Personal Information

Born July 19, 1960.

Private Address: 
N/A

Business address: 
Department of Computer Science 
University of Aarhus 
Åbogade 34 
DK- 8200  Århus N

Phone: +45 8715 4112
Phone direct: +45 8715 6154
Mobile: +45 2149 5634
Fax: +45 8715 4113
E-mail: kgronbak@cs.au.dk
WWW: http://www.cs.au.dk/~kgronbak

Nationality: Danish.

Civil Status: Married to Iben Krarup Grønbæk; two sons Jens Emil (1990) and Asbjørn (1994).

Education and Academic degrees

Primary school, 1967-76, Fjelstervang and Kibæk, Denmark. High School examination (Studentereksamen), Mathematics-Physics specialization, from Herning Gymnasium, Denmark,1979.

Cand. scient. (Master’s Degree) in Computer Science with Mathematics as the minor subject, Aarhus University, Denmark, 1988.

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, 1991.

Positions held

Research areas

Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing, Visual Analytics, Interactive Spaces, Augmented Reality, Interaction Design, Hypermedia, Multimedia, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Participatory Design.

Teaching and supervision experience

Teaching assistant in courses on programming, machine architecture and system development during 1983 - 1987. Since 1988 teaching computer science and system development mainly at graduate level at Aarhus University. Supervisor for several Master’s Thesis and Ph.D. students.

One of the founders of the interdisciplinary multimedia education programme at Aarhus University. Several years experience in teaching interdisciplinary multimedia courses in the programme as well as on similar programme at the IT-University Vest.

Several years experience in running multimedia education in an Open University setting with participants distributed nation wide in Denmark.

Several years experience in running a hypermedia class as distributed education on the first Danish IP-based audio/video connection which was established between the Danish Technical University and University of Aarhus in 1998 via the Danish Research Network.

Have supervised more than 30 Masters Thesis projects and more than 20 PhD Thesis projects.

Project management and project participation

Center Manager for Center for Interactive Spaces (www.interactivespaces.net) (2002 - Current). Established originally as part of ISIS Katrinebjerg (www.isis.alexandra.dk)

Research Manager of the CIT project #333, CONTEXTIT, in collaboration with Tele Danmark/InnovationLab and EUMAN A/S. 1 year (2003).

Manager of the National Research council project Distributed Multimedia Technologies and Applications (DMM) with a budget of Dkr. 22 mill over 4 years under the Danish Center for Multimedia.

Research Manager of the CIT project #123, COCONUT, in collaboration with Tele Danmark Internet. The total budget was Dkr. 10 mill. over 3 years (1997-1999).

Project manager/coordinator for the Open Hypermedia project under the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEF). Feb. 2000 – Jan 2001. The project was a joint development project undertaken by the Alexandra Institute ltd. and Mjølner Informatics ltd, the project delivered a version of Webvise tailored for use of Digital Libraries in research and education.

Manager of a NORFA research network for research education in Interactive Media (2000-2004) – total budget 1.500.000 NKR.

Manager of the InterMedia-Århus laboratory, part of the national Danish multimedia research initiative.

Manager of the Interactive Workspaces laboratory (http://www.cs.au.dk/ispace), part of the CIT Center for Pervasive Computing (http://www.pervasive.dk).

Co-manager of the EU IST, Disappearing Computer project, WorkSPACE 11,5 mill Dkr. (2001-2003).

Participation in other large projects (as workpackage/task manager): The research programme on Computer Support for Cooperative Design and Communication. Supported by an FTU grant from the Danish Natural Science Research Council and by the Danish Humanities Research Council. (1987-1989). The DEVISE project developing support for Experimental System Development, sup­port­ed by Danish Research Programme for Informatics, grant no. 5.26.18.19. (1990-1994). The EU Esprit projects: EuroCoOp (1990-1992); and EuroCODE (1992-1995).

Secretary and editor for a board formed by the Danish Ministry of Research in 1996 with the objective to investigate the prospects of establishing a Multimedia Research Centre in Denmark. The report is available at the Ministry’s server http://www.fsk.dk/.

Participation in organizing consortia for EU Proposals: EASTLINK: East European Contributions to Development of Object Oriented Hypermedia Application Frameworks. Plug-in Publishing: Open publishing services for integrated, local information repositories. OCTOPUS: On-line Commercial Technical Open PUblishing Service.

Grants and Research Management

Innovation and Commercial Deployment of Research.

Responsibility and management of a portfolio of commercial consultancy projects within the Alexandra Institute for 4-6 mio Dkr annually (since 2009). These projects can be found under the Alexandra Institute (www.alexandra.dk) they include costumers like NCC Ltd, LEGO Company, B&O, Arla, KMD Ltd., Virklund Sport Ltd., Danfoss Universe Ltd., Municipality of Aarhus, etc. Below is an excerpt of example projects.

Editorial Boards, Committees, etc.

Editorial boards for: The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. London: Taylor & Francis.

The Journal of Collaborative Computing. Kluwer Academic Publishers. (until 2005)

Programme committee chair for Hypertext 2011 - The 22nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia.

Programme committee co-chair for Hypertext 1998 - The ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia.

General chair of the twelfth ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia - Hypertext '01 - (http://www.ht01.org) to be held in Århus, Denmark, August 14-18, 2001.

Member of various programme and reviewing committees for: The Conference on Participatory Design (PDC); the Nordic Workshop on Programming Environment Research; the ACM Conferences on Hypertext; the European CSCW conference (ECSCW); the Third Decennial Aarhus Conference, Computers In Context: Joining Forces In Design (1995). WWW conferences. IADIS WWW/Internet Conferences.

Co-Chair of the Steering Committee for Interdisciplinary multimedia educations at University of Aarhus, (1997-2009).

Co-founder and chair of the steering committee for the IT Product Development Bachelor and Master’s Programmes at Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, (2007- Current).

Non-academic committees

Member of the Aarhus Region’s IT-Council’s ThinkTank on ”Interactive Rooms, Buildings and Urban Spaces” (2002).

Member of the Board for AugmentedMedia Aps. (www.augmentedmedia.net) (2004-2005).

Member of the Board for Hypergenic Ltd. (http://www.hypergenic.com) (2000 - 2006).

Member of the Aarhus Region’s IT-Council’s ThinkTank on ”ICT in Physical Products” (2006).

Chair of the board of Skovvangskolen (2001 - 2009).

ICT Expert Member of the Aarhus Municipality ThinkTank on “Spaces for Play and Learning” (Rum til Leg og Læring, 2008)
(http://www.aarhus.dk/~/media/Dokumenter/MBU/RULL/Fremtidens-boernebyggeri.ashx)

Co-owner and Chair of the board of Redia.dk (2010- current).

Awards

Winner of the Engelbart best paper award at Hypertext 97. The second Engelbart Award, in honour of the contributions made to the hypertext field by Doug Engelbart.

Awarded the "red dot: best of the best" for design concepts 2007 within the area of "education" for the Wisdom Well interactive floor for learning.

Best paper award in the Interactive Arts Track at the ACM Multimedia Conference 2008 for the paper entitled "Interactive Spatial Multimedia for Communication of Art in the Physical Museum Space" by Karen Johanne Kortbek and Kaj Grønbæk.

Talks and lectures

Many lectures about Cooperative Prototyping, CSCW, and Hypermedia both at national and international institutions. Including institutions such as: University of Aalborg, Denmark; University of Copenhagen, Denmark; University of Oslo, Norway; Xerox PARC, California, USA; Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Many talks about Prototyping, Active User Involvement, CSCW, Hypermedia, and Pervasive Computing in Danish companies and professional associations.

Invited talks for: The Open Hypermedia Systems Workshop at the ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technology (ECHT '94) Edinburg, UK, September 18 -23, 1994. The Social Context of Hypermedia Workshop. Held in Umeå, Sweden, February 16 -17, 1995. The Open Hypermedia Systems Workshop at the HYPERTEXT '96 – Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, Washington DC, USA, March 16-20, 1996. On Pervasive Computing for the SIGCHI.dk association at the IT-University, Copenhagen, March 2000.

Keynote entitled "Ubiquitous Hypermedia and Social Computing in Physical Environments" at Hypertext 2006 - Seventeenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia Odense, Denmark.

Many popular talks for public audiences as well as the Royal Family, ministers, and national politicians.

Professional memberships

Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Special interest groups: SIGCHI - Special interest group on human-computer interaction. SIGWEB - Special interest group on hypertext and hypermedia.

Skills

Fully fluent in Danish and English; reads German and bits of Russian. Many years experience in object oriented programming and modern development environments. Experience in use of various user interface construction tools and application frameworks; various relational and object oriented database systems; various Web based tools at both client and server level.

Publications

Publications include 1 book (386 pages, MIT Press, co-authored with Randy Trigg, XEROX PARC, US) and 150+ publications. For a complete documentation, see www.cs.au.dk/~kgronbak. 

Citations statistics: 9000+ and H-Index: 40, see Google Scholar https://scholar.google.dk/citations?hl=en&user=zaL7iZ4AAAAJ.