Yvonne Rogers

General

Yvonne Rogers is a Professor of Interaction Design, the director of UCLIC and a deputy head of the Computer Science department at UCL. Her research interests are in the areas of ubiquitous computing, interaction design and human-computer interaction. A central theme of her work is how to design interactive technologies that can enhance life by augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities. This involves informing, building and evaluating novel user experiences through designing, implementing and deploying a diversity of technologies. A current focus of her research is on human-centred data and people in the Internet of Things in urban settings. She is also researching what human-centred AI means in practice.

Central to her work is a critical stance towards how visions, theories and frameworks shape the fields of HCI, cognitive science and Ubicomp. She has been instrumental in promulgating new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in the wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., "Being Human: HCI in 2020". She has also published two monographs "HCI Theory: Classical, Modern and Contemporary"and "Research in the Wild" with Paul Marshall.

Brief biography

Yvonne joined UCL in September 2011. From 2006-2011, she was professor of HCI in the Computing Department at the Open University; from 2003-2006, she was a professor in Informatics at Indiana University. Prior to this, she spent 11 years at the former School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at Sussex University. She has spent sabbaticals at Stanford, Apple, Queensland University, University of Cape Town, University of Melbourne, QUT, UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz.

Yvonne was one of the principal investigators on the UK Equator Project (2000-2007) where she pioneered ubiquitous learning. She has published widely, beginning with her PhD work on graphical interfaces to her recent work on public visualisations and behavioural change. More recently, she was a PI for the Intel Collaborative Research Institute (ICRI) on sustainable and connected cities. This was a joint collaboration between UCL and Imperial, that ran for 5 years from 2012-2018. In her earlier career, she was awarded a prestigious EPSRC dream fellowship rethinking the relationship between ageing, computing and creativity.

In 2022 she was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award; "presented to individuals for outstanding contributions to the study of human-computer interaction" and the Royal Society Robin Milner Medal . In the same year, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society as "one of the leaders who created the field of Ubiquitous Computing". She collaborates a lot with industrial partners and was awarded a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award. She also received a MRC Suffrage and Science Award (2020) for being one of the leading women in 'mathematics & computing.' She is also a Fellow of the ACM; a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the ACM's CHI Academy: "an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction."

She is one of the authors of the definitive textbook on Interaction Design and HCI (soon to be 6th edition), that has sold over 300,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into many languages.