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James Hollan

Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science
University of California, San Diego - (FIAS Program)
Catalyzing A Human-Centered Information Research Program: Beyond Application and Document-Centered Views of Information
01 September 2021 - 30 June 2022
Neuroscience
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James Hollan is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award and is founding co-director of the Design Lab and the Distributed Cognition and HCI Lab. His research explores the cognitive consequences of computational media and addresses questions of importance for today’s increasingly technological society: How does technology shape our minds? How should what we know about our minds shape technology?

In September 2021, he joined the Paris IAS as part of the French Institutes for Advanced Study fellowship program - FIAS - co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945408. His fellowship also benefits from the support of the RFIEA+ LABEX, with a national funding (Grant ANR-11-LABX-0027-01).

Research interests

Human Computer Interaction and Information Visualization

Catalyzing A Human-Centered Information Research Program: Beyond Application and Document-Centered Views of Information

The sophisticated cognition demanded by contemporary information work has outpaced innovation in user interfaces. In modern computing systems, information is still encapsulated in application silos, leaving users to shuttle files between applications, cobbling together workflows, requiring troublesome context switching and increasing attentional demands. In short, we lack a cognitively convivial space for intellectual work.

Human-centered information is both an idea and the motivation for a novel computational environment. It is the idea of a cognitive workspace—a desktop for intellectual activity—reified as a computational environment that actively supports the coordination of information-based work by developing awareness of the structure of a user’s action: how she accomplishes activities through discrete tasks across devices, programs, and working sessions. Through use, information in the environment will accumulate and represent context: not only who accessed it and when, but concurrent activity and semantic relationships to other data. Just as awareness of the past influences human behavior, the content and context of the history of activity will drive the behavior of information. To the user, her information should seem alive, have awareness, know where it came from, how it got there, what it means—and behave accordingly.

 

Key publications

Hollan James D., Fox AR., Guo P., Nylandsted Klokmose C. et al., “Towards a Dynamic Multiscale Personalized Information Space: beyond application and document centered views of information” In Conference Companion of the 4th International Conference on Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming (<Programming> '20). Association for Computing Machinery, 2020, p. 136–143. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397537.3397542

Hollan James D., Rule A., Tabard A., “Exploration and Explanation in Computational Notebooks”, in Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2018, p.1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173606  

Hollan James D., Hutchins E., Kirsh D., “Distributed cognition: A new theoretical foundation for human-computer interaction research”, in ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 7, n°2, 2000, p.174–196. https://doi.org/10.1145/353485.353487 

Lecture by James Hollan, Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science, University of California, San Diego, 2021/2022 Paris Institute for Advanced Study Fellow as part of the Netias Lectures Seriess
31 Mar 2022 17:00 -
31 Mar 2022 18:30,
Addressing the Challenge of Human-Technology Partnership in the Digital Era: A Human-Centered Information Space Approach
Seminar by Jim Hollan organized by the Collège de France as part of the series on "Reimagining our Interaction with the Digital World"
01 Mar 2022 11:00 -
01 Mar 2022 12:00,
Paris :
Thinking with Computers: Opportunities and Challenges
01 Feb 2022 10:00 -
01 Feb 2022 13:00,
Catalyzing a Human-Centered Information Research Program: Beyond Application and Document-Centered Views of Information
Talk by Jim Hollan, 2021-2022 Paris IAS Fellow, as part of PHITECO2022, organized by the Université de technologie de Compiègne
19 Jan 2022 10:00 -
19 Jan 2022 11:10,
Compiègne :
Beyond Beyond-Being-There
Lecture series organized by the European Network of Institutes of Advanced Studies Netias in collaboration with the New Europe College, Bucharest
28 Oct 2021 17:00 -
30 Jun 2022 17:00,
Knowledge in the digital age

26445
2021-2022
Contemporary period (1789-…)
World or no region