Contact informationEmail: plaisant@umd.edu Tel: +1 (301) 405-2768 Surface mail address: 2117C Hornbake South Wing, 4130 Campus Dr. University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A. Coming to visit? PublicationsSee Academic Resume Books
6th Edition (2016)
Inspired EHRs: Designing for Clinicians (2014) Journal Special Issues
State of the Field and New Research Directions, Information Visualization, 10(4), 2011. Guest Editors: Catherine Plaisant, Andreas Kerren, Stasko Evaluation of Visual Analytics, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (May/June 2009).
Special Issue in Honor of Ben Shneiderman’s 60th Birthday: Reflections on Human-Computer Interaction, VideosEditor of the HCIL Video Report Series (1991-2006). Some (including the 2000 retrospective) are also available in the Open Video Project (a pioneer of video digital libraries). Later videos are included in the project pages. |
Catherine Plaisant is a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Associate Director of Research of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Catherine earned a Doctorat d’Ingénieur degree in France (similar to an Industrial Engineering PhD). In 1988 she joined the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory where she has been working with multidisciplinary teams on designing and evaluating new interface technologies that are useful and usable.
Catherine Plaisant has published over 200 papers, on subjects as diverse as information visualization, medical informatics, universal access, decision making, digital humanities or technology for families. Her work spans the interface development lifecycle, with contributions to requirements gathering, interface design, and evaluation. In 2015 she was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy recognizing principal leaders in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. In 2018 she was awarded an INRIA International Chair. in 2020 she received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award. With long term collaborator Ben Shneiderman she co-authored the 4th, 5th and 6th Editions of Designing the User Interface, one of the major books on Human-Computer Interaction. Need (a lot) more? Academic Resume (26 pages) or abbreviated version (7 pages) Current ProjectsFrom 1983 to 2002 the CHI Conference published a yearly Technical Video Program distributed on VHS videotapes. We are now working to preserve those video demonstrations and archive them in the ACM Digital Library.
PAOHVIS: Dynamic Hypergraphs Visualization Visualization of transportation data: I help the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology design or redesign the user interface of products for transportation managers and analysts. See RITIS (and also this much older HCIL transportation project)
Past ProjectsPeerFinder explores the challenge of finding people like you, i.e. finding records similar to a seed record, based on record attributes AND event history. We know that users do not trust the advice of blackbox algorithms for important decision making, and we believe that transparency and user control can increase trust in recommendations that are based on people similarities.
EventAction introduces prescriptive analytics for temporal event sequences. The idea is to help users make plans based on data from similar people who achieve the desired outcome.
CoCo (short for COhort COmparison) helps analysts compare two groups of records such as patients records or student records to find differences in the event sequences found in the groups.
EventFlow for event analytics is now used by many researchers. EventFlow allows them to 1) search for specific patterns of events 2) see an overview of all sequences and 3) simplify the data to reveal useful patterns. Precursor projects were:
Twinlist: explored how visual layout and animation can help clinicians see similarities in drug lists and rapidly make decisions about which drugs to keep and which one to discontinue. Related project: SHARP-C: Novel user interfaces for clinicians
Treeversity visualizes changes over time of dynamic hierarchical data. Users can analyze relative and absolute change over a variable in each node, as well as created and removed nodes. They can also compare non inherently hierarchical datasets, by grouping them by attributes.
Community Analysis and Visualization for “Nation of Neighbors”: This project looked at social network analysis for local communities.
FeatureLens: we worked with literary scholars to and combined visualization and text mining to explore patterns of repetitions in text collections. This was part of the larger MONK project. Visual Analytics Evaluation : The SEMVAST project helped develop benchmarks datasets and metrics for evaluation. I co-chaired the 1st IEEE Visual Analytics Challenge for several years starting with the 1st Challenge in 2006, and still try to maintain the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository.
iSonic : making georeferenced data accessible to users with visual impairments Dynamic Queries, and Query Preview (an ancestor of faceted search)
LifeLines for Visualizing Medical Patient Records (and other personal histories)
Touchscreen Toggles (ON/OFF selection) NetworksTrees and hierarchiesOthers
Temporary link to Ben’s paper on User Centered AI See MORE DETAILS of OLDER PROJECTS |
NewsFeb. 14, 2020 Feb. 9, 2020 Sept. 1, 2019 March 1, 2018 Oct. 5, 2017 July 6, 2017: SIGCHI-Paris Seminar June 30, 2017: June 27, 2017 June 19, 2017: Invited seminar at INRIA Lille June 7, 2017: Keynote at Journées Visu 2017, Rueil-Malmaison June-July 2017: Thanks to a Digiscosme Visiting Professor grant I spent two months working at INRIA with Jean-Daniel Fekete and his colleagues in Paris. It was great to work in Paris again, and spend weekends visiting friends and family. May 2017: Received the Dean’s Distinguished Research Scientist Award May 2016: As part of the HCIL Symposium we organized a workshop on Temporal Event Sequence Analysis + EventFlow and CoCo user group meeting. Join us on May 26!
12/2014: I was elected to the SIGCHI Academy, an ACM award. Thank you to all students and colleagues who made it possible, in particular Ben Shneiderman, my close partner for 28+ years. |
