Brown CS Alum John Stasko Receives An IEEE VGTC Lifetime Achievement Award
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on Nov. 10, 2023
Last month, Brown CS alum John Stasko (now Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech) received the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Visualization and Graphics Technical Community (IEEE VGTC). The VGTC is a subcommunity of the IEEE Technical Activities Board that provides leadership and organization in visualization, computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality, and interaction, and the award recognizes John’s “seminal contributions to the value of interaction in information and visual analytics research and to the design and evaluation of software and information visualization”.
John’s recent research has focused on new interaction methods for information visualization, running on small hand-held devices to large wall displays, while providing touch-sensitive and natural-language interfaces and toolkits, such as DataBreeze and NL4DV. One theme that is pervasive in his research is evaluation – he not only creates visualizations, he also evaluates them with carefully-applied quantitative and qualitative methods. His paper on the effectiveness of animation in trend visualization, done with collaborators at MSR while on sabbatical, received the InfoVis 2018 Test of Time Award. More recently, recognizing the weakness in traditional evaluation approaches, he developed a more holistic, value-driven evaluation approach – a heuristic methodology known as ICE-T.
More information about John and his research can be found in the one-pager that accompanies the award, located here.
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 has also been 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.
Earlier this year, John was named an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow.
More information about IEEE VGTG Lifetime Achievement Awards is available here, and a full list of recipients can be found here.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
