2022 VIS Steering Committee (VSC) Candidates
The VIS Steering Committee (VSC) provides scientific and organizational oversight of IEEE VIS. It is the highest level committee at IEEE VIS and develops long term strategy and policy, appoints scientific content chairs, manages relationships with journals, ratifies specified VEC appointments and decisions, and oversees the evolution of the area model that defines the conference.
The VSC provides oversight and planning for the VIS conference as described in the VIS Charter.
The 2022 candidates for the VSC are:
Remco Chang
It is a great privilege to be considered for a position on the VSC. I am an associate professor in Computer Science at Tufts University where I have been a faculty member since 2010. I have advised and co-advised 15 PhD students and postdocs, 10 of whom have become professors. In the visualization community, I have served as a papers chair for VAST, poster, workshop, panel, doctoral colloquium chairs for VIS, and a member of awards committees for various visualization conferences. I am currently an associate editor for TVCG and TiiS, and I will be a co-organizer of VIS in 2024.
Perhaps the contribution to the visualization community I am most proud of has been the visualization summer camp that I have co-organized since 2015. The summer camp is a mentoring workshop for untenured visualization faculty members in North America. Attendees gather for a few days to discuss the challenges of being faculty and share ideas on how to succeed in academia (and maintaining work-life balance). Some of the past attendees are now full professors who are integral to the visualization organization.
What I have learned from organizing the summer camp is that communication is the key to forming a vibrant community. The “(Early Career) Vis Researcher” Slack channel that I have helped develop is an example of how supportive, collegial, and welcoming the VIS community can be if we have the opportunities and the appropriate mechanisms to talk to each other. As the VIS community grows internationally and the organization becomes more complex, such open communication will be even more important, especially for newcomers, students, and members from minority groups to feel welcomed and engaged. As a member of the VSC, I will foster such open communications that are inclusive of visualization members from different backgrounds and make the VIS community a safe and welcoming one for all.
Niklas Elmqvist
I am honored to have been nominated for an elected position on the IEEE VIS Steering Committee (VSC). If elected I will draw on my twenty years of experience as a visualization researcher, organizer, and reviewer. Below are my qualifications for this position: Leadership: I am a full professor at UMD in College Park, USA with experience leading our HCI masters program (2014-2018), the HCIL research lab (2016-2021), and the ACM SIGCHI Ph.D. dissertation award committee (2021-2023). I also have a significant track record of scientific leadership and organization; see below. Contributions to VIS: I am an active researcher in the IEEE VIS community with dozens of publications in IEEE TVCG, several best papers and honorable mentions, and a research group of 6 Ph.D. students who all view IEEE VIS as their primary venue. Scientific organization: I have served as papers co-chair for IEEE VIS three times and as chair for Visualization subcommittee at the ACM CHI conference twice. I have been a member of more than 60 technical program committees and four editorial boards. Willingness to participate: I see service to the scientific community as a vital part of my job as a faculty member. Accordingly, I have contributed countless hours of my time to serve in virtually all of the roles in the VIS organization committee, to participate in VIS program committees a total of 18 times (InfoVis+VAST), and to review innumerable visualization research papers. I stand ready to donate more of my time to the VSC. After close to twenty years in the visualization community, I am submitting my candidacy for the IEEE VIS Steering Committee. Thank you.
Jeffrey Heer
I’m honored to be nominated for the VSC – thank you! I have been an active member of the VIS community for over 15 years, having served as a technical program co-chair for InfoVis and EuroVis, an associate editor of TVCG, and an InfoVis steering committee member. My collaborators and I have conducted research on topics including visualization languages & tools, graphical perception, data management, and interactive machine learning. In addition to my role in academia – directing the Stanford Vis Group and then the UW Interactive Data Lab – I have founded and helped advise companies in this space.
I believe VIS can benefit from a continued embrace of diverse research methods, a wider range of modalities (in addition to the visual, notably including accessibility), a greater commitment to theory, and stronger cross-disciplinary engagements (particularly across the lifecycles of data analysis, machine learning, etc.). I would like to see VIS researchers play a larger beneficial role in some of today’s major socio-technical issues and will attempt to position the conference to promote that. Accordingly, I will also strongly support efforts for increasing inclusivity and mentoring within the field.
Chris Johnson
I am a faculty member within and founding director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah where I am a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and hold faculty appointments in the Departments of Physics and Bioengineering http://www.cs.utah.edu/~crj/. I have made multiple technical contributions in scalar, vector, and tensor field visualization, problem solving environments, uncertainty visualization, and biomedical computing and visualization. I Co-Chaired the IEEE Visualization Conference in 2000 and Co-Chaired the IEEE Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) Symposium in 2012. I served on the Executive Committee of the IEEE VGTC 2012-2016, served on the LDAV Steering Committee for several years and also served on the IEEE VGTC Awards Committee multiple times, along with many other IEEE VIS committees. I have also had impact on the field through my many professional leadership roles. I currently serve on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, the Flatiron Institute Scientific Advisory Board, the Carnegie Institution for Science Advisory Council, and the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering and have served on more than 40 additional national or international external advisory boards. My vision for IEEE VIS is to continue to provide the premier international forum for presenting innovations in visualization and visual analytics methods and applications across science, engineering, medicine, humanities, commerce, the arts and to expand into new areas. I would like to see IEEE VIS grow in size, have a more significant presence from application researchers and researchers from companies, and to continue and expand efforts to be more inclusive.
Bernhard Preim
Let me briefly introduce myself. After working for an independent research institute for computer assisted diagnosis and treatment, I became Chair of Visualization in Magdeburg 2003. My research is quite application-oriented still with a strong bias towards medical applications. To carry out such application-driven research, I also deal with Human Computer Interaction. Thus, I am also familiar with HCI conferences and the German HCI community. I regularly participated in the IEEE Visualization conference since 2001 with paper presentations, as organizer of tutorials and participant of panel discussions. Four of my Phd students presented at the Doctoral Colloquium. As a European, I’m of course also familiar with the EuroVis conference where InfoVis, SciVis and Visual Analytics were always united. Thus, I was very positive about the REVISE activities shaping the future IEEE VisWeeks. I consider the current time quite exciting; in particular the shift towards hybrid conferences that probably needs careful planning and refinement to provide an attractive experience for both on-site and remote participants.
I founded (together with Charl Botha, NL) the Eurographics Workshop Series on Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine (VCBM), which was the first application-oriented Eurographics Workshop. After being heavily involved in organizing the first two workshops, I was leading the steering committee of this workshop for 10 years. I served as paper chair of VCBM (2008, 2010, 2016), VMV (2012) and EuroVis (2013). I also served in some award committees, e.g., the EuroVis Best Paper Committee in 2011 and the EuroVis Phd Award Committee in 2019. The largest conference I was happy to organize was the German HCI conference 2020 with about 800 participants and a rich programme with many tutorials, workshops and demo sessions. At the same time, this was an opportunity to get an in-depth experience with organizing a virtual event. I have been in the SciVis programme committee for many years and currently serve as Area Chair which makes me aware of the potential of this model but also with some limitations. The intense experience as Area Chair also leads to some thoughts on quality assurance and schedule.