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2007 ORION Leadership Award of Merit Recipient
Dr. Ronald M. Baecker
Dr. Ronald Baecker as he accepts the ORION Leadership Award of Merit at the 2007 award presentations in Toronto, June 4, 2007.
Dr. Ronald M. Baecker, University of Toronto Professor of Computer Science, widely recognized as one of the world's pioneers of computer animation and leading authority in the field of human-computer interaction, is the 2007 ORION Leadership Award of Merit winner.
From his early research at MIT, where he pioneered the use of computers to enable artists to interactively create animated films, Dr. Baecker's 40-year research career spans applications to education, medicine, and design.
Founder of the world-renowned Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI), Dr. Baecker has accumulated a long list of international awards and citations, making him one of Ontario's most accomplished and celebrated innovators.
A professor in three faculties at the University of Toronto (Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Management), he is also Bell Universities Laboratories Chair in Human-Computer Interaction; and founder and chief scientist at the UofT's KMDI.
He is also principal investigator of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council's Canada-wide Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research (NECTAR); and an affiliate scientist with the Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit at Baycrest.
ACM SIGGRAPH (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics), the industry's premier professional association, named him one of 60 pioneers of computer graphics. In 2005, he had the rare distinction of also being elected to the CHI (Computers and Human Interaction) Academy by ACM SIGCHI.
In the late 1960s, his PhD work helped launch the field of computer animation and in the 1970s, his interest in user-centered design led Dr. Baecker to the development of the field now called human-computer interaction, pioneering the use of new, friendlier input techniques and improved user interface design.
His instructional movie, Sorting out Sorting, was a landmark contribution to software visualization and is still used by computer science instructors all over the world. In that decade, he also pioneered the use of digital typography, to make computer programs more readable and accessible.
Around that time, he was among the developers of the idea of telepresence for computer-supported collaborative work. He was also among the first to see that the dissemination of "knowledge" and its encapsulation as "media" would have a profound effect on how information is represented and communicated.
As an entrepreneur, Dr. Baecker has founded, managed and successfully sold two software companies.
His current interests include ePresence, his vigorous new webcasting, conferencing, and rich media archiving system. Distributed as open-source technology by the UofT, it is used by 25 Canadian universities and medical schools and a growing number in other countries.
His most recent interest finds Dr. Baecker pioneering in yet another new field: the creation of computer-based cognitive tools as prosthetics for memory and language, to help victims of amnesia, Alzheimer's disease and other maladies and their caregivers.
For more information, visit http://kmdi.utoronto.ca/rmb and http://epresence.tv.
Back to the 2007 ORION Award winners page
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