San Francisco Bay Area ACM

Wednesday Jan. 16, 2002, Chapter Meeting
presents
Jock D. Mackinlay of Xerox PARC

who will speak to us about

"Visualization For All"

Date:

Wednesday Jan. 16, 2002

Time:
6:30 p.m. Refreshments; 7:00 p.m. Speaker

Location:
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room.

Slides:

Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.

Abstract

Graphics is a valuable technique for accessing information
because it exploits the considerable power of human vision.
History includes two well-known approaches: presentation, using
vision to communicate, and visualization, using vision to think.
Both approaches are being improved by the growing power of
computer graphics.

In this talk, I reflect on my experiences over the last two
decades using computer graphics to support these two approaches,
and propose a new research direction that combines their
strengths to make information more accessible to more people.
Starting with presentation, I describe an early prototype that
automatically designed 2D graphical presentations of relational
data using a composition algebra and various design criteria.  A
key research goal was to design presentations that do not lie or
mislead.  Turning to visualization, I describe how the
composition algebra was used to develop a series of prototypes
for different types of data. A key research goal was to make
large amounts of information accessible by using 3D graphics and
interactive animation.

Although both approaches can help people access information, both
also have weaknesses.  For example, a weakness of presentation is
that people distrust the visual power of graphics, which can
communicate lies just as effectively as truth.  On the other
hand, a weakness of visualization is that it often requires the
skills of a data specialist to be effective, which limits the
number of people who can use it.  However, given the increasing
power of computer-based visualization, I show how to overcome
these weaknesses by using visualization during presentation. In
such a "data demo", a data specialist uses the power of computer
graphics to give a decision making team direct access to the
data.  By democratizing information access, this new approach
offers the promise of participatory decision making, and thus
increased confidence and better decisions.  I conclude with a
research agenda suggested by the data demo idea.
 
 
 
Biography

JOCK MACKINLAY received his PhD in computer science from Stanford
University, where he pioneered the automatic design of graphical
presentations of relational information.  He joined Xerox PARC in
1986, where he collaborated with the User Interface Research
Group to develop many novel applications of computer graphics for
information access, coining the term "Information Visualization".
Much of the fruits of this research can be seen in his recently
published book, Readings in Information Visualization: Using
Vision to Think (Morgan Kauffman, 1999, co-authored with Stuart
Card and Ben Shneiderman).  He has developed numerous patents in
user interfaces and is a member of the editorial board of ACM
Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.

Directions

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