Professor Pat Hanrahan

CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University

Title:

The Semiology of Graphics and Interactive Data Analysis: The Impact of Jacques Bertin on Information Visualization and Visual Analytics

Abstract:

In 1967 after years of experience as a cartographer, Jacques Bertin wrote a monumental book, the Semiology of Graphics, that describes a theory of graphical representations.  In another book, Graphics and Graphic Information Processing, he described interative techniques for data analysis.  These books have been very influential in the information visualization and visual analytics communities, despite being poorly understood.  In memory of Bertin (1918-2010), I will review some of his major ideas, and describe how they have impacted the design of analysis and visualization systems such as Jock MacKinlay's Automatic Presentation System (APT) and Chris Stolte's Polaris/Tableau system.

Bio:

Pat Hanrahan is the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University where he teaches computer graphics.

His current research involves visualization, image synthesis, virtual worlds, and graphics systems and architectures.  Before joining Stanford he was a faculty member at Princeton.

Pat has also worked at Pixar where he developed developed volume rendering software and was the chief architect of the RenderMan(TM) Interface - a protocol that allows modeling programs to describe scenes to high quality rendering programs.  In addition to PIXAR, he has founded two companies, Tableau and PeakStream, and served on the technical advisory boards of NVIDIA, Exluna, Neoptica, VSee and Procedural.

Professor Hanrahan has received three university teaching awards.  He has received two Academy Awards for Science and Technology, the Spirit of America Creativity Award, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award, and the IEEE Visualization Career Award.  He was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

To receive future announcements, please sign up to the cse-seminar email list: https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/listinfo/cse-seminar