headshot of Meredith Ringel Morris

bio

Meredith Ringel Morris is a Principal Scientist in Google Brain. Prior to joining Google Brain, she served as Director of the People + AI Research team within Google Research's Responsible AI organization. Previously, she was a Sr. Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and Research Area Manager for Interaction, Accessibility, and Mixed Reality. She founded the Ability Research Group at MSR. She is an internationally-recognized leader in HCI, particularly in collaborative and social computing. Merrie is widely known as the founder of the field of collaborative web search; her SearchTogether system inspired numerous researchers in HCI and Information Retrieval to pursue work in this area. She subsequently co-developed a myriad of collaborative search prototypes and interaction techniques, aimed at supporting different search tasks, group configurations, and technologies. Her foundational studies of peoples’ collaborative searching habits and needs have informed the community’s understanding of search as a collaborative task. She was also the first to study the trend of friendsourced information seeking, wherein people use question-asking within social networks as an alternative to search engines; she contributed several articles describing and quantifying this phenomenon, as well as co-creating “socially embedded search engines,” an early type of chatbot that combined algorithmic search with friendsourcing. Additionally, Merrie is also widely known for her contributions to surface computing and gesture design: her dissertation introduced collaborative interaction techniques for the then-nascent field of surface computing, including cooperative gestures and identity-aware widgets, and her subsequent work as co-creator of the user-defined gesture-elicitation methodology has had broad impact in academia and industry, where it is frequently employed to design guessable gesture interfaces. She is also a leader in the field of accessibile technologies, particularly accessible social media, accessible communication technologies, the use of AI for accessibility applications, and AI equity for people with disabilities and older adults. Her current research at Google focuses on human-centered AI, including topics relating to human-AI interaction, AI ethics, and the societal impact of AI.

Dr. Morris has served as the general chair for ACM’s CSCW conference and has previously served as Technical Program Chair of the CHI, CSCW, ASSETS, and ISS conferences. Dr. Morris is a past member of the TOCHI editorial board and of the CSCW and CHI steering committees. She has been recognized as one of Technology Review’s “35 under 35” for her work on collaborative web search and was named an ACM Fellow and elected to the SIGCHI Academy for her contributions to HCI research. She is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles, many of which have been recognized with best paper awards, as well as Lasting Impact Awards from the UIST and ISS conferences. She is also an inventor on more than 20 U.S. patents, and her HCI innovations have influenced many of Microsoft’s products and services. In addition to her role at Google, Dr. Morris is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington in The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and in The Information School. Dr. Morris earned her Sc.B. in computer science from Brown University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. Her full CV is available here.