Title: Visualization for the People:  Where Are We Now

Speaker: Jean-Daniel Fekete, Senior Research Scientist, INRIA 

Abstract: 

For years, visualization has focused on expert users with a job to do and limited time. With the advent of visualization on the web, the landscape has changed. Now, visualization is presented to people with no external motivation, on their leisure time, and competing with various other activities. Still, visualization remains a powerful tool to make sense of complex data, in particular for citizens who want to make sense of the world they live in, with the help of the open data initiatives for example. But introducing visualization to the people triggers multiple problems related to visualization literacy and interaction literacy that need solutions. Dr. Jean-Daniel Fekete is exploring this research landscape with students and colleagues. He will report on some issues and solutions that hopefully will lead to a faster adoption of visualization by the people. 

Bio:

Jean-Daniel Fekete is Senior Research Scientist (DR1) at INRIA, the French National Research Institute in Computer Science. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1996 from Université Paris-Sud. From 1997 to 2001, he joined the Graphic Design group at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes that he led from 2000 to 2001. He was then invited to join the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland in the USA for one year. He was recruited by INRIA in 2002 as a confirmed researcher and became Senior Research Scientist in 2006. He is the Scientific Leader of the INRIA Project Team AVIZ (see http://www.aviz.fr/) that he founded in 2007 and that is well known worldwid in the domains of visualization and human-computer interaction. His main research areas are Visual Analytics, Information Visualization and Human Computer Interaction. Dr. Fekete was the General Chair of the IEEE VIS Conference in Paris in 2014, the first time it was held outside of the USA. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), Member of the IEEE Information Visualization Conference Steering Committee and of the EG EuroVis Steering Committee. He is currently on Sabbatical at NYU.