Catherine Plaisant is a French/American Research Scientist Emerita at the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...

and assistant director of research of the

University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab The Human–Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland, College Park is an academic research center specializing in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Founded in 1983 by Ben Shneiderman, it is one of the oldest HCI ...

Education

Catherine Plaisant completed her Ph.D. in

industrial engineering Industrial engineering (IE) is concerned with the design, improvement and installation of integrated systems of people, materials, information, equipment and energy. It draws upon specialized knowledge and skill in the mathematical, physical, an ...

Pierre and Marie Curie University Pierre and Marie Curie University ( , UPMC), also known as Paris VI, was a public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussieu Campus in the Latin Quarter of the 5th arrondissement of Paris, ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

. She also earned a

Diplôme d'Ingénieur The ''Diplôme d'Ingénieur'' (, often abbreviated as ''Dipl.Ing.'') is a postgraduate degree in engineering ''(see Engineer's Degrees in Europe)'' usually awarded by the '' Grandes Écoles'' in engineering. It is generally obtained after five to ...

from

Arts et Métiers ParisTech Arts et Métiers ParisTech () is a French engineering and research institute of higher education. It is a ''grande école'', recognized for leading in the fields of mechanics and industrialization. Founded in 1780, it is among the oldest French i ...

(one of the French ''

Grandes écoles Grandes may refer to: *Agustín Muñoz Grandes, Spanish general and politician * Banksia ser. Grandes, a series of plant species native to Australia * Grandes y San Martín, a municipality located in the province of Ávila, Castile and León, Spain ...

'').

Research

After five years working at the ''Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressource Humaine'' in Paris, Catherine Plaisant joined the

to work with

Ben Shneiderman Ben Shneiderman (born August 21, 1947) 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, Mathem ...

. Catherine Plaisant is known for her work on

human–computer interaction Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the process through which people operate and engage with computer systems. Research in HCI covers the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and comp ...

and

information visualization Data and information visualization (data viz/vis or info viz/vis) is the practice of designing and creating Graphics, graphic or visual Representation (arts), representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and i ...

. She contributed to the early development of

touchscreen A touchscreen (or touch screen) is a type of electronic visual display, display that can detect touch input from a user. It consists of both an input device (a touch panel) and an output device (a visual display). The touch panel is typically l ...

interfaces. For example, her work is cited in the

lock screen A lock screen is a computer user interface element used by various operating systems. They regulate immediate access to a device by requiring the user to perform a certain action in order to receive access, such as entering a password, using a cer ...

(or "slide to unlock") patent litigation, which cites in particular her 1991 video of a touchscreen slider. - UK Channel 4 website - ArsTechnica Plaisant also contributed to the development of

Treemap In information visualization and computing, treemapping is a method for displaying hierarchical data using Nesting (computing), nested figures, usually rectangles. Treemaps display hierarchical (Tree (data structure), tree-structured) data as a ...

(in particular Treemap 4.0) and Lifelines, a visualization of personal records, such as patient records.
"Treemap 4.0" from University of Maryland
LifeLines for Visualizing Patient Records - from University of Maryland Other work has focused on

visual analytics Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary science and technology field that emerged from information visualization and scientific visualization. It focuses on how analytical reasoning can be facilitated by interactive User interface, visual interfac ...

tools for exploring patterns of temporal event sequences, with projects such as LifeLines2 and EventFlow that enable analysts to find patterns in large databases of patient records, student records or customer records. Catherine Plaisant was elected to the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(ACM)

CHI Academy The SIGCHI Academy is a group of researchers honored by SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group in Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. Each year, 5–8 new members are elected for having made a significant, cumulative ...

in 2015, for her contributions to the field of study of

. Her work has been cited more than 32,000 times. In 2018, Dr. Plaisant was awarded an

INRIA The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name French Institute for Research in Comp ...

() International Chair. The chairs are awarded to eminent international researchers to join its project teams. Plaisant's research project, for 2018–2022, ''Visual Analytics for Exploratory Data Analysis'', is hosted by INRIA research team AVIZ (Analysis and Visualization). In 2020 she received the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award from the

(ACM). Later in 2020 Plaisant was recognized by the

IEEE Computer Society IEEE Computer Society (commonly known as the Computer Society or CS) is a technical society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) dedicated to computing, namely the major areas of hardware, software, standards and people ...

with the 2020 Visualization Career Award "for her comprehensive body of work within the field of data visualization, including her contributions to evaluation, benchmarks, case studies, and her specific research focus on event sequence visualization."

Books

* ''Designing the User Interface'' Pearson by Shneiderman, B. and Plaisant, C. - 4th Edition (2005), 5th Edition (2010), and 6th Edition (2016) .

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Plaisant, Catherine University of Maryland, College Park faculty Human–computer interaction researchers Data and information visualization experts American women computer scientists American computer scientists Living people 1957 births 21st-century American women