Jock D. Mackinlay (born August 16, 1952) is an American

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 ...

expert and Vice President of Research and Design at

Tableau Software Tableau Software, LLC is an American interactive data visualization software company focused on business intelligence. It was founded in 2003 in Mountain View, California, and is currently headquartered in Seattle, Washington. In 2019, the com ...

. With

Stuart Card Stuart K. Card (born December 21, 1943) is an American researcher and retired senior research fellow at Xerox PARC. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of applying human factors in human–computer interaction. With Jock D. Mackinlay, Geo ...

George G. Robertson George G. Robertson is an American information visualization expert and senior researcher, Visualization and Interaction (VIBE) Research Group, Microsoft Research. With Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay and others he invented a number of Informat ...

and others he invented a number of

techniques.

Education

Jock Mackinlay was born in

Nuremberg Nuremberg (, ; ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the Franconia#Towns and cities, largest city in Franconia, the List of cities in Bavaria by population, second-largest city in the States of Germany, German state of Bav ...

, Germany, and received his BA in mathematics and computer science from

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

in 1975 and his PhD in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in 1986, where he pioneered the automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information.

Career

In 1976, Mackinlay started working as a systems analyst for the

Bank of America The Bank of America Corporation (Bank of America) (often abbreviated BofA or BoA) is an American multinational investment banking, investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered at the Bank of America Corporate Center in ...

in San Francisco. In 1977 he became a systems analyst at Minimax Research Corporation. From 1979 to 1986 he was a research assistant at Stanford University while getting his PhD. In 1986 he joined

Xerox PARC Future Concepts division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a div ...

, where he collaborated with the User Interface Research Group to develop many novel applications of computer graphics for information access, coining the term "information visualization". Much of the fruits of this research can be seen in his 1999 published book, ''Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think'', written and edited with

and

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 ...

. In 2000, Mackinlay took a year-long sabbatical from

to work as a visiting professor at

Aarhus University Aarhus University (, abbreviated AU) is a public research university. Its main campus is located in Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second largest and second oldest university in Denmark. The university is part of the Coimbra Group, the Guild, and Ut ...

in Denmark, where he taught courses in ''Information Visualization'' and ''User Interfaces of Mobile Devices'' (co-taught with Polle Zellweger). In 2003, Mackinlay was on Chris Stolte's dissertation committee at Stanford along with Professor

Pat Hanrahan Patrick M. Hanrahan (born May 8, 1955) 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 render ...

. Stolte and Hanrahan had extended Mackinlay's dissertation to a formal specification language that combines query, analysis, and visualization into a single framework. They went on to found

after Stolte graduated. Mackinlay joined Tableau Software in 2004 as Director of Visual Analysis. He holds numerous patents in user interfaces and visual analysis.

Research and awards

Mackinlay has been an active member of the academic research community since the late 1980s. He was UIST'91 program chair and UIST'92 conference chair, and was papers co-chair for CHI'96. He was also on the editorial boards for ACM TOCHI (1997-2003) and IEEE CG&A (2004-6). He has received many awards for his work, including the best paper award at IEEE Visual Languages 1998 (co-authored with Polle Zellweger, Bay-Wei Chang, and Takeo Igarashi). In 2005, Mackinlay won DMReview's data visualization competition. In 2009, he received the Visualization Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee for his seminal technical work on automatic presentation tools and new visual metaphors for information visualization. Mackinlay became a distinguished member of ACM in 2013. In 2023, Mackinlay was elected to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

, "For contributions to the fields of computational data visualization and information visualization".

Publications

Books: * 1999. ''Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think''. With Stuart K. Card and

. Morgan Kaufmann. Articles: * 1986. "Automating the Design of Graphical Presentations of Relational Information". in: ''ACM Transactions on Graphics''. 5(2, April), 110-141. * 1989. "The cognitive coprocessor architecture for interactive user interfaces". With S. K. Card, and George G. Robertson. In: ''Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology'', pages 10–18. ACM Press, Nov 1989. * 1991. "Cone Trees: Animated 3D Visualizations of Hierarchical Information". With George G. Robertson and Stuart K. Card. In: Robertson, Scott P., Olson, Gary M. and Olson, Judith S. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 28 - June 5, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana. pp. 189–194. * 1993. "Information Visualization Using 3D Interactive Animation". With Stuart K. Card, and George G. Robertson. In: ''Communications of the ACM'', 36(4), April 1993. pp. 57–71. * 1993. "The document lens". With George G. Robertson. In: ''Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology''. ACM Press, Nov 1993. * 2000. "Opportunities for Information Visualization". In: ''IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications'' 20(1). * 2004
"Log-based Longitudinal Study Finds Window Thrashing"
With C. Royer. * 2007
"Show me: Automatic presentation for visual analysis"
With Pat Hanrahan and Chris Stolte. In: ''IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphic''s 13(6). * 2008
"Graphical histories for visualization: Supporting analysis, communication, and evaluation"
With J Heer, C Stolte, M Agrawala. In: ''IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics'' 14(6). * 2009
“Information visualization”
With Stuart Card, B Shneiderman. In: ''Human-computer interaction: Design issues, solutions, and applications'' 181 * 2013
“Storytelling: The next step for visualization”
With R Kosara. In: ''Computer'' 46(5) pp. 44–50 .

References

External links

Introduction at tableausoftware.com. {{DEFAULTSORT:Mackinlay, Jock D. 1952 births Living people Human–computer interaction researchers Data and information visualization experts Stanford University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Scientists at PARC (company)