Jeffrey Heer

Last updated

Jeffrey Michael Heer
Jeffrey Heer at UW.jpg
Heer in 2016
Born (1979-06-15) June 15, 1979 (age 45)
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley (BS, MS, PhD)
Known for Data visualization
Awards TR35, Sloan Fellowship, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Institutions University of Washington,
Stanford University
Doctoral advisor Maneesh Agrawala
Doctoral students
Website homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer

Jeffrey Michael Heer (born June 15, 1979) is an American computer scientist best known for his work on information visualization and interactive data analysis. He is a professor of computer science & engineering [1] at the University of Washington, where he directs the UW Interactive Data Lab. [2] He co-founded Trifacta with Joe Hellerstein and Sean Kandel in 2012.

Contents

Education

Heer received a B.S., M.S. and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. [3] As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, he developed the Prefuse and Flare [4] visualization toolkits.

Research and career

Heer was an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, from 2009 to 2013. [3] He is also co-founder and chief experience officer of Trifacta. [5] Heer's research focuses on new systems and techniques for data visualization. As a member of the Stanford University faculty, he worked with Mike Bostock on the Protovis and D3.js systems.

Heer then moved to the University of Washington where he worked with students and collaborators to develop the Vega and Vega-Lite visualisation grammars. Along with Joe Hellerstein and Sean Kandel, Heer has also developed interactive tools for data transformation (including Data Wrangler [6] ), leading to the founding of Trifacta. Other research contributions include work on the graphical perception of visualizations, social data analysis, text visualization, and interactive language translation tools.

Awards and recognition

Heer's research has been recognized by an ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, [7] a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery Investigator Award, [8] an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, [9] and MIT Technology Review's TR35 list. [10] Heer and his students have won best paper awards at human-computer interaction [11] [12] and visualization [13] conferences. His work has also appeared in the popular press. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]

Heer was named as an ACM Fellow, in the 2024 class of fellows, "for contributions to information visualization, human-centered data science, and interactive machine learning". [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Hopcroft</span> American computer scientist (born 1939)

John Edward Hopcroft is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation and data structures are regarded as standards in their fields. He is a professor emeritus at Cornell University, co-director of the Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies at Peking University, and the director of the John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grace Murray Hopper Award</span> Computer science award

The Grace Murray Hopper Award has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. The award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or service contribution at or before age 35.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Shneiderman</span> American computer scientist

Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.

George William Furnas is an American academic, Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Strategy at the School of Information of the University of Michigan, known for his work on semantic analysis and on human-system communication.

In computing, data transformation is the process of converting data from one format or structure into another format or structure. It is a fundamental aspect of most data integration and data management tasks such as data wrangling, data warehousing, data integration and application integration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pat Hanrahan</span> American computer graphics researcher

Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award.

Jock D. Mackinlay is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software. With Stuart Card, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of information visualization techniques.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph M. Hellerstein</span> American computer scientist

Joseph M. Hellerstein is an American professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on database systems and computer networks. He co-founded Trifacta with Jeffrey Heer and Sean Kandel in 2012, which stemmed from their research project, Wrangler.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samuel Madden (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist

Samuel R. Madden is an American computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is currently a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Piotr Indyk is Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Theory of Computation Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

John Thomas Stasko III is a Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he joined the faculty in 1989. He also is one of the founding members of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) Center there. Stasko is best known for his extensive research in information visualization and visual analytics, including his earlier work in software visualization and algorithm animation.

Anne Elizabeth Condon, is an Irish-Canadian computer scientist, professor, and former head of the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on computational complexity theory, DNA computing, and bioinformatics. She has also held the NSERC/General Motors Canada Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (CWSE) from 2004 to 2009, and has worked to improve the success of women in the sciences and engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trifacta</span>

Trifacta is a privately owned software company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Bangalore, Boston, Berlin and London. The company was founded in October 2012 and primarily develops data wrangling software for data exploration and self-service data preparation on cloud and on-premises data platforms.

Data exploration is an approach similar to initial data analysis, whereby a data analyst uses visual exploration to understand what is in a dataset and the characteristics of the data, rather than through traditional data management systems. These characteristics can include size or amount of data, completeness of the data, correctness of the data, possible relationships amongst data elements or files/tables in the data.

Gordon L. Kindlmann is an American computer scientist who works on information visualization and image analysis. He is recognized for his contributions in developing tools for tensor data visualization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hanspeter Pfister</span> Swiss computer scientist

Hanspeter Pfister is a Swiss computer scientist. He is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. His research in visual computing lies at the intersection of scientific visualization, information visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision and spans a wide range of topics, including biomedical image analysis and visualization, image and video analysis, and visual analytics in data science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sean Kandel</span>

Sean Kandel is Trifacta's Chief Technical Officer and Co-founder, along with Joseph M. Hellerstein and Jeffrey Heer. He is known for the development of new tools for data transformation and discovery and is the co-developed of Data Wrangler, an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation.

Daniel Wigdor is a Canadian computer scientist, entrepreneur, investor, expert witness and author. He is the associate chair of Industrial Relations as well as a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Niklas Elmqvist is a Swedish-American computer scientist. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University, and a Villium Investigator. He is the Director of the Center for Anytime Anywhere Analytics at Aarhus University, a research center on augmented reality and extended reality (AR/XR) for data visualization.

Leilani Marie Battle is an African American computer scientist. She is an assistant professor at University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Leilani Battle is also a co-director in UW's interactive Data Lab program. She is known for her research into the visualization and analysis of complex database systems.

References

  1. "Faculty - Computer Science & Engineering".
  2. "UW Interactive Data Lab".
  3. 1 2 "Jeffrey Heer – Bio". washington.edu. Retrieved May 27, 2021.
  4. "Data Visualization for the Web". Flare.
  5. "Trifacta". Archived from the original on December 7, 2013.
  6. Sean Kandel; Andreas Paepcke; Joseph Hellerstein; Jeffrey Heer. Wrangler: interactive visual specification of data transformation scripts. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/1978942.1979444.
  7. "ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award 2016".
  8. "Home - Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation". Archived from the original on March 15, 2016. Retrieved April 12, 2016.
  9. "Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships 2012" (PDF). Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 9, 2016.
  10. Review, MIT Technology. "Innovator Under 35: Jeffrey Heer, 30".
  11. "Best of CHI - CHI 2013".
  12. "UIST 2011 - 24th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (October 16-19, 2011 Santa Barbara, California)".
  13. "EuroVis 2013 - The Eurographics Conference on Visualization".
  14. "For Big-Data Scientists, 'Janitor Work' Is Key Hurdle to Insights". The New York Times. August 18, 2014.
  15. Harris, Derrick (October 4, 2012). "Gigaom - Why Trifacta is teaching humans and data to work together".
  16. Katherine Long (June 27, 2012). "UW recruits superstars of computer-science world". Seattle Times. Archived from the original on July 23, 2013.
  17. "Love and marriage: How the UW is making bets on the brains of 'big data' and 'machine learning'". June 28, 2012.
  18. "Show me". The Economist. February 27, 2010.
  19. Greene, Kate. "Simpler Data Visualization".
  20. "2024 ACM Fellows Honored for Contributions to Computing That Are Transforming Science and Society". Association for Computing Machinery. January 22, 2025. Retrieved January 22, 2025.