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After a decade as an anthropologist studying the Maya peoples of Central America, Cherri Pancake shifted to CS and conducted pioneering work in usability engineering for high performance computing. Today she’s the VP of the ACM and Director of the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science & Engineering at Oregon State University. We talk about her journey from the social sciences to computer science, her experiences leading professional organizations, and how she thinks about her interdisciplinary work today and into the future.

Bio

Dr. Cherri M. Pancake is Director of the Northwest Alliance for Computational Research; she recently retired as Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Intel Faculty Fellow at Oregon State University. She combines backgrounds in anthropology and computer engineering to address how complex software can best support the conceptual models and research strategies of practicing scientists and engineers.

Pancake was among the first worldwide to apply ethnographic techniques to identify software usability problems – an approach which is now mainstream – and she conducted much of the seminal work identifying how the needs of scientists differ from computer science and business communities. Over the past 25 years, she has served as PI or coPI on research grants totaling over $150 million from industry, not-for- profits, NSF, and Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, and Interior. The methods she developed for applying user-centered design to improve user interfaces have been reflected in software products from Hewlett Packard, Convex, Intel, IBM, and Tektronix. As a leader of national standards groups, she developed procedures for consensus-driven design that expedited the adoption of community standards.

A Fellow of ACM and IEEE, Pancake currently serves as ACM’s Vice President and recently stepped down as Chair of SIGHPC, ACM’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing.

Transcript

Andrew Miller:             Thank you so much for talking with us today. The first question that I ask people on this podcast is what first got you interested in computer science or computing? I’m interested especially for you since your journey to becoming a professional computer scientist was quite protracted. Were there early signs? Were you always a computer person? Were you a design kind of person?

Cherri Pancake:            Well you’re asking in a very polite way because some people would say, “You just have trouble making up your mind.” It actually has been a very interesting journey. When I was in undergrad school, computers were still pretty new. I was at Cornell and they had some, but it was still definitely the mainframe days. My undergraduate degree was in environmental design. At that time, that was a new concept at universities. A new field of study. It was very flexible. Some of my peers focused more on urban planning. I got very interested by the anthropology side of it. The cultural anthropology in particular.

Cherri Pancake:            By the time I graduated I really had the equivalent of a minor in cultural anthropology. In fact, I was going to go to grad school in anthropology and I got married and things changed a little. Among those things, I ended up going to Peru with the Peace Corps. My husband and I did. Down there, I actually lived outside of a very small Indian community way up in the Andes, 20 hours from Lima for travel. I got very interested in applying some of the ethnological techniques that I had learned in school. That seemed to be a really good match. So much so that after I left Peru, we went on to Guatemala and my husband worked in forestry. I actually worked in anthropology. I became curator of the ethnographic museum in Guatemala that specializes in the highland Maya Indian culture. I was gone for almost 10 years.

Cherri Pancake:            Anthropology, in particular ethnology, was my great love. When we came back to the U.S. … My husband wanted to come back. I found that anthropology, to be frank, isn’t great for your resume in getting a job in many areas of the U.S. I was in the southeastern U.S. I started thinking about retraining in something else. I had gotten into computers a tiny bit while I was at Cornell, but later when I was in Guatemala, through the anthropological connections, I got involved in long-term study of communities. We had to do a lot of data collection and analysis using statistical packages. Not really coding, but still using the computers.

Cherri Pancake:            I got very interested in that and in the issues of representing indigenous languages when at the time there were only English character sets and how computers could be applied to anthropological tasks to make things work a little better. As I looked around to retrain, I decided I liked the systems side of engineering. Auburn University was opening up a new disciplinary area, computer engineering, and I was the first graduate student in computer engineering there. That’s how I got into it. I really have enjoyed that career also.

Andrew Miller:             Yeah. It’s interesting to think also just historically, computer science … Elements that we now think of as foundational were once interdisciplinary between other disciplines.

Cherri Pancake:            That’s right.

Andrew Miller:             Computer engineering, which we think of as a core component and a normal area of study, was new at that time.

Cherri Pancake:            Yes. More of what was being called computer science was definitely much more on the mathematics end at that time.

Andrew Miller:             Just jumping back to the anthropology thing, because this is fascinating and I think we’ll get more into it later as well, one of the things about anthropology is that you’re examining the artifacts that people produce and the roles that they play in people’s lives. It seems to me like there are interesting parallels to be drawn between that approach and looking at the roles of computing systems in people’s lives. Is that something that you were seeing at that time or is that something that came later?

Cherri Pancake:            Well it’s interesting you should ask because at the time, I was sort of hiding my anthropological background because I found in engineering schools … I was the first woman to be accepted for the graduate program and any engineering field at Auburn. I found that my colleagues all thought … They had all wanted to be engineers since they were like three years old.

Andrew Miller:             Right.

Cherri Pancake:            One of the things I learned in working with other cultures is that it’s important to make the people that you’re interacting with feel comfortable with you, even if you’re very different. For engineers, I focused on helping them get over the fact that I was the first woman first. That difference first. Then later on, when they would comment about how I had helped them see differently or that that was an interesting approach, then I would explain why to them.

Andrew Miller:             You’ve made this career switch. You’re in a computer engineering program and you’re starting to figure out, “Okay. What is going to be my topic of research? What methods am I going to use?” What was your thought process as you started to embark on independent research in this new area?

Cherri Pancake:            Well my own dissertation work was actually in embedded systems and software tools for embedded systems. It was my very first graduate student who got me interested in the problem of software tools for parallel computing. With my background, it was obvious to me, though not to her, that the first thing I would ask is, “What do we know about the people who will be using these tools and how they think about computing?” It turned out nobody knew. Most users of parallel computing and high performance computing have always been scientists or engineers. The ones who have had big problems that require lots of computing power.

Cherri Pancake:            At that time, there were only a few places that had high performance computers. Users went there for extended periods to do their work, but nobody really studied them or understood anything about how they approach their tasks. I decided to fill that gap. It turned out that I worked for … Gosh. 10 years, I think. I spent three months a year at the Cornell Theory Center, working with users, especially the experienced ones. That was when I truly got the marriage between computing and anthropology because I ended up using what really classical ethnographic techniques to watch how they work, to elicit how they were thinking about their problem and compare and contrast that with how you think about your problem versus how you coat software.

Cherri Pancake:            Guess what? No surprise now, but back then it was a huge surprise that these users thought about computers and