Carl Gutwin
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Carl Gutwin is a Canadian computer scientist, professor and the director of the
Human–computer interaction Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the process through which people operate and engage with computer systems. Research in HCI covers the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and comp ...
(HCI) Lab at the
University of Saskatchewan The University of Saskatchewan (U of S, or USask) is a Universities in Canada, Canadian public university, public research university, founded on March 19, 1907, and located on the east side of the South Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon, Saskatch ...
. He is also a co-theme leader in the SurfNet research network and was a past holder of a Canada Research Chair in Next-Generation Groupware. Gutwin is known for his contributions in HCI ranging from the technical aspects of systems architectures, to the design and implementation of interaction techniques, and to social theory as applied to design. Gutwin was papers co-chair at CHI 2011 and was a conference co-chair of Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2010.


Education

Gutwin has
undergraduate degrees An undergraduate degree (also called first degree or simply degree) is a colloquial term for an academic degree earned by a person who has completed undergraduate courses. In the United States, it is usually offered at an institution of higher ed ...
in
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...
and in
English literature English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian languages, Anglo-Frisian d ...
. He received his
PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...
in 1997 from the
University of Calgary {{Infobox university , name = University of Calgary , image = University of Calgary coat of arms without motto scroll.svg , image_size = 150px , caption = Coat of arms , former ...
, where he worked and developed the idea of workspace awareness as a design factor for distributed groupware systems.


Research

Gutwin's main research areas are in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), groupware usability, interaction techniques, collaboration support, modelling human performance, information visualization and interface design. Along with his students and collaborators, Gutwin has published more than 200 papers in Human Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work.


KEA: Key Phrase Extraction

In 1999, Gutwin developed a key phrase extraction algorithm along with Ian Witten, Gordon Paynter, Eibe Frank, and Craig Nevill-Manning called KEA. Key phrases are important to a document as they provide a brief summary of a document's content and as document collections such as
digital libraries A digital library (also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection) is an online database of digital resources that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital ...
become larger, the value of such summary information increases. The goal of the algorithm is to help alleviate the tedious process of assigning key phrases manually. The algorithm uses
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
, lexical methods, and calculates feature values for each candidate to predict which candidates are good key phrases.


Workspace awareness for groupware

In 2002, Gutwin along with Saul Greenberg, developed a research paper regarding the idea of workspace awareness (the up-to-the-moment understanding of another person's interaction with a shared workspace) and how it can help and improve the usability of a groupware application. The goal of the research was to provide groupware designers a framework about how to design for awareness in multi-user systems, specifically workspace awareness. The developed framework can help educate designers about awareness in groupware and help to improve the quality of the systems that are built.


Group awareness in distributed software development

In 2004, Gutwin, alongside Reagan Penner and Kevin Schneider, evaluated how distributed developers maintain group awareness (where in the code are they working, what are they doing, and what their plans are). The team interviewed developers and reviewed project artifacts and communications from three
open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
projects. The findings suggested that developers maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with. The primary tools for maintaining awareness were mailing lists and chat tools. The study is one of the first to consider how awareness works in the real world.


Tag clouds

In 2008, Gutwin along with Scott Bateman and Miguel Nacenta, explored the popular method of
tag clouds A tag cloud (also known as a word cloud or weighted list in visual design) is a visual representation of text data which is often used to depict keyword metadata on websites, or to visualize free form text. Tags are usually single words, and th ...
which help visualize and link socially-organized information on websites. The goal of the research was to find out which visual features of tags draw the attention of viewers. The study was conducted by asking users to select tags from clouds that manipulated nine visual properties. The results showed that font size and font weight have stronger effects than other features such as intensity and number of characters. However, when several visual properties are changed at once, there is no one property that stands out above the others. The study also makes way for general applications such as the visual presentation of
hyperlinks In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to data by a user's clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with ...
as a way to provide more information to web navigators.


Touch-based interaction

In 2012, Gutwin along with Andy Cockburn and David Ahlstrom, studied the human factors of touch based interactions such as tapping and dragging. The goal of the research was to provide developers a
foundational knowledge Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon non-inferential justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises.Simon Blackburn, ''The Oxford Dict ...
in this area. The experiment was conducted using three input devices (the finger, stylus, and mouse as a performance baseline) and three different pointing activities which were bidirectional tapping, one-dimensional dragging, and radial dragging (pointing to items arranged in a circle around the cursor). For tapping, the results showed that finger pointing was faster than the stylus/mouse but inaccurate. For dragging, finger input is slower than mouse and stylus. For radial dragging, it was found that task time and movement distance are all linearly correlated with number of items available. Other radial dragging results showed that the stylus is the fastest but had the highest error rate of the three devices.


Awards

Gutwin was inducted into the ACM
CHI Academy The SIGCHI Academy is a group of researchers honored by SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group in Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. Each year, 5–8 new members are elected for having made a significant, cumulative ...
for his contributions to HCI research in 2012. In 2015 he was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Researcher.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gutwin, Carl Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian computer scientists University of Calgary alumni Academic staff of the University of Saskatchewan