Tamara Munzner

Last updated

Tamara Munzner
Born1969 (age 54–55)
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
CitizenshipAmerican, Canadian [1]
Alma mater Stanford University (BS, PhD)
Father Aribert Munzner
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science, Information Visualization
Institutions University of Minnesota
(1991–1995)
University of British Columbia (2002–present)
Thesis Interactive Visualization of Large Graphs and Networks  (2000)
Doctoral advisor Pat Hanrahan

Tamara Macushla Munzner (born 1969) is an American-Canadian scientist. She is an expert in information visualization who works as a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Contents

Early life

Tamara Macushla Munzner was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the daughter of abstract painter Aribert Munzner. [2] She graduated from South High School in 1986. [3] She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1991. [2] [3] She returned to Stanford for her graduate studies, completing her Ph.D. in 2000 under the supervision of Pat Hanrahan. [4] [5] Her thesis, Interactive Visualization of Large Graphs and Networks, involved using hyperbolic geometry to visualize large graphs. [6] [4]

Career

Munzner worked as an intern at ETA Systems in the 1980s while still in college. [3] Munzner then worked at The Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota from 1991 to 1995. [4] There, she helped produce two mathematical visualization videos, one about turning spheres inside-out and another about the different topological structures that a three-dimensional universe could have. [7]

She interned at Microsoft Research and Silicon Graphics. [3] After receiving her Ph.D., she became a research scientist at the Compaq Systems Research Center in 2000, before joining the University of British Columbia faculty as an assistant professor of computer science in the summer of 2002. [4] [3]

Munzner is the author of the book Visualization Analysis and Design (CRC Press, 2014). [8] She was program co-chair of the InfoVis conference in 2003 and 2004, and of EuroVis in 2009 and 2010. She has served as the chair of the steering committee of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) InfoVis and the executive committee of IEEE Visualization. [4]

Selected publications

Recognition

In 2015, Munzner received the IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award "in recognition of her foundational research that has produced a scientific basis for principles and design choices for visualization". [9] In 2019, Munzner was awarded a 10-Year Test of Time award from IEEE InfoVis. Her nested model of visualization design and validation, published in 2009, guided designers from a problem in an application domain to abstractions for the problem and data, to the design of visual encoding and interaction techniques, to efficient instantiation through algorithms. [10] She was elected as an IEEE Fellow, in the 2023 class of fellows, "for contributions to principles, processes, and design for visualization". [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific visualization</span> Interdisciplinary branch of science concerned with presenting scientific data visually

Scientific visualization is an interdisciplinary branch of science concerned with the visualization of scientific phenomena. It is also considered a subset of computer graphics, a branch of computer science. The purpose of scientific visualization is to graphically illustrate scientific data to enable scientists to understand, illustrate, and glean insight from their data. Research into how people read and misread various types of visualizations is helping to determine what types and features of visualizations are most understandable and effective in conveying information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data and information visualization</span> Visual representation of data

Data and information visualization is the practice of designing and creating easy-to-communicate and easy-to-understand graphic or visual representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and information with the help of static, dynamic or interactive visual items. Typically based on data and information collected from a certain domain of expertise, these visualizations are intended for a broader audience to help them visually explore and discover, quickly understand, interpret and gain important insights into otherwise difficult-to-identify structures, relationships, correlations, local and global patterns, trends, variations, constancy, clusters, outliers and unusual groupings within data. When intended for the general public to convey a concise version of known, specific information in a clear and engaging manner, it is typically called information graphics.

<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.

The Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia was established in May 1968. UBC CS is located at the UBC Point Grey campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. As of November 2023, it has 66 faculty, 64 staff, 259 graduate students, and 2,774 undergraduates.

Ming C. Lin is an American computer scientist and a Barry Mersky and Capital One Endowed Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also the former chair of the Department of Computer Science. Prior to moving to Maryland in 2018, Lin was the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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.

Jarke J. (Jack) van Wijk is a Dutch computer scientist, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and an expert in information visualization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Daniel Fekete</span> French computer scientist

Jean-Daniel Fekete is a French computer scientist.

Sheelagh Carpendale is a Canadian artist and computer scientist working in the field of information visualization and human-computer interaction.

Robert Spence was a British engineer who was a professor emeritus and senior research investigator at the Imperial College London, known for his work in the field of information visualization.

Claudio Silva is a Brazilian American computer scientist and data scientist. He is a professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, the head of disciplines at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and affiliate faculty member at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He co-developed the open-source data-exploration system VisTrails with his wife Juliana Freire and many other collaborators. He is a former chair of the executive committee for the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics.

The IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) is an annual conference on scientific visualization, information visualization, and visual analytics administrated by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics. As ranked by Google Scholar's h-index metric in 2016, VIS is the highest rated venue for visualization research and the second-highest rated conference for computer graphics over all. It has an 'A' rating from the Australian Ranking of ICT Conferences, an 'A' rating from the Brazilian ministry of education, and an 'A' rating from the China Computer Federation (CCF). The conference is highly selective with generally < 25% acceptance rates for all papers.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the IEEE Computer Society. It covers subjects related to computer graphics and visualization techniques, systems, software, hardware, and user interface issues. TVCG has been considered the top journal in the field of 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">Kwan-Liu Ma</span> American computer scientist

Kwan-Liu Ma is an American computer scientist. He was born and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan and came to the United States pursuing advanced study in 1983. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include visualization, computer graphics, human computer interaction, and high-performance computing.

Alla Sheffer is a Canadian researcher in computer graphics, geometric modeling, geometry processing, and mesh generation, particularly known for her research on mesh parameterization and angle-based flattening. She is currently a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia.

Jessica Hullman is a computer scientist and the Ginni Rometty professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. She is known for her research in Information visualization and Uncertainty quantification.

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.

Jane Patricia Wilhelms was an American biologist and computer scientist known for her contributions to computer graphics, including work on anatomical simulation of humans and animals and collision detection in computer animation, and isosurfaces and volume rendering in scientific visualization. She was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

For the American author, see Mary Ormsbee Whitton.

References

  1. ↑ Munzner, Tamara, "Just voted for the first time as a new Canadian citizen - democracy FTW!", Twitter, retrieved 2019-12-12
  2. 1 2 "Tamara Munzner biography". University of British Columbia . 11 November 2021. Archived from the original on 2023-07-11. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "the cavalcade of old Tamara Munzner bios", University of British Columbia , retrieved 2021-05-12
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "Curriculum vitae" (PDF), University of British Columbia , 21 June 2022, archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-07-11, retrieved 2023-07-11
  5. ↑ Tamara Munzner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. ↑ Hardenbergh, Jan (22 July 2002), "Interview with Tamara Munzner", Reports from SIGGRAPH 2002, ACM SIGGRAPH, archived from the original on 2012-05-22.
  7. ↑ Salvo, Natalie (19 May 2015), "Professor Tamara Munzner and CSIRO's Christian Stolte discuss how to create great visualizations", The AU Interview, The AU Review, archived from the original on 2018-03-06.
  8. ↑ Satzer, William J. (17 March 2015), "Review of Visualization Analysis and Design", MAA Reviews, Mathematical Association of America .
  9. ↑ "The 2015 Visualization Technical Achievement Award", Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , January 2016, retrieved 2021-11-06
  10. ↑ "VIS2019 - Test of Time Award Awards", Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , 2019, archived from the original on 2021-10-27, retrieved 2021-11-06
  11. ↑ IEEE Computer Society Announces 2023 Class of Fellows, IEEE Computer Society, 9 December 2022, retrieved 2023-07-03
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.