| Jolle Coutaz, Honorary Professor, Univ Grenoble Alpes Professor at University Grenoble Alps (1991 - 2020) Founding Member of Informatics Laboratory of Grenoble (LIG) French Legion of Honour (2013) IFIP Fellow (first cohort - 2019) IFIP TC13 Pionneer Award (2013) ACM SICHI Academy (2007) Honorary Dr. of Science, Glasgow University (2007) Wikipedia page, Google scholar page joelle at crowley-coutaz dot fr Participation in European Commission projects: ESPRIT BRA/LTR AMODEUS (1989-1995), IST FET GLOSS, IST CAMELEON, IST NoE SIMILAR, ITEA EMODE, ITEA UsiXML, Catrene AppsGate Participation in National projects: ANR CONTINUUM, ANR INVOLVED, FUI Minalogic NOMAD, Participation in Dagstuhl seminars on Ubiquitous Computing and on End-User Software Engineering |
Human Computer
Interaction, Multimodal Interaction, User Interface plasticity,
End-User Programming/End-User Development, Digital Behaviour Change
Intervention, Ambient intelligence, Smart home technologies.
I
have studied Computer Science at University Grenoble Alps (formerly
Universit Joseph Fourier) where I obtained my doctorate in 1970 and
Thse dEtat in
1988 in which I
set the foundations of software engineering for Human Computer
Interaction (HCI). I am currently professor honorary, formerly full
professor at University Grenoble Alps
from 1973 to Oct. 2012, and professor emeritus until Sept. 2020. I am
the founder in 1990,of the HCI research
group(Ingnierie de lInteraction
Homme-Machine) at the LIG laboratory
(Laboratory of
Informatics of Grenoble), and served as group leader until
2010,
I have been
involved in the
ACM CHI conference as paper and panel chairs. I have served as vice
chair of the
IFIP
Working Group 2.7(13.2) (User Interface Engineering). I have
served as a member of
the editorial board of Interacting
with Computer (Oxford Academic) and of the ACM Transactions On
Computer Human
Interaction (TOCHI).
In France, I was
the co-founder of two working groups on Computer Supported
Collaborative Work (CSCW) and Multimodal interaction of the CNRS
national programme.
I have served as expert for ANR (Agence
Nationale de Recherche)
as
well as for the European Commission. I have been involved in the ESPRIT
BRA/LTR
project AMODEUS (1989-1995) which was the first project in Europe to
truly
promote a multidisciplinary approach to HCI.
In 2008, I have
coordinated a
working group on Ambient Intelligence for the French Ministry of
Research
(MESR) to create a new trans-disciplinary field that brings together
Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) and Social and Human
Sciences (SHS) to
address societal challenges in novel ways. From 2012 to 2020, I
co-directed the Amiqual4Home innovation platform in the field of
Ambient Intelligence funded by the EquipEx program of the French
"Programme d'Investissement d'Avenir" in collaboration with INRIA
Grenoble Research Center and the University Grenoble Alps.
In 2007, I received the honorary degree of
Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) from
the University of Glasgow and I have been elected to the SIGCHI
Academy for leadership
in the profession in Computer Human Interaction. On March 8, 2013, I
was awarded the Legion of Honor by the Republic of France for my
pioneering contributions to Human-Computer Interaction. I was also
awarded the title of "IFIP
TC13 Pioneer", then nominated IFIP Fellow in 2019 in recognition of
"outstanding contributions to the educational, theoretical, technical,
commercial aspects of analysis, design, construction, evaluation and
use of interactive systems".
I am deeply honored to be included
in the HCI
Pioneers website launched by Ben
Shneiderman to draw attention to the trail blazers in HCI.
My early
interests concerned the software
foundations for the sound implementation of graphical and multimodal
interactive systems. In 1987, I
invented the Presentation-Abstraction-Control (PAC) software
architecture model whose
innovations have since been incorporated into modern
forms of MVC (see wikipedia).
This model was subsequently
improved with my colleague Laurence Nigay as the ARCH model to support
multimodal interaction.
In 1999, with the move to ubiquitous computing, I defined the concept of user interface plasticity as the capacity of user interfaces to adapt to the context of use while preserving usability. The concept of User interface plasticity has then been elaborated within the European CAMELEON project as a Unifying Reference Framework that operationalizes the development of plastic user interfaces. This framework has received high attention with more than 1200 citations since its publication in 2003 and has served as a structure for the definition of UI description languages developed in the European UsiXML project. In collaboration with colleagues, I developed the notion of "context" for user interface plasticity.
In 2007, I
was invited to
participate to the Dagsthul Seminar on End-user Software Engineering to
work on the challenges faced in helping end-user programmers to create
dependable software. As a follow-up of this work, I
co-directed the Catrene AppsGate project that included the development
of a smart-home
control system that sought to empower ordinary people to configure and
program smart home services. I have been living with Appsgate in my own
home from Fall 2014 to Winter 2023 (due to the final breakdown of
hardware !). AppsGate let us program many convenient functionalities
such as using Philips Hue lights as eco-feedback on our energy
consumption. From end-user programming facility, AppsGame turned to be
used as a Digital Behavior Change Intervention (DBCI) system.
Since
2013, my research
interest focuses on DBCI. I currently participate to the ANR ePsyCHI
project that aims to develop a set of semi-formal languages, called the
ePsyCHI language, to formalize, articulate, and make operational key
psychological theories related to behaviour change.
It was at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) that, in 1982, I first used a mouse to interact with a computer. I returned to CMU in 1983 as a scientific visitor, and it is there that I developed the concept of the UI mediator published in IEEE Computer Sept. 1985 (Abstractions for User Interface Design), as well as a constraint-based screen layout manager for the syntactic editor of the Gandalf project (one of the very first software development environments, led by Nico Haberman). In France, at the time, personal workstations did not exist, whereas CMU was equipped with Altos and Perqs. At CMU, I had the opportunity to chat with James Gosling who was developing the window manager for the Andrew system. I remember rich discussions about the pros and cons of overlapping VS tiled windows. I used my own money to one of the first Macs and to attend CHI 83 in Boston, just out of curiosity. CHI 83 changed my scientific orientation completely. I returned to France in December 84 with my Apple Macintosh (imagine: no disk drive and 128 Kbyte of main memory, but a very well-designed programmers toolkit!). It is then that I left behind my research in operating systems and networks (I experimented the use of packet switching for interconnecting computers), and started working on the software aspects of HCI (not knowing yet that HCI would become a research area).
My belief: you need to do what you feel is right, and not systematically follow the comfortabe path paved by mainstream research areas.
Publications,
Biography, Short CV (.pdf),
Research interests, A
bit of history
Last
update: February 2023