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Organizers' backgrounds

Yelena Nakhimovsky is a User Experience Researcher at Google in Mountain View. She leads research for Google Maps for Mobile and has conducted research for mobile Gmail, mobile Search, iPhone products from Google, among other mobile and non-mobile projects, including contributing to in-house mobile research infrastructure. Prior to Google, she worked and studied in the field of educational technology. Yelena received her M.S. in Human Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech.


Dean Eckles is a research scientist at the Dept. of Communication at Stanford, and Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, where he investigates how people interact with mobile systems that sense the shared environment and actively influence communication behavior. In this same vein, he previously designed and studied mobile, context-aware photo sharing at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. He takes a mixed-method approach, using diary methods, interviews, and controlled lab and field experiments. Dean is co-editor of Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change, a volume that examines the growing use of mobile phones to change behaviors in health, consumption, and interpersonal communication. Dean received his M.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.


Jens Riegelsberger is a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google in London. He coordinates UX research in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. A specific focus of his work is Google's mobile user experience. Prior to joining Google Jens taught as a guest professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin and worked as a UX consultant with LBi in London. He conducted user research projects for the Microsoft Xbox 360, Amazon, and Lufthansa, among others.  He received his Ph.D. in Human Computer Interaction from University College London. 


Program Committee:
  • Frank Bentley is a Principal Staff Research Scientist in the Motorola Experiences Research Lab. Frank's work focuses on understanding mobile media use and social presence and includes field studies, design, implementation, and user testing of new communications concepts.  Frank joined Motorola full-time in 2002 after completing his bachelors and masters degrees in the EECS department of MIT. For the past two years, Frank has also co-taught a course at MIT on "Communicating with Mobile Technology."

  • Scott Counts, Scott is a Researcher in the VIBE Group and a member of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research. His research focuses on building social software based on social psychological principles in order to facilitate online social interactions and networks. Current projects focus on social-cognitive aspects of social software, mobile social software, and enabling social collection and analysis of data. Scott received his Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Washington in 2002.

  • Sabrina Duda, is Psychologist (specialized in Engineering Psychology) and Founder and Managing Director and Partner of eye square GmbH. Sabrina Duda is researching in the area of Usability, Cultural Usability and Mobile Usability. She studied Engineering Psychology and Computer Science at Humboldt University, Berlin (http://eye-square.com/english/team-en/duda-en.htm).
  • Gillian Hayes is an Assistant Professor in Informatics at  School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine. Her research interests are in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing,assistive and educational technologies and medical informatics. She is very interested in issues surrounding the technology needs of people in chronic care situations. Gillian directs the social and technological action research (STAR) group, and is an alumna of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. 
  • Torgny Heimler is working at Sony Ericsson's Experience Lab in Lund, Sweden, as a Usability specialist since 2005. Before that, he made a living out of programming, designing, technical writing, playing music and taking photos. His current work involves GOFUT (Good Old-Fashioned Usability Testing), field studies, ethnography, design reviews and the odd focus group, targeting a wide range of applications. The balance and tension between quantitative and qualitative studies interests him, as does rural India. Torgny received his MS in Cognitive Science from Linköping University.
  • Pekka Ketola is Senior User Experience Manager at Nokia. His research interests include mobile user experiences, product miniaturization, product innovations and out-of-box experiences. Research articles have been published in HCI journals and conferences (see http://www.kolumbus.fi/ketola_ap/publications.htm). He has a PhD from the University of Tampere, Finland. In the dissertation, the focus was in studying how usability engineering can be included in the complex product development. Current activities include UI guideline development in ETSI workgroups, and developing competence development solutions for UX professionals.
  • Hendrik Knoche is currently based in Lausanne and finishing his PhD at University College London in computer science, in the Human Centred Systems Group. He holds a Diploma in computer science from the University of Hamburg. His latest research and thesis focus on Quality of Experience (QoE) in mobile multimedia services. He's been trying to find beneficial trade-offs between QoE and economic constraints. Hendrik has worked in industry as a consultant in information architecture, mobile services (Nokia, Vodafone, Sport1) and research projects investigating distributed collaboration and TV-centric services. He is on the program committee of EuroITV and uxTV. His publications can be found at http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/H.Knoche/publications.htm.
  • Sven Koerber is a director at SirValUse Consulting GmbH, and joined the company in the beginning of 2002. Since then, he has conducted dozens of usability tests and expert reviews, including several worldwide multi-country ones. Recently, his focus has shifted to setting up mobile user experience studies, account and team management. His main areas of interest include information retrieval behaviour, use of mobile technology and complex web interfaces. Before joining SirValUse, he was employed at Infoseek Germany to help conceptualise and test new search features for the relaunch of the search engine in 2001. He holds an M.A. phil. in Communication Science, Sociology and Psychology.
  • Joke Kort is a senior scientist at TNO Information and Communication Technology, located in the Netherlands. Her main research interest is in User eXperience (UX) and she is currently working on this topic (developing theory,  measurements/methods for evaluation and validation thereof) in different national and European research projects. Furthermore Joke is a project leader for some commercial projects in which products (stationary as well as mobile) are developed and evaluated with usability and UX in mind. She is an alumna of the Psychology, State University Groningen and User System Interaction, IPO, University of Technology Eindhoven.
  • Kent Lyons is a Research Scientist at Intel Research. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2005 from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing, and Wearable Computing. His work has explored the collocated use of mobile devices as well as the interaction challenges associated with different kinds of mobile computers. More generally, he is interested in exploring the integration of mobile devices into everyday life through the use of HCI. Kent has authored numerous HCI papers on mobile and wearable computing and presented user interface work at CHI, UIST, ISWC and Mobile HCI. Kent has also had extensive experience with the everyday use of wearable computers having worn one himself for many years.
  • Mischa Weiss-Lijn is currently working on developing Nokia's service user experience strategy.  He was formerly Head of Interaction Design at ShoZu, a mobile software start up where he worked on designing and evaluating a social media application across all major mobile platforms.  He wrestles daily with the challenge of delivering mobile services that stretch from the web, the mobile web and mobile applications. Prior to Nokia and ShoZu, Mischa worked on designing web sites & applications at Europe's two biggest digital agencies.  He has a PhD in HCI from University College London and a degree in Psychology from Oxford University.