Jonathan Grudin's history connected to computer history on a school
field trip, when he played blackjack against a huge computer at
Battelle Laboratories in Columbus, Ohio. Perhaps a vacuum tube had
burned out. The computer claimed to have won when it had not,
convincing Jonathan that computers were impressive but not
infallible. While in high school, he taught himself to write
programs, enter them on punch cards, and run them on a nearby
college's sole computer, unused in the evenings and on weekends.
His first program found twin primes; his second constructed random
bridge hands.
Jonathan majored in mathematics-physics at Reed College and
obtained an M.S. in mathematics at Purdue University. After working
as a programmer at Wang Laboratories and Stanford University, he
obtained a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, working with Don Norman
at the University of California, San Diego and spending two of his
summers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. During a
two-year postdoc at the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology
Unit in Cambridge, he conducted his first human-computer
interaction studies with Phil Barnard and Allan MacLean. He
returned to work as a software engineer at Wang Laboratories and
team leader at the artificial intelligence-oriented
Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation consortium in
Austin, Texas. From 1989 to 1991, he was a visiting professor at
Aarhus University. His first exploration of the field's history, in
the library next to his office, was to determine the origin of the
waterfall model of software development. From 1992 to 1998, he was
a professor of information and computer science at the University
of California, Irvine. He spent six-month sabbaticals at Keio
University and the University of Oslo. In 1998, he joined Microsoft
and became an affiliate professor at the University of Washington
Information School.
Jonathan is an ACM Fellow and member of ACM SIGCHI's CHI Academy.
He has participated in CHI and CSCW since their first conferences.
His CSCW 1988 paper on the challenges in designing technology to
support groups won the first CSCW Lasting Impact Award in 2014.
Penn State University
"I believe the book is successful in its aim to present a reasonably balanced narrative of the emergence of human factors as a consideration in technological discourse... I would recommend this book to students, pundits, and those new to industries where the current digital technologies are fundamental to their success." - Robert Willis, Vancouver Island University
Ask a Question About this Product More... |