John Thomas Stasko, III

Renowned for extensive research in information visualization and visual analytics, as well as software visualization and algorithm animation, Stasko has served as a Professor in and the Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he joined the faculty in 1989. He has also been one of the founding members of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) Center there.

He was born in Miami, Florida. As a youngster, he lived in Pennsylvania (Lancaster and Reading) and south Florida (Miami, Boca Raton, and Deerfield Beach). He attended Bucknell University and graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Mathematics in 1983. Stasko went directly to graduate school and earned a Sc.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brown University in 1985 and 1989, respectively. His doctoral thesis, "TANGO: A Framework and System for Algorithm Animation," is a highly cited project in the area of Software Visualization.

Upon joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, he continued his research in algorithm animation and software visualization. He was the lead editor on the 1998 MIT Press book Software Visualization: Programming as a Multimedia Experience, generally considered the lead reference for that field. In the late 1990s, his research broadened into other areas of human-computer interaction and he developed a specific focus on information visualization. Stasko formed the Information Interfaces Research Group, which he directed. He also became a pioneering researcher in the new field of visual analytics, and was a contributor to the 2005 book, "Illuminating the Path," that laid out a research agenda for this field.

He published extensively in these fields, including over 125 conference papers (two Best Papers Awards), journal articles, and book chapters. His research in information visualization spanned a spectrum from theoretical work on interaction, evaluation, and the conceptual foundations of visualization to more applied work creating new techniques and systems (such as TANGO, POLKA, SunBurst, InfoCanvas, Jigsaw) for people in a variety of domains. Stasko has served as Papers Co-Chair for the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) Symposium in 2005 and 2006 and for the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Symposium in 2009. He has also served on the Steering Committee of the IEEE InfoVis Conference, the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization, and as an At Large member of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee.

In 2007 he was appointed Associate Chair of the newly created School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. In addition to this role, he led the Information Interfaces Research Group where he advised undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students. He has traditionally taught CS 1331, an introductory object-oriented programming course, and CS 7450, Information Visualization, which originated in 1999 and is one of the first courses on this topic in the world.

In 2011, Stasko was a recipient of the Distinguished Scientists award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The Distinguished Member Grade ACM Award recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.

Among publications he authored or co-authored are: "Jigsaw: Supporting Investigative Analysis through Interactive Visualization," Information Visualization, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 118–132, with Carsten Gorg and Zhicheng Liu; "Casual Information Visualization: Depictions of Data in Everyday Life," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, (Paper presented at InfoVis '07), Vol. 13, No. 6, November/December 2007, pp. 1145–1152, with Zachary Pousman and Michael Mateas; "Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Role of Interaction in Information Visualization," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, (Paper presented at InfoVis '07), Vol. 13, No. 6, November/December 2007, pp. 1224–1231, with Ji Soo Yi, Youn ah Kang, and Julie A. Jacko; and "TANGO: A Framework and System for Algorithm Animation," IEEE Computer, Vol. 23, No. 9, September 1990, pp. 27–39.