Catherine Plaisant
Dr. Catherine Plaisant is Associate Director of Research of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. She earned a Doctorat d'Ingenieur degree in France in 1982 (similar to a Industrial Engineering PhD) and has written over 90 refereed technical publications on diverse subjects such as information visualization, digital libraries, universal access, image browsing, help, digital humanities, technology for families, or evaluation methodologies. She recently co-authored with Ben Shneiderman the 4th Edition of Designing the User Interface , one of the major books on the topic of Human-Computer Interaction.She enjoys working with multidisciplinary teams on designing and evaluating new interface technologies that are useable and useful. Research contributions range from focused user interaction techniques (e.g. Excentric Labeling) to innovative visualizations (such as LifeLines for personal records or SpaceTree for hierarchical data exploration) and interactive search interface techniques such as Query Previews. Those interaction techniques have been carefully validated with user studies and are finding applications in industry, government information systems and digital libraries.
Need more? - 2-page bio (01/2006) - Resume (07/2007)
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Contact information
Email: plaisant@cs.umd.edu
Tel: +1 (301) 405-2768, Fax (if you alert me first): +1 (301) 405-6707
Surface mail address: HCIL, Hornbake Library, 2117c South Wing University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A.
Coming to visit? see directions to HCIL** News **
Special Issue in Honor of Ben Shneiderman's 60th Birthday: Reflections on Human-Computer Interaction
Catherine Plaisant, Chris North (Editors)
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 23, No. 3 (December 2007)Publications and projects
.Publications: See Resume (07/2007) or for online versions of the papers search for "plaisant" or other key words in the HCIL tech report database
Patternfinder (and now Patternfinder in Azyxxi) and LifeLines2: Interfaces for searching temporal categorical data, visually explore results and look for potential cause and effect. Our focus is on Electronic Health Records. 
FeatureLens : we worked with literary scholars to develop a tool for exploring patterns of repetitions in text collections. This is part of the larger MONK project. 
VISUAL ANALYTICS EVALUATION: To develop evaluation methods for visual analytics and encourage researchers to work on realistic problems and test the tools they develop, we have been organizing contests in 2006 and 2007 in conjunction with the IEEE Visual Analytics symposium . In 2008 the Contest has evolved in the VAST 2008 Challenge
See also: the SEMVAST project
MONK is a large multi-institution project whose goal is to design and develop a digital environment helping humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the large collections of texts they study, using data mining and visualization. It continues the the NORA project. See JCDL paper nominated for Best Paper award (or the related HCIL project highlight ) or the FeatureLens and BasketLens projects 
TreePlus, for browsing graphs using a tree layout, with an emphasis on readability. It was used to display social networks and food webs. 
NetLens for iterative querying of bipartite graphs such of bibliographic data or email collections. 
TimeSearcher for exploration of time series. 
Information Visualization Benchmarks Repository and
the InfoVis CONTESTS we ran in 2003 and 2004.Integration of Data and Interfaces to Enhance Human Understanding of Government Statistics. A collaborative project with University of North Carolina. Our motto: "Find what you need, understand what you found". We worked on diverse topics but my main focus was on new methods for helping novice users get started with complex interfaces, dealing with missing data, and improving accessibility to blind users (see the project below) 
iSonic: making georeferenced data accessible to users with visual impairments Interliving: New Technology for Families. In particular we developed and evaluated to share calendar information between intergenerational family members, using digital pen technology. Treemap 4: New development in hierarchical information visualization with Treemap SpaceTree: a scalable and searchable hierarchical information browser A story telling robot for children in rehabilitation. PhotoFinder: Personal Photo Libraries Excentric Labeling for Information Visualization User interfaces for highway traffic management. In collaboration with the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology. Dynamic Queries and Query Preview Interfaces. Looked at how to avoid zero-hit queries with dynamic previews of the data available. In collaboration with NASA EOSDIS. Later on some of those ideas were applied in the user interfaces of the Global Land Cover Facility Learning Histories for Simulation-based engineering education environments LifeLines for Visualizing Medical Patient Records (and other personal histories) User Interfaces for the Library of Congress National Digital Library. How to "bring treasures to the surface" in the design of Digital Libraries.
See also WebTOC: a Tool to Visualize and Quantify Web Sites using a Hierarchical Table of ContentsUser Interfaces for the Visible Human Project High precision touchscreens, Information Kiosks, Home Automation (Summary) Hypertext research (my first project at HCIL in 1987!)
. Role Management as a guiding concept for the next generation of user interfaces (Summary) . User interfaces for Youth Services Information Systems . Network Management (Summary)
