Joseph A. Konstan is Distinguished McKnight Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he also serves as Associate Dean for Research of the College of Science and Engineering.  His research addresses a variety of human-computer interaction issues, including personalization (particularly through recommender systems), eliciting on-line participation, designing computer systems to improve public health, and ethical issues in research online. He is probably best known for his work in collaborative filtering recommenders (the GroupLens project, which recently won the ACM Software Systems Award).  

Dr. Konstan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993.  He is a Fellow of the ACM, AAAS, and IEEE, a member of the CHI Academy, Past-President of ACM SIGCHI, the 4500-member Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction, and a three-time member of the ACM Council.  He chaired the first ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in 2007, and has also chaired ACM's UIST 2003 and CHI 2012 conferences.  He is currently serving as co-Chair of ACM's Publications Board.