded Theory, (a modified version of Grounded Theory).

Wallace Hannum

Wallace Hannum is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Associate Director for Technology of the National Research Center on Rural Education Support. Hannum’s focus has been on applying learning theory to the design of effective instructional programs in public and private organizations both in the U.S. and internationally. His work integrates empirical learning research with processes for improving organizational effectiveness and focuses on instructional uses of technology, especially distance education to benefit those in rural areas. Dr. Hannum’s goal remains improving human competence and capability through education.

Catherine Heeney

Catherine Heeney is based at the Ethox Centre at Oxford University; which focuses on issues around biomedicine and ethics. She works in a multi-disciplinary team within a project entitled the Governance of Genetic Databases, and has been working on the sociological component. This has involved interviewing scientists involved in the building and maintenance of biobanks and similar entities. She draws on the theoretical frameworks provided by Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy and Science and Technology Studies. Catherine has worked at Edinburgh University at the Genomics Forum and the Department of Politics. At the Politics Department, she worked on a Project entitled Privacy and Data-sharing’, which explored the legal, technical and organisational spurs and barriers to data sharing in the public sector. Her doctoral thesis was on “The Role of Privacy in the Collection and Dissemination of Census and Survey Data”, which she carried out at the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census, within the Department of Sociology at Manchester University. As a doctoral researcher she spent two periods as a Marie-Curie Fellow at INFOLAB, Information Management, Department, Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Here she carried out research on the social and ethical aspects of the use of information technology in information management and in statistical research.

Jan Heim

Jan Heim is Chief Scientist at SINTEF ICT. Heim has been Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology at University of Trondheim. He joined the research institute SINTEF in Oslo in 1995 where he has worked in the field of Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on user requirements, adaptation of usability methods and psychological aspects of mediated communication in various European research projects. He is author or co-author of several international papers.

Thomas Herrmann

Thomas Herrmann is a professor of Information- and Technology-Management and a fellow of the Electrical Engineering Department. His research interests and teaching areas include design methods for socio-technical systems in the areas of knowledge management, groupware, (work-)process management and service engineering, as well as Human-Computer Interaction and privacy.

He was faculty member from 1992-2004 at the Computer Science Department at the University of Dortmund and was in charge of the development of infrastructure and new media for the University. He holds a PhD in Computer Science of the Technical University of Berlin (1986) and a Master of Art in Communication Science of the University of Bonn (1983).

Dirk Heylen

Dirk Heylen received his Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht. After that he became assistant professor in the Human Media Interaction group at the University of Twente where his research involves modeling conversational and cognitive functions of embodied conversational agents. His work on the analysis and synthesis of nonverbal communication in (multiparty) conversations has been concerned with gaze, and head movements in particular. He is involved in European and Dutch national projects on multi-party interaction, emotion research and the building of models of communicative agents. This includes building models of affective interaction, particularly in tutoring situations.

Roxanne Hiltz

A sociologist and computer scientist whose work focuses on “human centered” information systems, Starr Roxanne Hiltz is currently Distinguished Professor Emerita, Information Systems Department, College of Computing Sciences, NJIT. For 2008-2009 she has been chosen to be the Fulbright/ University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Communications and Media. Her research interests include Group Support Systems (virtual teams and online communities), evaluation research methods, Asynchronous Learning Networks, Emergency Management Information Systems, Pervasive Computing, and the applications and impacts of “social computing” (“Web 2.0”) systems. (Http://is.njit.edu/hiltz)

David Hinds

David Hinds is currently the President of Hinds & Associates, a management consulting firm. He recently completed his PhD in Business Administration with a concentration in information systems and social network analysis. Previously, he held senior management positions with Deloitte Consulting, Cordis Corporation (Johnson & Johnson), and The Wurth Group. He was also President and owner of Trend Distributors, a building supply distribution company. In addition to the PhD, Hinds hold a BS in Engineering Science, an MS in Management Science, and an MBA.

Paul Hodgson

Paul Hodgson works for British Telecom (UK) as a Senior Researcher, Security and Trust in the Mobility Research Centre. He is responsible for research in convergent security and trust, specifically in trust, identity and privacy. He joined BT in 1997 and has previously worked in the Security Research Centre on defensive technologies and the Future Technologies group on applying nature inspired approaches to network security. Prior to joining BT he worked on music and artificial intelligence at the University of Sussex, where he did work in computational/musical creativity. Prior to this he ran his own music software company and worked as a musician after completing a first degree in social science and philosophy at the University of Manchester. His research interests include the technical and social aspects of creativity, trust and security with special reference to opportunities in convergent environments. Dr Hodgson is author of several publications and patents, from areas such as computational creativity, email anti-virus protection, mobile services encryption and trust management. Dr Hodgson is a contributor to several international journals and he publishes and speaks frequently. Paul Hodgson received his DPhil in cognitive science from the University of Sussex, UK. He is a CISSP, a fellow of the RSA and a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. You can contact him at paul.w.hodgson@bt.com

Paul Hoeken

Paul Hoeken (1955) is Lecturer at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University Nijmegen. He studied business administration at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Prior to his present job he was active in consultancy, information management and logistics. His research interests include effectiveness of information systems projects, information architecture development and packaged software implementation.

Janet Holland

Dr. Janet Holland completed a Ph.D. in Teaching and Leadership, Instructional Design and Technology, with a minor in Communications from the University of Kansas. Dr. Holland currently serves as an Assistant Professor at Emporia State University, teaching pre-service teachers and master degree students in Instructional Design and Technology.

Dan Horn

Dan Horn is an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. He received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Michigan. He served as a post doctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, supporting the development of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). His research interests include social network analysis and computer-supported cooperative work.

Wilson Huang

Wilson Huang is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Valdosta State University. His Ph.D. degree in criminology is received from the University of Maryland, College Park. He has published refereed articles in the areas of cybercrime, hotel crime, criminal sentencing, and criminal violence across nations. His teaching interests include police-community relations, comparative criminal justice, crime and technology, and program evaluations.

Matthew J. Irvin

Matthew J. Irvin received his Ph.D. in education with a specialization in educational psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include student risk and resilience and the use of distance education for student learning and professional development for educators. Dr. Irvin has also had experience teaching college-level courses that incorporated elements of distance education and development of online courses.

Isa Jahnke

Isa Jahnke, Dr. phil., Assistant Professor, studied social science in Germany. She worked three years at a consultancy company. From 2001 until 2004 she researched in the field of socio-technical systems and knowledge management. After her PhD study, she moved as a Postdoctoral research assistant to the Department of Information and Technology Management. Since April 2008, she is an Assistant Professor at the Dortmund University of Technology at the Center for Research on Higher Education and Faculty Development. Her research topics are computer-supported cooperative work, collaborative learning, Web 2.0, and Internet-based communities. Further information: http://www.isa-jahnke.de ; Contact: isa.jahnke@tu-dortmund.de

Monique Janneck

Monique Janneck is junior professor for work and organizational psychology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She studied psychology and earned a doctorate in informatics with a thesis on the design of cooperative systems from a communication psychology perspective. Her research focus is on the interplay between human behavior, social structures and technological development: She is interested in the way humans interact with technology, the way theories and findings on human behavior can inform the design of information technology, and the way technology impacts individual, organizational, and social behavior and structures.

Julie Keane

Julie Keane is a Ph.D. student in education (Culture, Curriculum and Change) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently a research assistant at the National Research Center on Rural Education Support. From 1993-2004 Ms. Keane was Associate Project Director at the Center for Children and Technology, EDC, Inc. in New York.  She participated in nationally-based research examining technology in school reform, including analysis of federal and state education policy, professional development programs, curriculum reform initiatives, and the impact of technology on the social context of teaching and learning.  Ms. Keane holds a MA in Political Science.

Julie E. Kendall

Julie E. Kendall, Ph. D., is a Professor of Management in the School of Business-Camden, Rutgers University. Dr. Kendall is a fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute and a Past Chair of IFIP Working Group 8.2. She was awarded the Silver Core from IFIP. Professor Kendall has published in MIS Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Information & Management, CAIS, Organization Studies and many other jour­nals. Additionally, Dr. Kendall has co-authored Systems Analysis and Design, 7th edition Project Planning and Requirements Analysis for IT Systems Development. She co-edited the volume Human, Organizational, and Social Dimensions of Information Systems Development and is on the Senior Advisory Board for JITTA and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Database Management and IRMJ.

Kenneth E. Kendall

Kenneth E. Kendall, Ph. D. is a Distinguished Professor of Management in the School of Business-Camden, Rutgers University. He is one of the founders of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) and a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI). He served as the President of DSI and as a Program Chair for both DSI and AMCIS. Dr. Kendall was named as one of the top 60 most productive MIS researchers in the world, and he was awarded the Silver Core from IFIP. He co-authored, Systems Analysis and Design, 7th edition, and Project Planning and Requirements Analysis for IT Systems Development. He edited Emerging Information Technologies: Improving Decisions, Cooperation, and Infrastructure and co-edited The Impact of Computer Supported Technologies on Information Systems Development.

Manuel Kolp

Manuel Kolp is an associate professor in Information Systems at the Universitécatholique de Louvain, Belgium where he is also head of the Information Systems Research Unit and Academic Secretary of Research for the Louvain School of Management. Dr. Kolp is also invited professor with the University of Brussels and the Universitary Faculties St. Louis of Brussels. His research work deals with agent-oriented and socio-technical architectures for e-business and ERP II systems. He was previously a Post Doctoral Fellow and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. He has been involved in the organization committee of international conferences and has chaired different workshops. His publications include more than 50 international refereed journals or periodicals and proceedings papers as well as three books.

Olga Kulyk

Olga Kulykis a PhD student in the Human Media Interaction group, University of Twente, the Netherlands. She is also a visiting researcher in the Human Computer Interaction, Multimedia and Culture group of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her current research is on situation awareness support to collaboration of multidisciplinary teams in life sciences. She holds a MSc in computer science and post-MSc in human-computer interaction design. Her research interests include human-computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, group awareness in co-located collaborative environments, and ubiquitous computing.

Ivan Launders

Ivan Launders is a technical solutions architect for British Telecommunications. He has twenty-two years of software and telecommunications experience working with network and system integration solutions. He received his Master’s Degree in 1996 from Sheffield Hallam University and is currently working towards the completion of a Ph.D. in Transaction Agent Modelling and Knowledge Representation at Sheffield Hallam University. His research interests are in Smart Applications, particularly in capturing and modeling the exchange and use of knowledge in business transactions and business processes.

Ronald M. Lee

Ronald M. Lee has nearly 30 years of research experience in electronic commerce, web-based initiatives, and formal modeling. For the last five years, he has conducted research at Florida International University on open sourced e-learning, e-tourism, e-culture, and virtual world environments. For the previous ten years, he was Director of the Erasmus University Research Institute for Decision Information Systems (Euridis). He previously held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Lee holds a BA in Mathematics, an MBA, and a PhD in Decision Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton).

Ronald Leenes

Dr. Ronald Leenes is associate professor in IT, law and (new) technology at TILT, the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (Tilburg University). His primary research interests are privacy and identity management, regulation of, and by, technology. He is also involved in research in ID fraud, biometrics and Online Dispute Resolution. Leenes (1964) studied Public Administration and Public Policy at the University of Twente and received his PhD for a study on hard cases in law and Artificial Intelligence and Law from the same university.

Mikael Lind

Associate professor Mikael Lind is with the University College of Borås, Linköping University, and Jönköping International Business School, Sweden. He is the leader of the informatics department and the founder of InnovationLab at the school of Business and Informatics in Borås. He is also associated to the research network VITS in Sweden and is active in different international communities such as Language/action and Pragmatic Web. His current research interests are business process management, e-services, method engineering, co-design of business and IT, private-public partnership, and research methods for information systems development. His research is mainly characterised by empirically driven theory and method development. He is involved in several action-research projects focusing co-design of business processes and information systems. He is also the project manager of the citizen-centric e-service project e-Me — turning the internet around (www.e-me.se). He is also associate editor for the open journal Systems, Signs & Actions (www.sysiac.org)

Rachel McLean

Dr Rachel McLean is a Senior Lecturer in Business Information Technology within the Business School at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She has contributed to both national and international conferences and journals, and managed a number of funded research projects. Her research and publications are in the field of the adoption, implementation and use of technology in a variety of organisational and social contexts.

Dario Maggiorini

Dr. Dario Maggioriniis assistant professor at the UniversitàdegliStudi di Milano – Italy; where he received his master degree and PhD in computer science in 1997 and 2002 respectively. He joined as a faculty member the department of Informatics and Communication in 2003, where his teaching activity is typically related to operating systems and network protocols and architectures. In the past, he has been working on Quality of Service for IP networks, multimedia content delivery, application-level networking, and software architectures for service provisioning. Currently, his research interests focus mainly on software and network architecture for entertainment applications and content/service provisioning in distributed environments.

Christopher A. Miller

Dr. Christopher A. Miller is Chief Scientist and co-owner of Smart Information Flow Technologies, a small business in Minneapolis, MN specializing in research and development of intelligent human-automation systems. Previously, Dr. Miller was a Fellow at the Honeywell Technology Center. His interests include human automation integration, human performance modeling, and politeness and etiquette across cultures and in human-human and human-machine interaction. Dr. Miller’s Ph.D. was received from the Committee on Cognition and Communication in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Anders I. Mørch

Anders I. rch is an associate professor at InterMedia, University of Oslo, Norway. He received a PhD in informatics from the University of Oslo and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has worked in industry for 3 years at the NYNEX Science and Technology Center, New York. His general interests are technology-enhanced workplace learning, human-computer interaction, and participatory design. His specific interests include computer-supported collaborative learning, educational applications of software agents (critics; pedagogical agents), and socio-technical interaction design. Dr. Mørch is a senior researcher and InterMedia project leader in the European Knowledge-Practices Laboratory (KP-Lab) project (2006-2011). Contact him at anders.morch@intermedia.uio.no.

Mahmoud Neji

Mahmoud Neji received the Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the UPS Toulouse, France in 1984. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher. His research interests include pattern recognition, computer vision, and automated face analysis such as face modeling, facial expression recognition, affective computing in learning environments, intelligent environments.

DoritNevo

DoritNevo is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at York University’s Schulich School of Business. She received her Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of British Columbia and her M.Sc. in Economics from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Her current research interests include expectations management, requirements analysis, and design and evaluation of knowledge management systems.

Anton Nijholt

Anton Nijholt received his M.Sc. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Delft University of Technology and his Ph.D. degree from the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He held positions at various universities in the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada. Currently, he is chair of the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente. His main research interests are multiparty and multimodal interaction, and social and intelligent (embodied) agents. He is involved in European projects on multi-party interaction, emotion research and embodied agents. Game research and brain-computer interfacing also receive his interest in some large-scale Dutch national projects.

Pernilla Qvarfordt

PernillaQvarfordt is a Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, where she conducts research in the area of human-computer interaction. Pernilla’s current research is focused on developing technology for enhancing human-human communication and collaboration. Pernilla received her Ph. D. in Computer Science from Linköping University, Sweden in 2004. Her dissertation work focused on exploring the use of eye-gaze information in multimodal interaction. During her graduate study she worked Université Paris-Sud and the IBM Almaden Research Center as a visiting researcher.

Emilee Rader

Emilee Rader is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, in the School of Information. After earning a master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, she spent five years working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Motorola Labs, designing and evaluating next generation applications for mobile technologies. Her current work focuses on understanding the social and cognitive processes that affect how collaborative groups use social software for information management, in order to design technological or social interventions to make storing, organizing, finding and sharing information easier.

David Redmiles

David Redmiles is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1992. He is the author of a number of technical journal and conference publications. In general, his research interests are in the overlap between software engineering, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work.

Rutger Rienks

Rutger Rienks received his M.Sc. degree and his PhD. from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. His activities focus on the extent to which computers can replicate the human abilities to perceive and comprehend both single- and multiparty interaction. He has published on meeting modelling in general and on a number of topics where technology can aid the meeting domain. He has shown possibilities for applications on various dimensions of the meeting process.

Laura Anna Ripamonti

Dr. Laura Anna Ripamonti is Assistant Professor at the UniversitàdegliStudi di Milano – Italy, where she teaches “Economics and Enterprise Management” to Computer Science undergraduate students and “Laboratory of Computer Science” to students graduating in Biosciences. She graduated in Engineering and Managerial Sciences at Politecnico di Milano and she got a PhD in Computer Science. Her research interests focus on the relations between ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and social networks. Due to her multidisciplinary background, she is interested both in the technological and in the organizational aspects of the topic, which she prefers to investigate through an “action research” approach.

Peter Rittgen

Dr. Rittgen received a Master of Science in Computer Science and Computational Linguistics from University Koblenz-Landau, Germany, and a PhD in Economics and Business Administration from Frankfurt University, Germany. He is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Business and Informatics of the University College of Borås, Sweden. He has been doing research on business processes and information systems development since 1997, especially in the areas Business and IT Co-design & Collaborative Modeling, Business Network Governance and Business Process Simulation & Improvement. Dr. Rittgen is the Vice-Chair of the AIS Special Interest Group on Modeling and Simulation, SIGMAS (www.ModellingAndSimulation.org) and an Associate Editor of the Informing Science Journal. He is also a PC member in several international conferences and serves on numerous review committees for international journals and conferences. He published over 70 works including 2 edited books, 8 book chapters and 10 journal articles. For further details refer to http://www.adm.hb.se/~PRI/.

Mary Beth Rosson

Mary Beth Rosson is a Professor in Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Her research interests include community computing, environments and tools for learning and using object-oriented design and programming, and visual programming environments. She co-authored Usability Engineering(Morgan-Kaufmann, 2002), and has numerous articles in national and international conferences, magazines, journals, including the Communications of the ACM and International Journal of Hunan-Computer Studies. In 2008, she was inducted into the CHI Academy for her extensive research contributions to the study of HCI.

Andee Rubin

Andee Rubin, Senior Scientist at TERC, has done research and development in the fields of mathematics, educational technology, and online learning for over 25 years. Her recent research has focused on how students and teachers develop statistical reasoning, how video can be used to introduce ideas of movement over time, and how mathematics can be integrated into informal settings such as zoos and aquariums. She is the author of Electronic Quills: A Situated Evaluation of Using Computers for Writing in Classrooms (with Bertram Bruce) and an editor of Ghosts in the Machine: Women’s Voices in Research with Technology.

Roel Schouteten

Roel Schouteten (1969) is Assistant Professor at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University Nijmegen. He studied management and organization at the University of Groningen where he completed his PhD in 2001. His research interests include quality of working life, technology, work and organization, and HRM and performance. He serves as editorial secretary of the Dutch Journal of Labour Studies (TijdschriftvoorArbeidsvraagstukken).

Ben Shneiderman

Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland.  He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001.  He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. His books include Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (Addison Wesley, 5th ed. 2009) and Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), which won the IEEE Distinguished Literary Contribution award in 2004.

Malcolm Shore

Dr Shore started his career in ICL, UK before completing his degree in Computer Science and emigrating to New Zealand where he accepted a commission in the RNZAF as a computer specialist. On retiring from the RNZAF, he took the position of Manager Computer Security at the Government Communications Security Bureau. Dr Shore subsequently left the Government and returned to industry as Technical Director, CES Communications where he was responsible for the design and development of secure voice, satellite, and radio products. Dr Shore is currently the Head of Security for Telecom NZ and a Senior Fellow at Canterbury University where he lectures in Computer Forensics and Information Warfare.

Jonas Sjöström

Jonas Sjöström, BSc, is a systems designer, software developer and teacher currently working on his PhD studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research is centered around socio-technical design of information systems. His PhD work aims at providing a coherent and useful conceptualization of the IT artifact founded in semiotics and social action theories. Furthermore, he works actively with conceptualizing use qualities of IT artefacts, as a means to improve IT design and organizational change processes.

Peter A.C. Smith

Peter is president of The Leadership Alliance Inc. (TLA), an Anglo-Canadian management-consulting company he founded in 1988. Peter maintains a very active international consulting practice assisting client organizations in both public and private sectors. He largely specializes in helping clients enhance their performance by optimizing strategies for design and development of critical innovation drivers such as Organizational Learning, Knowledge Management, Leadership, Collaboration and Motivation. Peter is a past associate of Peter Senge’s Organizational Learning Center (MIT) and of the Agility Forum. He is Editor-in-Chief of the online “Journal of Knowledge Management Practice”; Consulting & Special Issue Editor for the scholarly-refereed journal “The Learning Organization”; Executive Director, International Foundation for Action Learning-Canada; and Past-Chair, International Community of Action Learners. Peter has had published over forty scholarly chapters on a broad range of topics related to performance enhancement, and is internationally in demand as a speaker, workshop leader and conference chair.

Ronald Stamper

Ronald Stamper studied mathematics at Oxford in the 1950s, where he developed a passion for singing opera but, was diverted into hospital administration and then the steel industry, where he began to apply computers. Soon disillusioned by the poor organisational returns from technically excellent systems, he began to look for an alternative approach. The opportunity came when asked by the steel industry staff college to create courses for systems analysts in heavy industry. At that time, computer companies ran all the other courses for marketing their products. Instead, he treated organisations as the real information systems in which computers could play a part – if appropriate. He was one of the main contributors to a national training programme in systems analysis and was invited to join a team at the London School of Economics to develop teaching and research in information systems in 1969. His book Information, based on organisational semiotics, was published in 1973. He began the research mentioned here in 1971 with Research Council funding. The theoretical work was largely completed before he left the LSE 20 years later for the University of Twente. With his students there and at other universities, the theory was put to the test in a large number of diverse organisations. Since retiring in 1999 he has continued the work, with funding from the EPSRC concentrating on writing up results from this lengthy research programme.

Charles Steinfield

Charles Steinfield is a professor and chair in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. His research interests include the uses of online social networks, individual and organizational collaboration via ICT, and e-commerce. He is currently pursuing projects on social capital and online social network site use, collective action and the diffusion of information technology standards, and ICT use in knowledge-oriented business clusters. He is a recipient of MSU’s Teacher-Scholar and Distinguished Faculty awards.

Tom Stewart

Tom Stewart is Joint Managing Director of System Concepts. He is a Chartered Psychologist and a Fellow of the Ergonomics Society. He was a founder member of the Human Sciences and Advanced Technology (HUSAT) Research group at Loughborough University in 1970. In 1979, he joined the management consultancy Butler Cox and Partners and worked on assignments in Europe, North America and Australia. He joined System Concepts in 1983, and became Managing Director in 1986. He chairs a number of British, European and International standards committees and is founding editor of the international Journal Behaviour and Information Technology. He is President of the Ergonomics Society.

Matti Tedre

Matti Tedre holds a PhD degree in Computer Science. He works as an associate professor and head of B.Sc Program in Information Technology at Tumaini University, Tanzania. Previously he has worked in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Joensuu, Finland, as an assistant, researcher, and lecturer; and he spent two years in South Korea visiting the universities of Yonsei and Ajou. He has also been a visiting instructor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Earlier, he worked as a programmer and as a software analyst. His research interests include social studies of computer science, the history of computer science, information technology education, and the philosophy of computer science.

David Thorns

David Thorns is Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has over 40 years experience as an urban researcher working in the fields of housing, social policy, social inequality, tourism, research methodology and the implications of globalisation. He has published extensively including 10 books. He is a Principal researcher and Member of the Management Group of the Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences project and Principal Researcher on a three year Marsden funded project Winners and Losers in the Knowledge Society. He is also a member of steering committee of the Asia Pacific Housing Research Network. Social Science Commission of NZ UNESCO and Vice President Social Sciences of the Royal Society New Zealand and Board member of the Centre for Housing Research Aotearoa /New Zealand. International Social Science Council and Capability Building Fund for the NZ Advanced Network.

David Tuffley

Since 1999, a Lecturer in the School of ICT at Griffith University, and a Senior Consultant in the Software Quality Institute (partnered with the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University). Before academia, he began his IT career in London in the late 1980’s as a Technical Writer and from there to business analysis and software process improvement work in Australia working with public and private sector clients. 

Wouter Van den Bosch

Wouter Van den Bosch holds a BA in International Business Studies and currently studies Sociology. He works as a researcher for Memori, a research- and consultinggroup of the University College of Mechelen, Belgium. His work focuses on the design and development of social software applications and their use to support online community building, knowledge management, citizen participation and social inclusion.

Veerle Van der Sluys

Veerle Van der Sluys is freelance Java and Drupal software engineer and has a passion for web development and new technologies (web2.0). She received her MSc and her PhD in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from Ghent University (Belgium). Veerle’s research interests are in decision support, social network analysis and network visualization. She has been involved in the KnoSoS research project at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium and Katholieke Hogeschool Mechelen, Belgium.

Gerrit van der Veer

Gerrit van der Veerhas a MSc in Cognitive Psychology and a PhD in computer science. His research interests are in user interface design methods, visual design, and mental models of ICT users. He is emeritus professor in interaction design at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and full professor of human-computer interaction at the Open University Netherlands. Currently he is also a visiting professor in the Human Media Interaction research group of the University of Twente.

Paul van der Vet

Paul van der Vet studied chemistry and philosophy of science and holds a Ph.D. in chemistry. He joined the Department of Computer Science at Twente in 1989 to work on AI projects related to natural science domains. He has carried out research in text mining, information extraction, and information retrieval. He has an interest in ontologies and knowledge representations, again of natural science subjects. Since 2000, he is member of the Human Media Interaction group at Twente. Currently, he is involved in several national and international research projects.

Betsy van Dijk

Betsy van Dijk is an assistant professor in the Human Media Interaction research group. She graduated in mathematics and has a PhD on teaching methodology in computer science. Currently, her research interest is in the field of human-computer interaction where the main topics are interface and interaction design, user evaluation, user modelling and personalization. Her focus is on multi-modal and multi-party interaction and ambient intelligence. She is involved in several national and international research projects on human-computer interaction.

Shun-Yung Kevin Wang

Shun-Yung Kevin Wang serves as a research analyst with the Justice Research Center in Tallahassee, Florida. He has intensive experience in retrieving and analyzing delinquent juvenile data stored in the information system of Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (FDJJ). Prior to his current employment, he served as a program evaluator and data analyst for organizations in Florida. Mr. Wang holds a M.S. from the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice and a Specialist degree from the College of Information at Florida State University (FSU). Currently, he is a candidate for a doctoral degree in criminology and criminal justice at FSU.

Yves Wautelet

Yves Wautelet is an IT project manager and a postdoc fellow at the Universitécatholique de Louvain, Belgium. He completed a PhD thesis focusing on project and risk management issues in large enterprise software design. Dr. Wautelet also holds a bachelor and master in management sciences as well as a master in Information Systems. His research interests include aspects of software engineering such as requirements engineering, software project management, software development life cycles and CASE-Tools development as well as information systems strategy.

Hans Weigand

Hans Weigand studied Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, with minors in Linguistics and Organization theory. His Ph.D. thesis applied linguistics to the field of knowledge representation. In 1989, he moved to Tilburg University where he is currently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Dept. of Information Management He has participated in several European industrial projects and research networks, and is one of the founders of the Language/Action Perspective workshops and the Pragmatic Web conference.

Brian Whitworth

Brian Whitworth is a Senior Lecturer at Massey University (Albany), Auckland, New Zealand. He holds a B.Sc. in mathematics, a B.A. in psychology, an M.A. (1st Class) in neuro-psychology, and a Ph.D. in Information Systems. He has published in journals like Small Group Research, Group Decision & Negotiation, The Database for Advances in Information Systems, Communications of the AIS, IEEE Computer, Behavior and Information Technology (BIT), Communications of the ACM and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Topics include generating online agreement, voting before discussing, online communication processes, legitimate by design, spam and the social-technical gap, polite computing and the web of system performance. His hobbies include motorcycle riding, quantum theory and philosophical songs.

Heike Winschiers-Theophilus

Dr. Heike Winschiers-Theophilus is involved in cross-cultural design and usability engineering research in Namibia since 1995. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Hamburg in 2001. She has been a faculty member of the University of Namibia and is now heading the Software Engineering Department at the Polytechnic of Namibia. She is part of an international researcher community engaged in Human Computer Interaction for development propagating Community Centered Design as an adaptation of Participatory Design.

ShuminZhai 

ShuminZhai works at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He has published about 100 research papers, received numerous patents, contributed to three IBM Research Division Accomplishments, and led major IBM product innovations. His work has been broadly reported in the news media. He is on the editorial boards of Human-Computer Interaction, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, and other journals. He has been a visiting professor and have lectured at various universities in the US, Europe and China.  He earned his Ph.D. degree at the University of Toronto. In 2006, he was elected to ACM’s inaugural class of Distinguished Scientists.