Panel

Designing for Complexity: New Approaches to System Administration UI's
Designing user interfaces for system administration is challenging due to the ever increasing complexity of the systems and potential risks involved in the operation of such systems. This topic is of significant interest to the Human-Computer Interaction community. Improving system administration work environments has the potential for decreasing both the cost of computing and risk of downtime associated with deploying/maintaining complex systems.

This panel brings together lead user interface architects from leading IT companies, who will present their current and emerging ideas and strategies with respect to creating tools for system administration in current complex environments that will increase administrator efficiency and system reliability.

Jeff Calcaterra IBM Systems and Technology Group
Jeff Calcaterra is a UI designer for IBM (R) Systems Director. Prior to Systems Director, he worked for most of his career as a consulting user experience professional on a variety of projects ranging from mobile devices to websites to product and patch installation and IT problem determination. Jeff has been with IBM for 9 years and has an MS in Human Factors Psychology from Wright State University.
Eddie Chen Principal User Experience Specialist, BMC
Eddie Chen is a Principal User Experience Specialist at BMC Software, where he has been since 2003. He received his degree in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego, and has worked in the Human-Computer Interaction field for more than 14 years, mostly in enterprise and system administration software, but also having worked on projects ranging from e-commerce, to consumer electronics, to game software. He has also guest lectured for the Human Factors class at CSU East Bay and believes in the phrase “sometimes a teacher, always a student”.
Vinay Gupta Distinguished Technologist, Manageability Architect, Hewlett-Packard
Vinay Gupta is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett-Packard. He is the Manageability Architect for HP's high-end NonStop systems. He has been working on manageability applications since 1994 after his graduation from Institute of Technology in India. He has a lot of experience architecting, designing, and developing many user interfaces related to system manageability and serviceability. He has worked all the way from command line based user interfaces to highly graphical web-based user interfaces. One of his major objectives has been to create easy to use and intuitive UIs for customers to make their job easier, especially in very scalable environments.
Luke Kowalski Corporate UI Architect, Oracle Corp.
Luke Kowalski helps with technology policy and serves as the corporate UI architect at Oracle. His role bridges the user interface (UI) design groups at Oracle, and he works as an evangelist for effective UI technology, on legal aspects of user interfaces, accessibility, M&A business context and partnerships, as well as cross-divisional information architecture strategy. Before coming to Oracle, he worked for various startups as director of UI and Web, as well as for Netscape's Server and ECommerce divisions. He holds several UI patents, a CPE Certification, and serves as an ISO representative for US through ANSI. His educational background includes advanced degrees from UTA, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University.

Ian Lucas Senior Program Manager Lead, Management & Services Division, Microsoft
Ian Lucas is Senior Program Manager working on improving the overall manageability experience for technologies across Windows Server. His current role includes a strong focus around innovating in both UX design and engineering processes to enable a more holistic approach to developing management solutions across the multiple complex technologies within Windows Server. He currently spends a large portion of his time championing the importance of great IT Pro UX across teams, and finding ways to leverage new technologies and SW development approaches to make great UX happen. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, Ian was the manager of Compaq Computer’s R&D Centre in Australia, where he had worked for 13 years in various software development and management roles. His education background includes an MBA (University of Washington) and a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (University of Queensland, Australia).
Craig Villamor Manager, Platform UI Design, Salesforce.com
Craig Villamor is the Manager of Platform User Interface Design at Salesforce.com. In his current role, he manages a team of UI Designers focused on creating intuitive, yet powerful interfaces for complex administrative and development tasks on the Salesforce.com platform. As a user experience professional for over 10 years, Craig has worked on a wide variety of Web applications for both the consumer and enterprise markets. Prior to Salesforce, Craig was a Senior User Experience Researcher at eBay, Director of User Experience at Monster.com and founder of HiringTools and gumshoo.com.

Moderator: AEleen Frisch Exponential
Æleen Frisch has been a system administrator for over 25 years, tending a plethora of VMS, Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac systems over the years. Her current system administration responsibilities center on looking after a very heterogeneous network of systems. She is also a writer, lecturer, teacher, marketing consultant and occasional database programmer. She has written eight books, including Essential System Administration (now in its third edition from O'Reilly Media, Inc.) and Exploring Chemistry with Electronic Structure Methods (Gaussian, Inc.). In her scant spare time, she also writes poetry and is currently working on her first novel.