Featuring Lucy Suchman, professor of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University.

Lucy Suchman has engaged for over 30 years in research at the interface of humans and machines, with a particular focus on initiatives in the delegation of human capabilities to technological systems. Before taking up her present post, she was a principal scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where she spent 20 years as a researcher. Her current research extends her longstanding engagement with the fields of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and robotics to the domain of contemporary war fighting—including problems of ‘situational awareness’ in military training and simulation, and in remotely-controlled weapon systems. She has written for both social and information sciences audiences, and is the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) and Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication (1987), both published by Cambridge University Press. In 2002 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Sciences, in 2010 the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award, and in 2014 the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Bernal Prize for Contributions to the Field.

Sponsors: Recovering Prairie Futures, IPRH Research Cluster, Provost’s Office, College of Engineering, College of Media, School of Information Sciences, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology