Citizenship American Name Elizabeth Churchill | Nationality British | |
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Doctoral advisor Richard Young, Thomas Green Residence San Francisco, California, United States Fields Human–computer interaction, Cognitive science, Experimental psychology, Artificial intelligence | ||
Chi 2014 elizabeth f churchill plenary reasons to be cheerful
Elizabeth Frances Churchill is a British American psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction (HCI) and social computing. She is the Secretary-Treasurer of the ACM and is a Director of User Experience at Google.
Contents
- Chi 2014 elizabeth f churchill plenary reasons to be cheerful
- Background
- Research
- Academic work
- References
Background
Churchill was born in Calcutta, India and moved to Newcastle upon Tyne in her early childhood. She gained a B.Sc. in Experimental Psychology and a M.S. in Knowledge Based Systems from Sussex University in the United Kingdom where she worked on Soar simulations. After completing a Ph.D. (1994) from the University of Cambridge, she joined University of Nottingham as a Postdoc. In 1997, she moved to California, United States to join FXPAL where she formed and lead their Social Computing Group. In 2004, Churchill joined Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). She joined Yahoo! in 2006 as a principal research scientist, where she formed and led the Internet Experiences Group in the Microeconomics and Social Systems division of Yahoo! Labs. Her group and research was multidisciplinary, addressing the intersection of computer science, cognitive and social psychology, design science, neuroscience, analytics, and anthropology. She was previously Director of Human Computer Interaction for eBay Research Labs in San Jose, CA. Currently, she is a Director of User Experience at Google in Mountain View, CA. In 2009, she was elected as the Executive Vice President of ACM SIGCHI on a joint ballot with Gerrit van der Veer, SIGCHI's president.
Research
Churchill is known for her work on Embodied Conversational Agents and co-edited a book of the same name, an area of HCI which uses computer generated embodied agents together with a model of gesture and facial expression to enable face-to-face speech communication with people. She is also known for her work on public displays and installations. In 2011, she co-edited a special journal issue on Feminism and HCI with Shaowen Bardzell at Indiana University Bloomington.
Academic work
Churchill has chaired and run the technical program in several top conferences and publishes regularly in top-tier academic journals and conferences in computer science, human-computer interaction, sociology, and related fields. Her work has appeared in various newspapers and magazines around the world including Scientific American and SFGate.