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 land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

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. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

industrial engineering Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information a ...

at Pierre and Marie Curie University in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

. She also earned a Diplôme d'Ingénieur 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 in ...

(one of the French '' Grandes écoles'').

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 research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design te ...

and

information visualization Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, a ...

. She contributed to the early development of

touchscreen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is ofte ...

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 cert ...

(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 nested figures, usually rectangles. Treemaps display hierarchical ( tree-structured) data as a set of nested rectangles. Each branch of ...

(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 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 (ACM)

CHI Academy The CHI 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 co ...

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 ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...

(french: Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique) 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 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Later in 2020 Plaisant was recognized by the

IEEE Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

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 Pearson may refer to: Organizations Education *Lester B. Pearson College, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada *Pearson College (UK), London, owned by Pearson PLC *Lester B. Pearson High School (disambiguation) Companies *Pearson PLC, a UK-based int ...

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 Information visualization experts American women computer scientists American computer scientists Living people 1957 births 21st-century American women