David Kieras wins a Best Paper Award at CHI 2014

Prof. David Kieras has coauthored a paper that has been selected for a SIGCHI Best of CHI Best Paper Award at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

The paper, entitled Towards Accurate and Practical Predictive Models of Active-Vision-Based Visual Search, was coauthored with Kieras’ former student Anthony Hornof (PhD CSE 1999), now an Associate Professor in Computer and Information Science at the University of Oregon and currently on assignment as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation.

The paper discusses recent advances in cognitive modeling which permit increasingly realistic and accurate predictions for visual human-computer interaction tasks such as icon search by incorporating an “active vision” approach which emphasizes eye movements to visual features based on the availability of features in relationship to the point of gaze. It presents a high fidelity model of a classic visual search task that demonstrates the value of incorporating visual acuity functions into models of visual performance. The features captured by the high-fidelity model are then used to formulate a model simple enough for practical use, which is then implemented in an easy-to-use GLEAN modeling tool. Easy-to-use predictive models for complex visual search are thus feasible and should be further developed.

Prof. Kieras’ research activities are in the area of applied and theoretical cognitive psychology, with specific interests in human-computer interaction, cognitive simulation modeling, human performance, complex human learning, and natural language processing. His research approach is to construct computational models for the cognitive processes involved in tasks that have practical importance, validate the models against empirical data, and prepare them for practical application.

Prof. Kieras received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. After a two-year R.K. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Carnegie-Mellon, he joined the Psychology Department as Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona. In 1984, he joined the faculty of CSE at the University of Michigan where he also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology. Prof. Kieras received the Jack A. Kraft Innovator Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in 2010. He is a member of the CHI Academy and is affiliated with the Interactive Systems Lab in CSE.