Professor John Riedl’s work stands the test of time

CS&E Professor John Riedl (posthumous) has been selected to receive the IEEE’s InfoVis 20 Year Test of Time Award for one of his most influential papers, “An Operator Interaction Framework for Visualization Systems.”

The paper introduced a framework Riedl and CS&E alum Ed H. Chi developed to enable a new way of organizing systems to generate graphics for data analytics.

Information visualization is about creating interactive graphics to allow users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once.  Chi and Riedl’s research proposed a number of ways to think about how to transform data step by step into interactive graphics.  It also described ways users could understand the data so they can better organize what they are analyzing or creating.

The paper was published at the 1998 IEEE VIS conference. Professor Riedl’s paper was selected in tribute to him and the impact of his work, which has continued to inspire the visualization community and beyond for over twenty years.

Chi, who was advised by Riedl and co-authored the paper, will accept the award and reflect on Riedl’s work and contributions to the visualization community at this year’s IEEE VIS conference in Berlin, Germany.