HCI Seminar - John Stasko - Reflections on the Value of Visualization

Abstract:
Although everyone today seems focused on AI and LLMs to solve problems and make decisions, many everyday activities still benefit from a more human touch and presence. Data Visualization, the focus of my research, is fundamentally a tool to help people perform analysis better and communicate information about that analysis more effectively. In this talk, I'll recount multiple examples from my career that illustrated the value of visualization and the lessons that I learned from those examples. Additionally, I will attempt to more precisely explain how visualization helps analysis and communication, and I will describe the situations in which visualization can be most beneficial. 

Bio:
John Stasko is a Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1989. From 2021-22, he also served as the School’s Interim Chair. Stasko is a widely published and internationally recognized researcher in the areas of information visualization and visual analytics, approaching each from a human-computer interaction perspective. He was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy in 2016 and IEEE Visualization Academy in 2019. Stasko received the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2012 and the Visualization Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. He was named an IEEE Fellow in 2014 and an ACM Fellow in 2022.

This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97746469057.