The Organizers

---

 Daniel Russell has been working in the area of sensemaking since the early 1990s. His publication of The cost structure of sensemaking in 1993 (with Stu Card, Mark Stefik, and Peter Pirolli) led to a stream of research in this area. Now a Senior Research Scientist at Google, he primarily studies how people formulate information needs and satisfy them with online research tools and databases. He has run three earlier CHI workshops on sensemaking, one of which led to a special edition publication of the journal Computer-Human Interaction  

 Gregorio Covertino is a Sr. UX Manager and UX Researcher at Cloudera. He has been working on collaborative visualizations for sensemaking since 2003 with his PhD work on multi-role emergency management teams. In addition, he has worked on bias and visualizations for intelligence analysis teams at Xerox PARC. At Informatica and Cloudera, his most recent research work has focused on self-service analytics tools for business users, big data tools for data scientists and IT professionals, and log analytics tools  

Niki Kittur is an Associate Professor and Cooper-Siegel Chair in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research explores a future that scales sensemaking beyond the limits of a single individual’s mind by: 1) distributing sensemaking among many people and machines; 2) enabling people to build on the sensemaking that others have already done; and 3) seamlessly integrating human and machine cognition to make sense of large information spaces. He is also a co-founder of DataSquid, a startup that supports sensemaking by bringing the power of intuitive touch and physics to data visualization.

 Peter Pirolli has been a long-time contributor to the sensemaking literature, establishing his contributions to this area with the seminal book Information Foraging Theory (2007). His research involves a mix of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction, with applications in digital health, sensemaking, and information foraging 

 Elizabeth Anne Watkins is a PhD student at Columbia University, and applies the sensemaking framework to the use of cybersecurity tools in organizations. In her research on news publishers she’s found they combine the technical and organizational issues of bureaucratic systems with the creative, autonomous decision-making of both affiliate and freelance journalists. Sensemaking provides a lens to study how journalists in these organizations “make sense” of information security across continuously shifting sociotechnical contexts.