If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.

Robert joined CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in 1974. There he first worked on computer-controls of particle accelerators. When Robert became head of Office Computing Systems for CERN he began considering a hypertext system to link all CERN documentation over networks. In 1989 he teamed up with Tim Berners-Lee to produce the foundations for what became WWW at the end of 1990.

In 1993 Robert started the first www-based project funded by the European Commission together with the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. He was instrumental in making CERN putting the Web technologies into the public domain (April 1993). He organised the First International WWW Conference for May 1994, a continuing series over which he presided for many years. He started the "Web for Schools" project within the European Union (1994).

During 1994-1997 he helped CERN and INRIA to set up the Web Consortium that overlooks the WWW standards, to transfer WWW technologies from CERN to the Consortium.

Robert has been awarded two Ph.D. Hon., the ACM Software System Award, the Plantin Prize (City of Antwerp), the Medal of Recognition of the City of Geneva, and is Commander in the Order of King Leopold I of Belgium.

He is from Belgium and holds a degree of Mechanical and Electrotechnical Engineering (University Ghent) and a Master of Science degree (University of Michigan).