Steve Whittaker is a professor in Human-Computer Interaction. He currently works at University of California at Santa Cruz. He was previously a Professor in information retrieval at the Information Studies department at the University of Sheffield. He earned an MA at the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. at the University of St Andrews. He has also been a Research Scientist at HP Labs, Lotus, AT&T Labs and IBM.
Whittaker has authored or co-authored more than 100 technical papers a number of which have won best paper prizes and awards. His work focuses on design and implementation of systems to support computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), computer mediated communication (CMC), personal information management(PIM) and interfaces for information retrieval, in particular for speech data. He also has 11 patents.[1] He has an h-index of over 40 and is presently the 69th most prolific author in the field.[2] He was elected to the prestigious CHI Academy in 2008 for his "extensive contributions to the study of HCI" and for his leading role in "the shaping of the field".[3] He is probably best known for his papers on email, instant messaging and lifelogging.