Subject: Petition

From: Mark Gollin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 0 Sep 92 16:01:43 PDT

I agree with and support the petition for withdrawal of the report. 
Commercial ventures already focus adequately on commercial research, 
and it would be intolerable to waste the potential for pure research in 
a field that has only existed in its modern form for 50 years.

"User Interface" is a totally inadequate description for the areas of 
user interface design, human-computer interaction, and even the 
interdiciplinary areas of cognitive psychology and perception which 
have a lot to contribute to both psychology and computer science. Given 
the penetration of microprocessor systems of increasing complexity into 
consumer products such as audio and video electronics, and automobiles, 
we are in danger of disenfranchising large "technophobic" sections of 
the population from the benefits of an information-rich society. 
Human-computer interaction as a separate research area has come of age 
only in the last 10 years and is being pursued by scientists at 
Bellcore, the Univ. of California system, and in many other places, and 
critical to making advanced technology easily usable by those who have 
not had years of training in Computer Science.

If the government is going to inject millions or billions of dollars 
into Computer Science research, it is important that at least some of 
that money go towards making technology more usable by the taxpayers 
who support it.

Mark A. Gollin, Software Design Engineer, Microsoft Corp.

Disclaimer: This represents my views only, and does not imply any 
support by or the opinion of Microsoft Corp.