Alumni/Industry Lecture: Professor Tamara Munzner - Visualization Analysis and Design
Title: Visualization Analysis and Design
Speaker: Dr. Tamara Munzner, Professor, Department of Computer Science, UBC
Time: 6 - 7:30 pm. Networking starts at 6 pm, talk begins at 6:30 pm. Light refreshments will be served.
Location: Galvanize, 14th Floor, 980 Howe St. Vancouver
RSVP: Please rsvp below
Abstract:
Computer-based visualization (vis) systems provide visual representations of datasets designed to help people carry out tasks more effectively. Visualization is suitable when there is a need to augment human capabilities rather than replace people with computational decision-making methods. The design space of possible vis idioms is huge, and includes the considerations of both how to create and how to interact with visual representations. Vis design is full of trade-offs, and most possibilities in the design space are ineffective for a particular task, so validating the effectiveness of a design is both necessary and difficult. Vis designers must take into account three very different kinds of resource limitations: those of computers, of humans, and of displays. Vis usage can be analyzed in terms of why the user needs it, what data is shown, and how the idiom is designed. I will discuss this framework for analyzing the design of visualization systems.
Bio:
Tamara Munzner is a professor at the University of British Columbia Department of Computer Science, and has been active in visualization since 1991. She was a research scientist from 2000 to 2002 at the Compaq Systems Research Center (the former DEC SRC), and earned her PhD from Stanford between 1995 and 2000. She was a technical staff member at the National Science Foundation Research Center for Computation and Visualization of Geometric Structures (The Geometry Center) at the University of Minnesota from 1991 to 1995. She has published over sixty-five papers, and co-chaired InfoVis and EuroVis. Her book Visualization Analysis and Design appeared in 2014, and she is the editor of the AK Peters Visualization series with CRC Press. She received the IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2015, the InfoVis 10-year Test of Time award in 2019, and is a founding member of the VIS Academy. She served on the InfoVis Steering Committee 2010-2017, as chair of the VIS Executive Committee 2012-2017, and was a founding member of the BioVis Steering Committee 2012-2013. She has consulted for or collaborated with many companies including Agilent, AT&T Labs, Google, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, and early-stage startups.
Many thanks to Tableau for sponsoring the lecture, and to Galvanize for hosting.