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Technical Fellow

Jock Mackinlay

About

Jock D. Mackinlay is the first Technical Fellow at Tableau Software.  He believes that well-designed software can help a wide-range of individuals and organizations work effectively with data, which will improve the world. He is an expert in visual analytics and human-computer interaction who joined Tableau in 2004 after being on the PhD dissertation committee of Chris Stolte, one of the cofounders of Tableau. 

Mackinlay received his BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1975 and his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1986. His PhD dissertation described how to automatically generate graphical presentations of relational information including bar charts, scatter plots and node/link diagrams.  Inspired by Jacques Bertin, he developed a composition algebra to generate a wide variety of graphical presentations and evaluation criteria to identify effective presentations. 

In 1986, Mackinlay joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he collaborated with the User Interface Research Group to develop many novel applications of computer graphics for information access, many inspired by his composition algebra.  His key mentors were Stuart K. Card and George G. Robertson. They published three influential papers at the ACM CHI’91 conference on their prototype system called the Information Visualizer.  This prototype included the Cone Tree, an animated 3D node-link visualization of hierarchical information, and the Perspective Wall, a 3D focus+context technique that was effective for temporal analytics.   In 1999, he co-wrote the book Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think with Stuart K. Card and Ben Shneiderman.

While working on the visualization book, Mackinlay also collaborated with Polle Zellweger and Bay-Wei Chang on Fluid Documents, which used interactive animation to embed annotations, images, and rich links in documents.  In 2000-2001, he took a sabbatical at the University of Aarhus as a visiting professor.  Mackinlay, Zellweger and Danish collaborators explored how to do fluid annotations with open web standards.  Mackinlay taught a course in Information Visualization based on his newly published book. Mackinlay and Zellweger also taught a course on the user interface of mobile devices.  The mobile device course led directly to a 2003 paper on contextual views in minimal space, which was research done at PARC after the sabbatical.  After returning to PARC from Denmark, Mackinlay focused on exploiting advances in flat panel displays and graphics cards that enabled personal computers with 6-8 monitors.   He described how to design visual analytics applications using wideband visual interfaces that fill the human visual field.  He implemented several novel user interface techniques for creating seam-aware applications that target wideband displays based on multiple monitors. 

Toward the end of his time at PARC, Mackinlay was also a member of the PhD dissertation for Chris Stolte, who was working with Stanford Professor Pat Hanrahan on the visual analysis and exploration of large, complex databases.    Stolte and Hanrahan developed the VizQL specification language for data views, which extended Mackinlay’s composition algebra.  After graduation in 2003, Stolte. Hanrahan, and Christian Chabot co-founded Tableau Software to commercialize this research.

Mackinlay’s primary focus at Tableau has been the direction forward for the products, particularly in the areas of visual analytics and human-computer interaction.  He is an inventor on numerous patents involving visual analytics and human-computer interaction. In 2005, Mackinlay and Hanrahan added the Show Me feature to Tableau v1.5, which finally incorporated results from Mackinlay’s dissertation into a commercial application.  In 2009, Mackinlay received the Visualization Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee for his seminal technical work on automatic presentation tools and new visual metaphors for information visualization.  In 2011, he started the Design Team, the User Research team, and a small “Bell Labs style”industrial research team at Tableau.

Focus

  • Algorithms for Automated Graphical Design of Visualizations
  • Data Storytelling
  • Perception and Cognition
  • Visualization Techniques
  • Computer Graphics
Lucky to have a long research career related to Tableau’s mission

Papers

Spreadsheet Property Detection With Rule-assisted Active Learning

Zhe Chen, Sasha Dadiomov, Richard Wesley, Daniel Cory, Michael Cafarella, Jock Mackinlay
CIKM’17 , November 6–10, 2017, Singapore, Singapore
PDF

Towards A General-Purpose Query Language for Visualization Recommendation

Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Dominik Moritz, Anushka Anand, Jock Mackinlay, Bill Howe, and Jeffrey Heer
Proceedings of the Workshop on Human-In-the-Loop Data Analytics (HILDA '16)
PDF

Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations

Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Dominik Moritz, Anushka Anand, Jock Mackinlay, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer
The IEEE Information Visualization Conference (Chicago, October 25-30, 2015)
PDF

Support the Data Enthusiast: Challenges for Next-Generation Data-Analysis Systems

Kristi Morton, Magdalena Balazinska, Dan Grossman, Jock Mackinlay
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 7, pp. 453–456, 2014
PDF

Public Data and Visualizations: How are Many Eyes and Tableau Public Used for Collaborative Analytics?

Kristi Morton, Magdalena Balazinska, Dan Grossman, Robert Kosara, Jock Mackinlay
SIGMOD Record, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 17–22, 2014
PDF

Automatic generation of semantic icon encodings for visualizations.

Vidya Setlur, Jock D. Mackinlay
Proceedings ACM CHI’14, April 2014, p.541-550.
PDF

Storytelling: The Next Step for Visualization

Robert Kosara, Jock D. Mackinlay
IEEE Computer (Special Issue on Cutting-Edge Research in Visualization), vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 44–50, 2013.
PDF

Dynamic Workload Driven Data Integration in Tableau.

Morton, K., Bunker, R., Mackinlay, J., Morton, R., Stolte, C.
Proceedings of SIGMOD’12 May 2012. 807-16.
PDF

Technical perspective Finding and telling stories with data.

Jock Mackinlay
CACM 52 (1) January 2009. 86.
PDF

Graphical Histories for Visualization: Supporting Analysis, Communication, and Evaluation.

Jeff Heer, Jock Mackinlay, Chris Stolte, Maneesh Agrawala
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 14(6), 1189-1196 (Also Proceedings of IEEE Infovis’2008).
PDF

Show Me: Automatic Presentation for Visual Analysis.

Jock D. Mackinlay, Pat Hanrahan, Chris Stolte
IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 13(6), 1137-1144. (Also Proceedings of IEEE InfoVis’2007).
PDF

Visualization data with bounded uncertainty

Chris Olston, Jock Mackinlay
Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, October 2002

Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think

Stuart K. Card, Jock Mackinlay, Ben Shneiderman
Book: Morgan-Kaufman, San Francisco

The Structure of the Information Visualization Design Space

Stuart K Card, Jock Mackinlay
Proceeding IEEE InfoVis97
PDF

An Organic User Interface for Searching Citation Links

Jock D. Mackinlay, Ramana Rao, Stuart K. Card
CHI'95 (Denver, May 7-11, 1995)
PDF

Information Visualization Using 3D Interactive Animation

George G Robertson, Stuart K Card, Jock D Mackinlay
Communications of the ACM, 36(4 April), 57-71.

The Information Visualizer: An Information Workspace

Stuart K Card, Jock D Mackinlay, George G Robertson
Proceedings of CHI'91, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 181-188.
PDF

The Perspective Wall: Detail and Context Smoothly Integrated

Jock D Mackinlay, George G Robertson, Stuart K Card
Proceedings of CHI'91, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 173-179.
PDF

Cone Trees: Animated 3D Visualizations of Hierarchical Information

George G Robertson, Jock D Mackinlay, Stuart K Card
Proceedings of CHI'91, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 189-194
PDF

Rapid, Controlled Movement Through a Virtual 3D Workspace

Jock D Mackinlay, Stuart K Card, George G Robertson
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH'90, ACM Conference on Computer Graphics and Interaction. pp. 171-176
PDF

A Semantic Analysis of the Design Space of Input Devices

Jock D. Mackinlay, Stuart K. Card, George G. Robertson
Human-Computer Interaction, 5(2-3), 145-190.
PDF

Automatic Design of Graphical Presentations

Jock D. Mackinlay
PhD Dissertation: Stanford University 1986

Automating the Design of Graphical Presentations of Relational Information.

Jock D. Mackinlay
ACM Transactions on Graphics, 5(2, April), 110-141. Reprinted in Maybury, M. T. & Wahlster, W. (Eds.) Readings In Intelligent User Interfaces (pp. 193) San Francisco, California: Morgan-Kaufmann (1999) and Card, S. K., Mackinlay, J. D., & Shneiderman, B.
PDF

Expressiveness and Language Choice.

Jock D Mackinlay, Michael R. Genesereth
Data and Knowledge Engineering, 1(1, June), 17-29.
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