Jim Thomas
Founding Director and Science Advisor to National Visualization and Analytics Center
AAAS Fellow, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Fellow

"3I’s of Visual Analytics for FODAVA Teams: Interdisciplinary, International, and Immediacy"

Abstract:

Visual Analytics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of study that brings talents from many disciplines including statistics, mathematics, information, knowledge, and library sciences, knowledge representation and synthesis, scientific and information visualization, cognitive and perceptual sciences, communications, decision sciences and more.  The demand for visual analytics is being stimulated by new requirements for homeland security but similar needs are present in science, commerce, home, and almost any domain that deals with complex, large information sources that require human judgement to “detect the expected and discover the unexpected”. Almost all of these needs requires interculture international solutions with near term needs while keeping on eye on the long term science.  The definition of visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by the interface visual interface.  Jim will present the new needs for science and technology, referenced from the recent book Illuminating the Path: the Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics, http://nvac.pnl.gov/. Jim will also discuss success stories, common characteristics of todays visual analytics solutions, directly addressing the 3I’s, and provide Jim’s top technical challenges for visual analytics, enlisting comments and recommendations.

Bio:

Dr. Jim Thomas is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow and Laboratory Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with over 35 years of experience. In 2009, he was awarded  Christopher Columbus Foundation Award for top science and impact in contributing to homeland security, and DHS Award for Accomplishment: Technology Partnership and Deployment. He is founder and past Director of Department of Homeland Security National Visualization and Analytics Center. He is considered the father for visual analytics and specializes in the research, design, and implementation of innovative information and analytic visualization, multimedia, and human computer interaction technology with over 160 published papers in these areas. Some of the  recent technologies developed have set a new stage for the visualization of masses of multimedia information sources with several publications, patents, with recent publications being widely referenced and re-printed.  More recently he has led teams in text, numerical, image and video, temporal and geospatial analysis for massive information spaces.

He has received several international science awards including "Top 100 Scientific Innovators" (Science Digest) and twice the Research and Development's Industrial Research 100 Significant Scientific and Industry Accomplishments  "Top 100 Innovators in Science and Industry". In addition, twice he was awarded the Federal Laboratories Consortium Technology Transfer Award for innovation in transferring research technology to industry and universities. He has served numerous other leadership roles including Chair of IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology Symposium Steering Committee 2006-present, IEEE Visualization  Conference  Co-Chair 2003-2004, Editor-In-Chief  for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 1998-2002 and Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH 1987 –1992.

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