CCS Members

Tom Hewett is Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Drexel University where he teaches courses on Cognitive Psychology, The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction, The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction Design, and Problem Solving and Creativity. He has been a visiting fellow, visiting professor or visiting researcher at the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland, Twente University, Hengelo, The Netherlands, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, the Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, and the University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece. Most recently, during academic year 2003-2004, Tom spent a month as Visting Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Currently Tom is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), the Society for Applied Research in Cognition (SARMAC), the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) and the IEEE Computer Society. Tom regularly offers a professional development tutorial on cognitive aspects of interactive computing system design to interface designers at both conferences and in-house training sessions. He regularly teaches a week long course module on Human Problem Solving for the User System Interaction program at the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. In addition, Tom has made a variety of invited and refereed conference presentations..

Tom Hewett is a published courseware author and has worked on the design, development and evaluation of several interactive computing projects, the earliest being a semi-intelligent, on-line assistance program for users of bibliographic database search services, and an interactive hypertext guidebook to the Macintosh and micro computing facilities at Drexel University. (A derived version of this guidebook is still distributed to all faculty and students at Drexel almost two decades after its first introduction as a campus resource.) Some research papers have described the structure and implications of a taxonomy for thinking about instructional computing and have explored pedagogical and institutional implications of universal student access to personal computers. Other research papers have focused on the evaluation of interactive computing systems and the impact of evaluation on the design process. Tom chaired the ACM SIGCHI Curriculum Development Group that wrote recommendations for undergraduate curricula and courses for Human Computer Interaction and has participated in several other curriculum development projects. He served for four years as Vice Chair for Operations of SIGCHI, was one of the general co-chairs for the CHI '94 conference held in Boston, MA, USA and has chaired or co-chaired the CHI tutorials program 3 times. More recently Tom was one of the program co-chairs for the 4th Creativity and Cognition conference held in Loughborough, UK. Recent research includes working with a group of computer scientists interested in developing a scientific Problem Solving Environment (PSE) which integrated symbolic and numeric computing. Another recent project involved studying and developing tools for networked engineering design. A recently funded project with colleagues at Drexel involves development of symbolic computing tools to facilitate the work of mathematics tutors participating as Math Doctors with the Math Forum at Drexel. In addition, Tom maintains on going collaboration with the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology Sydney.