Brown CS News

Earlier this month, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and professional computing society, elevated Brown CS alum John Stasko (now Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech) to the rank of Fellow for contributions to the design, analysis, usage, and evaluation of software and information visualization. The ACM Fellows Program, initiated in 1993, celebrates the exceptional contributions of leading members of the computing field by conferring the association’s most prestigious membership grade.

Brown CS Professor Steven P. Reiss was Stasko’s PhD advisor. “I fondly remember John,” he says, “both from when he was here as a PhD student (but that was quite a while ago), and in my several meetings with him at Georgia Tech and at many software visualization conferences. He, along with Eric Golin, were instrumental in getting the FIELD editor working. I always felt that his dissertation on TANGO, a very flexible system for algorithm animation, was undervalued – it was highly cited, but should have seen widespread use.” 

John's primary research areas are data and information visualization, approaching each from a human-computer interaction perspective. In 2013, he served as General Chair of the IEEE VIS conference, the flagship academic conference for his field, when it was held in Atlanta. Stasko received the 2012 IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award, and he was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy in 2016 and the IEEE VIS Academy in 2019. John was named a 2014 IEEE Fellow and a 2022 ACM Fellow. On the instructional side, he has twice received the College of Computing's annual gus baird Teaching Award. Stasko earned his PhD from Brown CS in 1989. Continuing a mindset he says that he potentially picked up at Brown, John still teaches one of GT's intro programming courses to hundreds of mostly freshman students each year.

John is Director of the Information Interfaces Research Group, whose mission is to help people take advantage of information to enrich their lives. As the amount of data available to people and organizations has skyrocketed over the past 10-20 years, largely fueled by the growth of the internet, insufficient methods for people to benefit from this flood of data have been developed. A central focus of many of the group's projects is the creation of information visualization and visual analytics tools to help people explore, analyze, understand, and communicate data sets. John's passion about research in, and the value of, data visualization is illustrated in his EuroVis 2014 Conference Capstone invited lecture. He describes his more recent research on designing flexible and natural interfaces for human-data interaction in this 2022 CSIG-VIS lecture.

The full list of 2022 ACM Fellows is available here.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.