In 2008, Marti Hearst was on sabbatical and finishing her book Search User Interfaces when Barack Obama won the Presidential election. By February 2009 she'd finished the book and its associated web site, her PhD students were all graduated, and she still had months left in her sabbatical. So it seemed only logical to move to Washington DC and join the administration!

Thus began a journey that led to a deep case study in the difficulties of bringing good IT practices to a $2.5 billion organization with more than $350 million in annual IT spending. Join her for this tale of how she learned to be in the executive suite -- or at least how to wear an executive's suit -- and built one of the largest user experience groups in the federal government.

Dr. Marti Hearst is a Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science Division. Her primary research interests are user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, digital humanities, and empirical analysis of social media.

She has recently completed the first book on Search User Interfaces. Prof. Hearst received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. She was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.