Catherine Plaisant facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Catherine Plaisant
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Catherine Plaisant in 2020
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| Born | May 26, 1957 |
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| Fields | Human–computer interaction, information visualization |
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Catherine Plaisant is a French-American computer scientist. She is known for her work in making computers and technology easier for people to use. She is a Research Scientist Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. There, she was also the assistant director of research at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab.
Her work focuses on human–computer interaction (how people and computers work together) and information visualization (creating pictures and graphics to help understand data).
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Contents
Education and Early Career
Catherine Plaisant was born and studied in France. She earned a Ph.D., which is the highest degree you can get from a university. Her degree was in industrial engineering from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. She also received a special engineering degree called a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from another top French school, Arts et Métiers ParisTech.
After finishing her studies, she worked for five years in Paris. She then moved to the United States and joined the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland.
Making Technology User-Friendly
Dr. Plaisant has spent her career finding ways to make technology less confusing and more helpful. Her research has had a big impact on tools we use every day.
Touchscreen Technology
Long before smartphones were common, Catherine Plaisant was developing ideas for touchscreen interfaces. One of her most famous contributions was shown in a 1991 video. It featured a touchscreen slider that could be used to control things on a screen.
This idea was very important. It was later mentioned in legal cases about the "slide to unlock" feature on smartphones. Her early work helped show how this kind of technology could work.
New Ways to See Information
Dr. Plaisant also helped create new tools to see and understand large amounts of information. This is called information visualization.
- Treemaps: She helped improve a tool called a Treemap. A treemap uses rectangles of different sizes and colors to represent data. This makes it easy to see which parts of the data are biggest or most important.
- Lifelines: She helped create a tool called Lifelines. It turns a person's history, like a patient's medical records, into a simple timeline. This helps doctors quickly see a patient's health history all at once.
- EventFlow: Following the success of Lifelines, she worked on a project called EventFlow. This tool helps experts find patterns in huge databases. For example, it can be used to study student records to see how they learn over time or to look at customer records to understand their habits.
Awards and Recognition
Catherine Plaisant has received many awards for her important work in computer science.
- CHI Academy (2015): She was elected to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI Academy. This is a major honor that recognizes leaders in the field of human-computer interaction.
- INRIA International Chair (2018): She was given a special position by INRIA, a top French research institute. This allowed her to lead a research project on using visual tools to explore data.
- SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award (2020): She received this award for her many years of service and contributions to the computer science community.
- IEEE Visualization Career Award (2020): The IEEE Computer Society gave her this award for her entire career's work in data visualization. They recognized her research, her case studies, and her focus on visualizing event timelines.
By 2020, her research papers had been cited, or referred to, by other scientists more than 32,000 times.
Books
Catherine Plaisant is a co-author of a popular book about designing computer interfaces.
- Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant. This book has been updated many times, with the 6th edition published in 2016. ISBN: 978-0-32153735-5.
