Jock Mackinlay

About

Jock D. Mackinlay is VP of Research and Design at Tableau Software. Jock’s 1986 Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University developed a formal algebraic approach for the automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information based on the work of Jacques Bertin. After graduation, he joined Xerox PARC, where he focused on visualization and computer-human interaction (CHI). In 1991, he co-presented three papers with his PARC colleagues Stuart K. Card and George G. Robertson at the ACM CHI conference that helped to establish the field of information visualization. Over the next decade, he developed many visual metaphors, some inspired by his dissertation formalism. In 1999, Jock co-wrote and edited a book with Stuart K. Card and Ben Shneiderman titled Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, which is a key reference work in the field of visualization. This book includes a reference model inspired by the formalism from Jock’s dissertation that has been adopted by the visualization field as the basic pipeline for visualization. In 2003, Jock was on Chris Stolte’s dissertation committee at Stanford along with Professor Pat Hanrahan. Chris and Pat had extended Jock's dissertation algebra to a formal specification language that combines query, analysis, and visualization into a single framework. They went on to found Tableau Software after Chris graduated. Jock joined Tableau Software in 2004. Their current joint work focuses on using this formalism to develop intuitive visual analysis applications for a wide range of users. In 2007, Jock co-wrote an IEEE InfoVis paper that described how his dissertation work on automatic presentation finally became widely available when it was added as a core function to Tableau Desktop. In 2009, Jock received the Visualization Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE VGTC for “his seminal technical achievement on automatic presentation tools and new visual metaphors that helped to shape the field of information visualization”. Jock has co-authored many scientific publications on visualization and computer –human in a variety of refereed journal and conference publications, including IEEE TVCG, IEEE InfoVis, IEEE CG&A, IEEE Computer, Communications of the ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM TOIS, ACM TOG, ACM CHI, ACM UIST, WWW, and AAAI. He received the best paper award at IEEE Visual Languages’98 (co-authored with Polle T. Zellweger, Bay-Wei Chang, and Takeo Igarashi). He has served as a member of program committees and as a reviewer for most of the conference and journals in the fields of visualization and human-computer interaction. He was UIST’91 program chair and UIST’92 conference chair. He was co-papers chair for CHI’96. He was on the editorial boards for ACM TOCHI (1997-2003) and IEEE CG&A (2004-6). Jock became a distinguished member of ACM in 2013. Jock is a co-inventor on more than 50 patents.