Steve Cousins, President & CEO

Steve Cousins is a seasoned executive, entrepreneur and innovator with a strong track record for managing research and development organizations and creating a significant return on investment. Prior to joining Willow Garage, Steve was the senior manager of the User-Focused Systems Research Group at the IBM Almaden Research Center, one of the top Human-Computer Interaction Research groups in the world.

Before he assumed his roles at  Willow Garage and Almaden Research, Steve managed the Advanced Systems Development Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Earlier in his career Steve was a member of the research staff in the Information Sciences and Technology Laboratory where his research interests were in information visualization, personal information management and digital libraries.  Steve's career in research began at the Medical Informatics Laboratory at Washington University School of Medicine, followed by research at Interval Research while completing his doctoral work at Stanford.

Steve received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis, where he currently serves on the Computer Science department's external advisory board.

He has given numerous presentations on topics including information visualization, digital libraries, and human-computer interaction, web 2.0 technologies.  He is the general chair for the User Interface Software and Technology conference UIST 2008.