Congratulations to Dr. George Fitzmaurice

I am pleased to share that my colleague has won an award. George Fitzmaurice (pronounced fitz-morris by the way) was nominated and has been awarded entry into the ACM CHI Academy! The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, and awardees are given lifetime invitations to the annual Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) award banquet. Back in the day, I met Admiral Grace Hopper (the inventor of the COBOL programming language) when she attended an ACM meeting at my school. My point is that ACM is no stranger to those who have impacted our industry, and George is no exception.

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George Fitzmaurice is our Director of the User Interface (UI) Research Group at Autodesk Research. In collaboration with his colleagues, he has co-authored over 110 research papers and has been awarded over 90 patents in a range of areas spanning the field of Human-Computer Interaction, including:

• 3D User Interfaces
• Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) Interactions
• Wearable and Mobile Interaction
• Software Learnability and Learning Systems
• Interactive Visualizations of HR data and Organization Knowledge
• Sketch-Based Animation
• Pen-based interactions
• Interactive Fabrication
• Physical Crowdsourcing
• Human-Robot Interaction

He was instrumental in establishing the field of Graspable UIs, the precursor to what is known as Tangible UIs. He also pioneered the concept of spatially-aware displays and situated information spaces with his Chameleon research project which are now commonly known as "mobile AR."

In addition to HCI research, George has led efforts to productize many of his own research projects and those carried out in his lab. Some notable achievements in this vein are Autodesk SketchBook Motion (awarded the 2016 Apple iPad App of the Year), the ViewCube and SteeringWheels widgets (the standard 3D navigation mechanisms across Autodesk products), and the productization of the research project Chronicle into Autodesk Screencast, which has created a rich community of learning content attracting over 3 million site visitors and generating thousands of tutorial videos. Earlier in his career, he contributed to the design of the Maya 1.0 animation product, and the Sketchbook pen-based drawing tool.

Dr. Fitzmaurice received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and also holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Brown University and a B.Sc. in Mathematics with Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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Dr. George Fitzmaurice, he puts the human in human-computer interaction.

Congratulation, George!

A celebration is alive in the lab.