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 100 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 co-authored with Ben Shneiderman the 4th and 5th Editions 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 (a lot) more? Resume
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, 2117C Hornbake South Wing University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A.
Coming to visit? see directions to HCIL** News **
06/09: Now a Research Scientist (equivalent to Full Professor for Research Faculty), thank you all!
05/09: Visual Analytics Evaluation workshop: May 29th 2009 in conjunction with the HCIL symposium.
04/09: Designing the User Interface, 5th ed. (2009) by Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant is now published.
03/09: Visual Analytics Challenge 2009 underway (after great success of 2008 Challenge!)
Publications and projects
.Publications: See Resume or for online versions of the papers search for "plaisant" or other words in the HCIL tech report database
Special Issue on the Evaluation of Visual Analytics (Spring 2009)
Catherine Plaisant, Jean Scholtz and Georges Grinstein (Guest Editors)
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (May/June 2009)
Special Issue in Honor of Ben Shneiderman's 60th Birthday: Reflections on Human-Computer Interaction
Catherine Plaisant, Chris North (Guest Editors)
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 23, No. 3 (December 2007)
(2009), and the older 4th edition was:
(2006)
LifeLines2, Patternfinder (and now Patternfinder in Azyxxi): 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: The NSF SEMVAST project seeks to develop benchmarks datasets and metrics for evaluation. To encourage researchers to work on realistic problems and test the tools they develop, I co-chair the VAST 2009 Challenge, which follows the 2008 Challenge, and the 2007 and 2006 contests, all organized in conjunction with the IEEE Visual Analytics symposium . 
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)
