Wendy Mackay


Wendy Elizabeth Mackay is a Canadian researcher specializing in human-computer interaction. She has served in all of the roles on the SIGCHI committee, including Chair. She is a member of the CHI Academy and a recipient of a European Research Council Advanced grant. She has been a visiting professor in Stanford University between 2010 and 2012, and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2014.
She is currently leading research at Exsitu, while being a Research Director with INRIA Saclay in France. She is specialized in the research of human context and aims to develop and to facilitate the development of interfaces that provide users with the tools needed to accomplish the task at hand.

Background and contributions

Mackay received a B.A. in Psychology from University of California, San Diego in 1977. She received a M.S. in Experimental Psychology from Northeastern University in 1979 and a Ph.D in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990.
Her scientific contributions include writing the original toolkit software for IVIS, the world's first interactive video system. She also conducted the first major study of electronic mail while at MIT. Her design methods are taught in institutions around the world such as Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, and University of British Columbia. Mackay has published over two hundred research articles on human-computer interaction and has served as program chair or on the program committees of ACM CHI, ACM UIST, ACM CSCW, ACM DIS and ACM Multimedia.

Career

After graduating from MIT with a Ph.D, Mackay formed a multimedia research grop at Digital Equipment Corporation. There, she created over 30 multimedia projects, including the first interactive video system which was titled IVIS. She then continued to manage research groups at MIT and eventually worked as a senior research scientist at Xerox PARC where she published an award-winning special issue of Communications of the ACM on Computer Augmented Environments. She also worked on augmented paper interfaces and explored the integration of paper with the online world. Afterward, she taught at University of Aarhus, University of Paris-Sud, and Stanford University as a visiting professor.

Notable Awards

Wendy married Michel Beaudouin-Lafon on August 11, 1993 in Avalon, California. She has two sons - Alexandre and Matthew Thomas Beaudouin-Mackay.