Jacob O. Wobbrock

Jacob O. Wobbrock is a Professor in the University of Washington Information School and, by courtesy, in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He is Director of the ACE Lab, Associate Director and founding Co-Director Emeritus of the CREATE research center, and a founding member of the DUB Group and the MHCI+D degree program.

Jacob O. Wobbrock
Born	(1976-01-15) January 15, 1976 (age 47)
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Stanford University (B.S. with Honors, M.S.), Carnegie Mellon University (Ph.D.)
Awards	ACM Fellow 2021^[1] ACM CHI Academy 2019^[2] ACM ICMI 2022 Ten-Year Technical Impact Award ACM 2019 SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award^[3] AMiner 2018 and 2021 Most Influential Scholar in HCI,^[4] Runner-up in 2020 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award 2017^[5] National Science Foundation CAREER Award^[6] NISH National Scholar Award for Workplace Innovation and Design^[7]
Scientific career
Fields	Human-Computer Interaction, Mobile computing, Computer accessibility
Institutions	University of Washington
Doctoral advisor	Brad A. Myers
Website	faculty.uw.edu/wobbrock//

Wobbrock conducts research and teaches in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with a focus on input and interaction techniques, human performance measurement and modeling, HCI research and design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing. He frequently publishes on interaction techniques, text entry methods and their evaluation, gesture recognition and design, statistical methods and tools, mobile user interfaces, and accessible user interfaces, among other topics.

Wobbrock has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers^[8] and received 29 paper awards, including seven best papers and eight honorable mentions from ACM's CHI conference. In 2021, he was named an ACM Fellow "for contributions to human-computer interaction and accessible computing." In 2019, he was inducted into the CHI Academy. For his work on accessible computing, he received the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award and the 2019 SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award, a 10-year lasting impact award. He also received a 10-year impact award from ICMI 2022 for his work on the $P gesture recognizer.^[9] He is also the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and seven other National Science Foundation grants.^[10][11] In both 2018 and 2021, he was #1 of 100 on AMiner's Most Influential Scholars in HCI list, and was runner-up in 2020. (AMiner is an automatic citation-ranking system from Tsinghua University.) From 2012 to 2022, he served on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. His advisees have gone on to positions at Harvard, Cornell, Colorado, Washington, Brown, Simon Fraser, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, among others.

As an entrepreneur, Wobbrock was the venture-backed co-founder and CEO of AnswerDash from 2012 to 2015. AnswerDash was acquired by CloudEngage in June 2020.^[12]

Education

Wobbrock grew up in Lake Oswego, Oregon and graduated with academic honors from Lake Oswego High School. He attended Stanford University, where he received his B.S. with Honors in Symbolic Systems (1998) and his M.S. in Computer Science (2000). In both degrees, he had a formal specialization in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). After working in Silicon Valley startups for a few years, he attended the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Ph.D. (2006). At graduation, he was honored with CMU's School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award.^[13]

Research

Wobbrock's research seeks to scientifically understand people's experiences of computers and information, and to improve those experiences by inventing new interactive technologies, especially for people with disabilities. His research topics include input and interaction techniques, human performance measurement and modeling, HCI research and design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing.

Some of his notable research projects are the $-family gesture recognizers,^[14] the end-user elicitation design method,^[15][16] the Slide Rule design for accessible touchscreen gestures^[17] (which some have noted might have influenced Apple's VoiceOver accessibility software design^[18]), the ARTool statistics tool^[19][20] for nonparametric ANOVA-type analyses, the Pointing Magnifier assistive pointing and visual aid,^[21][22] and the versatile EdgeWrite text-entry system.^[23] Wobbrock is also known for his formulation of Ability-Based Design,^[24][25] which scrutinizes technologies for their ability assumptions and insists that technologies accommodate people, rather than the other way around.

Teaching

Wobbrock teaches technical and design-oriented Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) subjects, and courses on research methods, statistics, and research design. He has also developed courses on experience design, interactive technology design, and input and interaction techniques. In February 2016, he launched Designing, Running, and Analyzing Experiments on the Coursera platform. This massive open online course (MOOC) focuses on experiment design and data analysis in the R programming language for formal Human-Computer Interaction studies.

Industry

Wobbrock was the venture-backed cofounder and CEO of AnswerDash, a SaaS startup that provides intelligent in-context help to websites and mobile apps. His co-founders were fellow professor Amy J. Ko and then-Ph.D. student Parmit Chilana, now a professor at Simon Fraser University. After running AnswerDash from 2012 to 2015, Wobbrock returned to his full-time academic position at the University of Washington. AnswerDash was acquired by CloudEngage in June 2020.^[26]

Between graduating from Stanford University and starting his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, Wobbrock worked at Silicon Valley startups DoDots^[27] and Google. While in college, he held two technical internships at Intel.

Personal life

Wobbrock lives in Seattle, Washington and is married to Alison Wobbrock (née Pawluskiewicz), a daughter of Polish emigrants from Nowy Targ, Poland and the niece of celebrated Polish composer Jan Kanty Pawluskiewicz.

References

1. "2021 ACM Fellows".
2. "ACM SIGCHI Awards".
3. "ACM SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award".
4. "AMiner Most Influential Scholars in HCI".
5. "ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award".
6. "NSF CAREER Award".
7. "National Scholar Award for Workplace Innovation & Design" (PDF).
8. "Most prolific authors in computer science". DBLP.
9. Vatavu, R.-D., Anthony, L. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2012). Gestures as point clouds: A $P recognizer for user interface prototypes. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI '12). Santa Monica, California (October 22-26, 2012). New York: ACM Press, pp. 273-280. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2388676.2388732
10. NSF CAREER Award.
11. Jacob Wobbrock awarded $500K NSF grant to design more accessible mobile devices. URL retrieved 2 January 2018.
12. Taylor Soper. UW spinout AnswerDash, a contextual Q&A service for customer support, acquired by CloudEngage. GeekWire, June 23, 2020.
13. Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Student Awards
14. Wobbrock, J.O., Wilson, A.D. and Li, Y. (2007). Gestures without libraries, toolkits or training: A $1 recognizer for user interface prototypes. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '07). Newport, Rhode Island (October 7–10, 2007). New York: ACM Press, pp. 159-168. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1294211.1294238
15. Wobbrock, J.O., Aung, H.H., Rothrock, B. and Myers, B.A. (2005). Maximizing the guessability of symbolic input. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '05). Portland, Oregon (April 2–7, 2005). New York: ACM Press, pp. 1869-1872. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1056808.1057043
16. Wobbrock, J.O., Morris, M.R. and Wilson, A.D. (2009). User-defined gestures for surface computing. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). Boston, Massachusetts (April 4–9, 2009). New York: ACM Press, pp. 1083-1092. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518701.1518866
17. Kane, S.K., Bigham, J.P. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2008). Slide Rule: Making mobile touch screens accessible to blind people using multi-touch interaction techniques. Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '08). Halifax, Nova Scotia (October 13–15, 2008). New York: ACM Press, pp. 73-80. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1414487
18. Lazar, J., Goldstein, D. and Taylor, A. (2015). Ensuring digital accessibility through process and policy. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 35-36.
19. Wobbrock, J.O., Findlater, L., Gergle, D. and Higgins, J.J. (2011). The Aligned Rank Transform for nonparametric factorial analyses using only ANOVA procedures. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). Vancouver, British Columbia (May 7–12, 2011). New York: ACM Press, pp. 143-146. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1978963
20. Elkin, L.A., Kay, M., Higgins, J. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2021). An aligned rank transform procedure for multifactor contrast tests. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '21). Virtual Event (October 10–14, 2021). New York: ACM Press, pp. 754-768. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3472749.3474784
21. Findlater, L., Jansen, A., Shinohara, K., Dixon, M., Kamb, P., Rakita, J. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2010). Enhanced area cursors: Reducing fine-pointing demands for people with motor impairments. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '10). New York, NY (October 3–6, 2010). New York: ACM Press, pp. 153-162. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1866029.1866055
22. Jansen, A., Findlater, L. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2011). From the lab to the world: Lessons from extending a pointing technique for real-world use. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). Vancouver, British Columbia (May 7–12, 2011). New York: ACM Press, pp. 1867-1872. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979888
23. Wobbrock, J.O., Myers, B.A. and Kembel, J.A. (2003). EdgeWrite: A stylus-based text entry method designed for high accuracy and stability of motion. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '03). Vancouver, British Columbia (November 2–5, 2003). New York: ACM Press, pp. 61-70. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=964703
24. Wobbrock, J.O., Kane, S.K., Gajos, K.Z., Harada, S. and Froehlich, J. (2011). Ability-based design: Concept, principles and examples. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing 3 (3). Article No. 9. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1952384
25. Wobbrock, J.O., Gajos, K.Z., Kane, S.K. and Vanderheiden, G.C. (2018). Ability-Based Design. Communications of the ACM 61 (6), June 2018, pp. 62-71. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3148051
26. CloudEngage Acquires Seattle-based AnswerDash, Expanding Personalization Capabilities to Include AI Powered Self-Service Support. PR Newswire, June 23, 2020.
27. Glynn, J. and Sigg, K. (2000). DoDots. Stanford Graduate School of Business Case Study. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/dodots