Pat HANRAHAN, Canon Professor of Computer Science and Electrical 

Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University (USA)

Short Biography

Pat Hanrahan is the Canon Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University.  As a founding employee at Pixar Animation Studios, Hanrahan led the design of RenderMan.

Hanrahan served as a co-founder and CTO of Tableau Software. He has received three Academy Awards for Science and Technology, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award, and the IEEE Visualization Career Award.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2019, he received the ACM A. M. Turing Award.

Title: “On Notation”

Summary of the presentation

This talk is a follow-on to my Eurovis 2009 Keynote titled "Systems of Thought". A system of thought is a set of concepts and representations that help us efficiently structure our thinking.

In that talk I described different linguistic, mathematical, computational, and visual representations; and compared their advantages and disadvantages. The best representations are easy to understand and easy to manipulate.

Expert problem solvers know how to pick the best representations  for solving the problem at hand, and often use multiple representations synergistically.

In this talk I will drill down into "notation". I will examine mathematical notation and compare it to the notation used in programming languages. Mathematical notation is expressive, but imprecise. Programming languages utilize a precise notation, but it is very limited. Domain specific languages should include both a rich semantics and an expressive notation.

The title of this talk was inspired by Ken Iverson's Turing Award Lecture and paper with the same title.

Eva HORNECKER, Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany)

Short Biography

Eva Hornecker is a Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany. Her work is located at the intersection between technology, design, and the social sciences. Before coming to Weimar in 2013, she taught and researched at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland and the Austrian TU Vienna and has been a PostDoc at the Open University, UK, the University of Sussex, UK, and at HitLabNZ in New Zealand, following her PhD at the University of Bremen, Germany. She co-founded the ACM TEI conference and introduced a framework on tangible and embodied interaction that is widely received. Nowadays, her research goes beyond tangible interfaces, but continues to focus on anything that is not classical desktop computing, but embodied, material, or embedded in physical environments - which includes data physicalisation. Her group utilizes mainly qualitative methods of enquiry and Research Through Design approaches. She is a Distinguished Member of the ACM for her contributions to the TEI community and currently serves on the ACM SigCHI Lifetime Awards committee.
 

Title: “Data Physicalisation and Sensification - How Explorative Research Led to a Design Vocabulary for Physicalisation”

Summary of the presentation

Representing data in other than just visual form appears to foster higher affective engagement, which motivates research on Data Physicalisation and Sensification. My team has explored this both via creative designerly approaches and user studies, in teaching and research, aiming to understand this novel design space and its implications for data meaning-making. In my talk, I will discuss how our work, experiences made ,and inspirations from the works of others informed development of a design vocabulary for Physicalisation. In trying to systematize the design space of Physicalisation, we realized that finding physical analogues to InfoViz's visual variables is not enough. This is partially due to Physicalisation’s embodied and situated nature. There are also new opportunities, when sensifications only reveal the data IN direct interaction via kinesthetic perception. My talk aims to give insight into our thinking and to illustrate some of these central points.