The Value of Visualization for Exploring, Presenting, and Understanding Data

Seminar Series: HCI Seminar Series 2018

Speaker: John Stasko

Speaker Affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology

Host: Arvind Satyanarayan

Host Affiliation: MIT/CSAIL

Date: Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM

Location:

Abstract
Everyone’s talking about data these days. People, organizations, and businesses are seeking better ways to analyze, understand, and communicate their data. While a variety of approaches can be taken to address this challenge, my own work has focused on data visualization. In this talk, I’ll describe the unique advantages and benefits that visualization provides, and I’ll support these arguments through examples from recent projects in my research group. Two specific themes that I’ll emphasize are the importance of interaction in visualization and the challenge of determining a visualization’s value and utility.

Bio
John Stasko is a Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing (IC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1989. His Information Interfaces Research Group develops ways to help people and organizations explore, analyze, and make sense of data to solve problems. Stasko is a widely published and internationally recognized researcher in the areas of information visualization and visual analytics, approaching each from a human-computer interaction perspective. He has received Best Paper or Most Influential/Test of Time Paper awards from the IEEE InfoVis and VAST, ACM CHI, INTERACT, and ICSE conferences. Stasko has been Papers/Program Co-Chair for the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) and the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Conferences and has served on multiple journal editorial boards. He received the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2012, and was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2011, an IEEE Fellow in 2014, and a member of the ACM CHI Academy in 2016. In 2013 he also became an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science at the Univ. of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Relevant URL: hci.mit.edu/hci-seminar.html

For more information please contact: Amy Shea-Slattery, 617-253-6002, amyshea@csail.mit.edu