Abstract

Abigail Sellen is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft’s research lab in Cambridge. Beginning her career as a psychologist, she never expected to work for a string of big American IT companies. Since getting her PhD in Cognitive Science in 1990, she fell by chance into Computer Science by taking a summer internship at Apple Computer where she discovered it’s possible to do paid work, have fun and invent new technologies all at the same time. In the years that followed, she did more of the same at EuroPARC (Xerox’s European equivalent of PARC ) and at Hewlett-Packard’s lab in Bristol, as well as a short stint at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge. Abi will talk about the ups and downs of industrial research, the occasional chaos of combining a research career with raising a family, and how out of all of this you can do research you enjoy.