Maxine Cohen, Ph.D., professor at the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences, would not be a human-computer interaction specialist today if it weren’t for the fact that she is left-handed.
“Being left-handed, I think I was always aware of misfits with things,” she said. “The world is set up for right-handed people.”
Cohen describes human-computer interaction as “that human-computer interface where the computer and person meet.” She said that sometimes when her students start learning about human-computer interaction, they believe it is common sense, but there are rules in the field supported by research.
“There’s a part of it that’s an art. When you’re designing an icon, it’s art to make it more meaningful,” she said. “But there’s science in how long it takes to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse.”
While in a “one-year teaching job that lasted 11 years,” she decided to pursue her doctorate at State University of New York at Binghamton. She graduated the same year that her son graduated from high school.
Cohen said that receiving her doctorate later in life allowed her to appreciate it more and understand the importance of life-long learning.
“A lot of our students are students who couldn’t do their edu-cation immediately after college,” she said. “And so I do understand the challenges of trying to balance family and work and school.”
Cohen said she enjoys how her students connect their problems to the courses and the examples.
“For a young student, anything I say is the authority because I’m the professor,” she said. “[With my students,] I find that they’re very challenging, but it’s a good challenge.”
In 2010, Cohen collaborated with other writers on the fifth edition of a textbook called “Designing the User Interface.” She was a reviewer of the book’s previous editions and was contacted by the publishers to help co-author the latest edition. Cohen said the book has helped widen NSU’s reputation and she enjoyed working on it.
“That was a really exciting, challenging time for me,” she said. “I feel that it was good for me and it was good for NSU and it was good for our students.”
Cohen said her family is “very much a Nova family.” Her daughter is an academic advisor in the College of Pharmacy and her husband is the assistant director of enrollment reporting and data quality at the Office of Information Management at the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences.
“We talk a lot about, ‘How was your Nova today?’” she said. “We’re Nova through and through. We keep telling my son we’re going to bring him over one day, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
Cohen participated in the Women’s Institute in Summer Enrichment Program at Cornell University in 2008 and is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction and the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers. She formerly worked as a programmer at Eastman Kodak and the human factors group in the now-closed IBM plant in Boca Raton. She also reviews fellowship and grant applications for the National Science Foundation and has presented work at the Frontiers in Education Conference.
Cohen enjoys traveling and going on cruises with her husband, and human-computer interaction also factors into her hobby of reading.
“I recently got a Kindle, and from an HCI standpoint, the way it fits [in my hand] is really good,” she said. “I really like that when I read it at night, I can adjust the font.”
Ultimately, human-computer interaction factors into the way she teaches.
“I think the part that probably has stood out for me as most special is how technology has changed and really allowed us to teach in this distance format,” she said. “If you want to use the library, you don’t have to be in the same town as your library. So all of a sudden, all these educational resources are available to you.”
