Clare-Marie Karat

Author of the "Computer User's Bill of Rights" and creator of a cost-benefit methodology for analyzing the return on investment in usability, Karat is a leading figure in Human Computer Interaction research. She began working at IBM as a Human Factors Engineer in development, then became a Consultant in the IBM Consulting Group, and worked most of her 23 years at IBM as a Research Staff Member in the Policy Lifecycle Technologies department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. While there, Karat conducted HCI research in the areas of policy, privacy, security, usability methods, and personalization. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she led the Server Privacy ARchitecture and Capability Enablement (SPARCLE) Policy Workbench research project that provides organizations and external users with the capability to effectively manage the personal information held by organizations.

She also held technical leadership roles in the Army Research Laboratory International Technology Alliance (ARL ITA) project on security policy management of information in mobile adhoc networks, IBM's Open Collaborative Research on Policy Frameworks for Security and Privacy project with academic colleagues at CMU and Purdue Universities, and the National Security Agency High Assurance Platform project to improve secure information sharing. Karat then became a Principal Consultant with Karat Consulting Group.

She is the author of the "Computer User's Bill of Rights"; editor of the book, "Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce", published in 2004; and a co-author of "The Design and Evaluation of Usable Technology in Industrial Research: Three Case Studies". Karat is well-known for creating a cost-benefit methodology for analyzing the return on investment in usability. She has served as an editorial board member of the ACM interactions, the British Computer Society's interacting with Computers, and Elsevier's International Journal of Human Computer Studies journals, and as a reviewer for the ACM Communications of the ACM, IEEE Security and Privacy, and the IBM Systems Journal journals.

She has chaired international conferences and held a variety of technical committee roles in the ACM CHI, HFES, IFIP INTERACT, and SOUPS conferences. Karat has presented keynote addresses, taught seminars, published numerous papers in technical journals and conference proceedings, and contributed to many books in the fields of HCI, policy, privacy, security, and personalization. She received her education at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Stanford University.